Customer Accounts & B2B

As with Shopify, BigCommerce owns authentication entirely — a theme never touches passwords directly. What's specific to BigCommerce is how far its customer model extends: customer groups can drive tiered pricing, and a dedicated B2B Edition adds wholesale-specific functionality on top of the same core platform.

The customer object

A logged-in shopper's data is available across the storefront through a customer context, similar in spirit to Shopify's customer object:

{{#if customer.id}}
  <p>Welcome back, {{customer.first_name}}</p>
{{else}}
  <a href="/login.php">Log in</a>
{{/if}}

Login and account pages

Login, registration, and account pages are built from dedicated Stencil page templates that BigCommerce routes to automatically (/login.php, /account.php), following the same "theme controls the look, platform controls the logic" split as everywhere else in Stencil.

Customer groups and tiered pricing

A customer group (Wholesale, VIP, Staff, and so on) can be assigned per customer, and prices can be configured to vary by group — the same product can show a different price to a logged-in wholesale customer than to a first-time retail shopper, calculated automatically before the price ever reaches a template:

<p>{{product.price.formatted.without_tax}}</p>

Notice the template code is identical to a normal product price — group-based pricing logic happens entirely on BigCommerce's side, not something a theme calculates or branches on itself.

B2B Edition

B2B Edition is a separate, purpose-built layer for wholesale and business selling: company accounts with multiple buyer seats and role-based permissions, sales quotes with negotiated pricing, invoicing with net-term payment options, and a dedicated Buyer Portal where a company's users manage their own B2B purchasing. It's a distinct product tier from standard customer groups — worth knowing it exists so a wholesale-heavy requirement doesn't get bolted onto customer groups when B2B Edition already solves it directly.

Price lists

Price lists are named sets of custom prices that can be assigned to specific customer groups or individual companies — a more flexible mechanism than group-based percentage discounts when pricing needs to vary product-by-product rather than as a blanket rule.