Multi-Market B2B Commerce: Managing International Catalogues and Pricing with Elastic Path and Composable Commerce Platforms
Expanding a B2B ecommerce operation from a single domestic market to multiple international markets is one of the most complex challenges in digital commerce. The operational surface area increases exponentially: multiple currencies, locale-specific product assortments, regional tax regimes, contract pricing that varies by market, content localisation, and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions.
Before diving into solutions, it’s important to understand the key concepts of composable commerce. Grasping these foundational ideas is essential for decision makers and teams planning international expansion, as they clarify how composable commerce differs from traditional approaches and why it offers greater flexibility.
For enterprises that have adopted composable commerce domestically and are now expanding internationally, the architecture choices made during initial implementation have a profound impact on how difficult — or straightforward — that international expansion will be. In contrast to legacy architecture and monolithic platforms, which are often rigid, costly to update, and slow to adapt, composable commerce provides a more agile and scalable foundation for growth.
This guide covers the practical challenges of multi-market B2B ecommerce with composable architecture, with specific attention to how Elastic Path’s platform addresses the catalogue management, pricing, and localisation requirements of international B2B operations. Composable technology enables a modular and flexible approach to international expansion, allowing businesses to incrementally upgrade or replace components as needed. The development approach taken during initial implementation will directly impact future scalability and adaptability. Decision makers must carefully assess whether the chosen architecture aligns with their business needs and long-term goals.
Why Multi-Market B2B Is Harder Than B2C
B2C international expansion is challenging, but B2B adds layers of complexity that B2C does not face:
Contract pricing. B2B customers typically negotiate pricing agreements specific to their organisation, volume commitments, and contract terms. These agreements vary by market and by business industry—a customer’s UK contract pricing may differ from their German contract pricing due to logistics costs, local competition, market conditions, and industry-specific requirements.
Tiered pricing. Beyond contract-level pricing, B2B catalogues often feature tiered pricing structures where unit price decreases as order volume increases. These tiers may vary by market based on local supply chain economics.
Tax complexity. B2C tax is relatively uniform within a jurisdiction. B2B tax involves reverse charges, exemption certificates, intra-community supply rules (for EU trade), and the interaction between VAT, GST, and sales tax across different jurisdictions.
Catalogue variations. Not every product is available in every market. Regulatory restrictions, import limitations, local certifications, and market-specific product variants all require market-specific catalogue management.
Approval workflows. B2B purchasing often involves approval chains that may have different requirements in different markets — budget thresholds in local currency, different approver hierarchies, and locale-specific compliance checks.
Benefits of Using a Composable Commerce Platform
In today’s fast-evolving electronic commerce landscape, businesses face increasing pressure to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across every digital channel. Composable commerce platforms have emerged as a transformative solution, empowering companies to build a flexible and modular e-commerce infrastructure that adapts rapidly to shifting customer demands and market trends.
One of the standout benefits of composable commerce architecture is its modular nature. By leveraging composable commerce solutions, businesses can assemble their digital commerce stack from best-of-breed packaged business capabilities (PBCs), such as payment gateways, content management systems, and customer data platforms. This approach allows organizations to select and integrate only the specific services that align with their unique business needs, rather than being constrained by the limitations of traditional monolithic e commerce platforms.
Composable commerce platforms enable unified commerce by seamlessly connecting online stores, mobile apps, and social media apps, ensuring a consistent and engaging customer experience across all digital channels. This flexibility is especially valuable for companies in the consumer packaged goods sector, where the ability to launch direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels and respond quickly to changing customer preferences is critical. By enabling businesses to gather real-time customer insights and deliver highly differentiated experiences, composable commerce offers a powerful way to attract customers, drive loyalty, and increase online sales.
For e commerce businesses looking to scale, composable commerce architecture provides a future-proof foundation. The scalable and adaptable e commerce infrastructure supports growing online purchases and expanding operations, allowing businesses to add new capabilities or enter new markets without the risk of vendor lock-in or the constraints of legacy platforms. This agility is essential for staying ahead of ecommerce trends and meeting rising customer expectations.
Moreover, composable commerce platforms streamline e commerce operations by allowing businesses to update or replace individual software components without disrupting the entire process. This not only reduces operational risk but also accelerates digital transformation initiatives, enabling businesses to innovate and respond to new opportunities faster than ever before.
In summary, the benefits of composable commerce include enhanced flexibility, scalability, and business agility, as well as the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all digital channels. As the e commerce industry continues to evolve, adopting composable commerce solutions positions businesses to capitalize on growth opportunities, meet the demands of modern consumers, and maintain a competitive edge in the digital marketplace.
Catalogue Management Strategies
Managing product catalogues across multiple markets requires a clear strategy. Catalogue management is a crucial part of the broader software ecosystem in composable commerce, where modular components work together to deliver flexible and scalable eCommerce solutions. There are two primary approaches, each with trade-offs.
Approach 1: Overlaying a new catalogue on top of the existing one
This method allows you to add market-specific products or pricing without duplicating the entire catalogue. Seamless integration between the catalogue overlay and other systems is essential to maintain consistency and ensure smooth operations across all channels.
Approach 2: Synchronising catalogues between systems
This approach involves keeping catalogues in sync across different platforms or regions. Synchronisation often relies on application programming interface (API) connections, which enable reliable data exchange and consistency between systems.
Both approaches benefit from composable technology, which allows businesses to adapt their catalogue management strategies as their needs evolve.
Approach 1: Single Global Catalogue with Market Overlays
Maintain a single master product catalogue and apply market-specific overlays for localisation, pricing, and availability:
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Master catalogue: Contains all products with base attributes (dimensions, materials, technical specifications) that are consistent globally.
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Market overlays: Each market has an overlay that modifies or extends the base catalogue — localised descriptions, market-specific pricing, availability flags, and regulatory compliance data.
Elastic Path’s Product Experience Management (PXM) supports this pattern through its hierarchical catalogue structure. You define a base catalogue and create market-specific catalogues that inherit from and override the base.
Advantages:
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Single source of truth for product data.
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Changes to base attributes (specifications, images) propagate to all markets automatically.
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Easier to maintain consistency across markets.
Disadvantages:
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Overlay management becomes complex as the number of markets grows.
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Market-specific attributes must be carefully modelled to avoid conflicts with the base.
Approach 2: Separate Catalogues per Market
Create independent catalogues for each market, with synchronisation tooling to keep shared data consistent:
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Each market catalogue is a standalone entity with its own product set, attributes, and pricing.
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A synchronisation layer copies base product data from a master source and applies market-specific transformations.
Advantages:
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Maximum flexibility for market-specific product assortments.
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No risk of base catalogue changes inadvertently affecting a specific market.
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Markets can operate independently — useful when local teams manage their own catalogues.
Disadvantages:
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Synchronisation adds complexity and potential for data drift.
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Changes to shared product data must be propagated manually or through automation.
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Higher operational overhead.
Our Recommendation
For most B2B enterprises, Approach 1 (single catalogue with overlays) is the better starting point. It reduces data duplication and ensures consistency, which is critical in B2B where product specifications must be accurate across all markets. Approach 2 is appropriate when markets have fundamentally different product assortments with minimal overlap.
Multi-Currency and International Pricing
Pricing is the most operationally complex aspect of multi-market B2B commerce. Digital commerce platforms must support complex pricing models for international ecommerce business, ensuring flexibility and scalability as companies expand globally. Elastic Path provides the primitives — price books, currencies, and customer-specific pricing — but the business rules that drive international pricing require careful architecture. Additionally, integrating with multiple payment providers is often necessary to support diverse market requirements and offer customers a variety of secure payment options.
Price Books and Currency Management
Elastic Path’s price book model allows you to define multiple price books, each with its own currency and pricing rules. A common pattern for international B2B:
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Global base price book: Prices in a reference currency (typically GBP or USD) that serve as the baseline.
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Market-specific price books: Prices in local currency for each market, derived from the base price book with adjustments for logistics, local costs, and competitive positioning.
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Customer-specific price books: Contract pricing for individual customer accounts, expressed in the customer’s trading currency.
The price book hierarchy determines which price applies: customer-specific overrides market-specific, which overrides the global base.
Contract Pricing Across Regions
B2B contract pricing in a multi-market context involves several dimensions:
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Base price by market: The list price for the product in a specific market’s currency.
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Customer discount: A percentage or fixed discount negotiated with the customer.
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Volume tiers: Unit price reductions at specified order quantity thresholds.
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Promotional pricing: Time-limited offers that may be market-specific or global.
Elastic Path’s pricing API handles these layers through its price book stacking capability. The frontend presents the resolved price to the customer — the single price that accounts for all applicable rules.
Currency Conversion and Exchange Rates
For enterprises that maintain prices in a reference currency and convert to local currencies, exchange rate management is critical:
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Fixed rates vs dynamic rates: B2B contracts often specify a fixed exchange rate for the contract period. Dynamic rate conversion is used for non-contracted purchases.
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Rate update frequency: How often are exchange rates refreshed? Daily is standard for most B2B operations.
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Rounding rules: Different markets have different conventions for price rounding. The pricing engine must respect locale-specific rounding rules.
Tax Calculation Integration for E Commerce
Tax in international B2B commerce is a domain in itself. Unlike legacy systems that often have hard-coded tax logic and limited flexibility, the composable approach to tax is to integrate a specialised tax calculation service rather than attempting to implement tax logic within the commerce platform. By leveraging new technologies, businesses can achieve more flexible and accurate tax calculation, adapting quickly to changing regulations and market demands.
VAT, GST, and Sales Tax
Different jurisdictions use different tax models:
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VAT (Value Added Tax): Used across the EU and UK. B2B transactions between VAT-registered businesses in different EU countries typically apply the reverse charge mechanism — no VAT is charged by the seller; the buyer accounts for VAT in their own tax return.
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GST (Goods and Services Tax): Used in Australia, India, Singapore, and other markets. Similar to VAT but with jurisdiction-specific rates and rules.
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Sales tax: Used in the US. Applied at the point of sale with rates varying by state, county, and even city.
Tax Service Integration Pattern
In a composable architecture, the commerce platform delegates tax calculation to a dedicated service:
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At checkout, the commerce platform sends the order details (items, quantities, ship-from, ship-to, customer tax status) to the tax service.
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The tax service calculates the applicable tax for each line item based on the jurisdictional rules.
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The calculated tax is returned to the commerce platform and included in the order total.
Leading tax calculation services (Avalara, Vertex, TaxJar) provide APIs that integrate cleanly with Elastic Path’s API-first architecture. The key is ensuring that the integration handles B2B-specific scenarios: reverse charges, exemption certificates, and intra-community supply documentation.
Content Localisation Patterns with Content Management Systems
Product content — descriptions, specifications, marketing copy, images — must be localised for each market. Localising digital storefronts and the online store experience is essential to reach customers in each market, ensuring that your eCommerce platform resonates with local preferences and expectations. In a composable architecture, content localisation typically involves the headless CMS and the product catalogue working together:
Product Content Localisation
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Translatable attributes in PXM: Product descriptions, names, and marketing copy are stored as locale-specific variants within the product catalogue.
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CMS-managed rich content: Longer-form content (buying guides, comparison pages, landing pages) is managed in the headless CMS with locale-specific versions.
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Image localisation: Some markets require localised images — different packaging photography, locale-specific regulatory labels, or culturally appropriate lifestyle imagery.
Locale Detection and Routing
The frontend must determine which locale to present:
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IP-based geolocation: Detect the user’s country from their IP address and present the appropriate locale.
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Browser language: Use the browser’s language preference as a signal.
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Explicit selection: Allow users to choose their market/language combination.
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URL structure: Use locale-prefixed URLs (/de/products/, /fr/products/) for SEO and clarity.
Deployment Architecture for Multi-Market
A multi-market composable commerce deployment requires decisions about how the infrastructure serves different markets. The right deployment architecture depends on the organization’s digital maturity, as more digitally mature businesses are better equipped to manage complex, microservices-based solutions. Additionally, supporting mobile devices is a key consideration in deployment planning, since a significant portion of users access ecommerce platforms via smartphones and tablets.
Single Instance, Multi-Locale
Deploy a single instance of the commerce platform and frontend that serves all markets. Market-specific behaviour is driven by configuration (price books, catalogues, locale settings) rather than separate deployments.
Advantages: Lower infrastructure cost, simpler deployment pipeline, consistent codebase. Best for: Markets with similar requirements and shared product catalogues.
Multi-Instance
Deploy separate instances of the commerce platform for each market or region. Each instance has its own catalogue, pricing, and configuration.
Advantages: Maximum isolation between markets, ability to customise deeply per market. Best for: Markets with fundamentally different requirements or regulatory constraints.
For most B2B enterprises, the single instance approach with Elastic Path’s multi-locale and multi-price-book capabilities provides sufficient flexibility while keeping operational complexity manageable.
Getting Started with International Expansion
For B2B enterprises running composable commerce domestically and planning international expansion, we recommend the following approach. Expanding internationally enables you to attract potential customers by launching new eCommerce stores tailored to each target market:
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Audit your data model: Ensure your product catalogue supports locale-specific attributes and multiple price books.
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Choose your tax strategy: Select and integrate a tax calculation service that covers your target markets.
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Define your catalogue strategy: Decide between single catalogue with overlays or separate catalogues per market.
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Plan your pricing architecture: Map out the price book hierarchy that handles base, market, customer, and promotional pricing.
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Localise incrementally: Start with one new market, validate the architecture, then expand.
McKenna Consultants has extensive experience with Elastic Path implementations and multi-market B2B commerce architecture. If you are planning international expansion on a composable commerce platform, contact us to discuss your requirements.
About Nick McKenna
Nick McKenna is the CEO and founder of McKenna Consultants. With over 27 years of programming experience and a First Class Honours degree in Computer Science, Nick leads the company’s technical strategy and client engagements.
