A buyer with an account logs in, searches for a fitting he buys weekly and sees a price twenty percent higher than the one on his last invoice. He does not know whether the site is wrong, his account is wrong or someone has changed his terms.
He phones the counter. He will phone the counter every time from now on, and the website will quietly be recorded as underused.
The teardown: why this happens
Trade pricing lives in an account system and the website was usually built on a retail platform. Connecting the two is real work, so it gets done at checkout and nowhere else, which is the one place it does not help.
Failure one: list prices on the product page
The buyer makes a decision on the product page. Showing a price there that is not his price means every judgement he makes is wrong, and he stops trusting the site entirely.
Failure two: prices only appear in the basket
Adding six items to discover the real total is not a shopping experience, it is a calculator with extra steps.
Failure three: search and category pages show list
Even when the product page is right, comparison across a category at list price is useless to a buyer choosing between options.
Failure four: order history shows different prices
Nothing destroys confidence faster than a history showing what he actually paid next to a current price he did not agree to.
Failure five: nobody explains what the visitor is seeing
If account pricing genuinely cannot be shown before login, saying so plainly on the page is far better than letting a buyer assume the list price is his.
Failure six: contract pricing expires silently
Agreed pricing with an end date that lapses produces a price change nobody warned him about. Publishing when terms are reviewed prevents the suspicion of a quiet increase.
Failure seven: quantity breaks are invisible
A buyer who cannot see that ordering ten changes the rate orders five. The break structure needs to be visible at the point of decision.
Failure eight: the failure is never measured
The orders go to the counter instead, revenue looks fine, and nobody attributes the phone volume to a website that cannot show a buyer his own price.
What it actually costs
Every order handled by a person that could have been placed online, forever. For a distributor with hundreds of accounts that is a permanent cost built into the operation.
The interim fix
Where full integration is not possible yet, publish the discount structure, state clearly that prices shown are list, and make it effortless to request a quote or confirm a price. That is far better than silence.
Accounts have to open easily first
It is covered in trade account questions on B2B ecommerce stores.
Larger orders still need quoting
That is covered in bulk order and quote requests on B2B stores.
The recurring questions are worth scripting
The approach is in scripts for the ten questions every online store gets, and ongoing account support behaves like an AI assistant for a subscription business.
Getting started
Publish your discount structure, quantity breaks and what prices shown represent, then answer pricing and availability questions at any hour. SpideyChat for wholesalers and distributors answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.