The Feature That Took Us to Florence and Paris: A Closed B2B Catalog That Survives ElasticSuite

Some feature requests sound simple and quietly take down half a B2B build. Vitacom brought us one of those. As a distributor, they needed a fully closed catalog: the public sees nothing, and every business customer logs in to see products and their own negotiated prices. Different company, different prices, sometimes a different slice of the catalog. And all of it had to stay fast and correct under ElasticSuite, the search engine doing the heavy lifting behind the storefront. On Magento Open Source, not Adobe Commerce. That last constraint is where the story gets interesting.

What Vitacom actually asked for

Strip it to the requirement and it is three things at once. First, a gated catalog: a guest lands on the store and sees no products and no prices until they log in as an approved business account. Second, per-company pricing: two customers searching the same term should each see their own contracted price, not a public list price and not each other's. Third, and this is the part people underestimate, none of that could come at the cost of search. B2B buyers live in search and layered navigation, and a distributor catalog with tens of thousands of SKUs is unusable without fast filtering and sorting. So the gate and the per-company prices had to hold while ElasticSuite kept doing its job.

Why this quietly breaks most Magento B2B builds

Here is the collision. ElasticSuite indexes prices and product visibility ahead of time, per customer group, so it can serve fast results. The moment you gate the entire catalog and give every company its own prices, you are fighting that index from three directions at once. Search results, the price filters in layered navigation, and price sorting all have to be correct for each group. Nothing gated can leak to the wrong customer, and nothing gated can leak to Google. And a naive approach to per-customer pricing makes the index balloon. It is why a lot of B2B builds end up in one of three bad places: search that shows the wrong prices, a catalog that leaks to people who should not see it, or ElasticSuite switched off entirely so the store falls back to slow, dumb search. For a distributor, any of the three is a dealbreaker.

There is also a platform assumption buried in here. Gated catalogs with company-specific pricing are the flagship feature of Adobe Commerce's B2B shared catalogs, so the reflex answer is that you need the paid edition to do it. Vitacom runs Magento Open Source. The honest question we started with was whether this could be built properly at all without paying for Adobe Commerce, or whether we would have to tell them to switch editions. We wrote about that wider Open Source versus Adobe decision separately, if the context helps: Adobe Commerce vs Magento Open Source.

The answer was in the room, in Florence and Paris

We did not find the way through by staring at the code longer. We found it in the community. We took the problem to Meet Magento in Florence and then to Meet Magento in Paris, two events, two cities, in the middle of a real client deadline. That is where niche, thorny problems like this actually get unstuck: in the room with the people who maintain these tools, who have hit the same wall on their own projects, and who will happily sketch an approach with you between talks. We came back from those two trips with the way to build it.

This is the difference we think matters. There is an agency that Googles your problem and hopes, and there is an agency that is embedded in the ecosystem that builds the tools your store runs on. We fly to the events, we sponsor them, we contribute back, and when a problem is genuinely hard we have people to talk to. Vitacom did not pay for two plane tickets to Italy and France. They paid for a team that already had those relationships when the hard request landed. We recapped one of those events here: Meet Magento France 2026.

What we built, and what we will keep to ourselves

We are not going to walk through the implementation, because the how is exactly the part that took two trips and a lot of experience to get right, and it is ours. The what is simple to state. Vitacom now runs a fully closed catalog on Magento Open Source. The public sees nothing. Every business customer logs in and sees its own catalog and its own prices. And ElasticSuite search, filtering and sorting stay fast and correct for each of them, with no prices leaking across companies and nothing gated exposed to search engines. No Adobe Commerce license. No search switched off. A gated B2B store that still behaves, for the buyer, like a fast consumer storefront.

It is worth saying where this sat. This B2B work rode on top of the same rebuild that took Vitacom's storefront from a mobile PageSpeed of 12 to 100, on a server eight times smaller, which we covered in the Vitacom case study. A gated catalog is only worth building if the store underneath it is genuinely fast. Slow B2B is just B2C pain with a login wall in front of it.

What this means if you run B2B on Magento

The useful takeaway is not about Vitacom, it is about your options. You can have a fully gated catalog, per-company pricing, and fast ElasticSuite search on Magento Open Source. You do not automatically need Adobe Commerce shared catalogs to get there. As with most things Magento, the wall B2B merchants hit is usually an implementation wall, not a platform wall. The platform can do it. The question is whether your team has solved this specific collision before, or is about to learn on your budget. We mapped the other side, where the closed platforms genuinely wall you in, in Shopify B2B Limitations in 2026.

If you are running or planning a B2B store on Magento and you are staring at the closed-catalog and ElasticSuite problem right now, book a free strategy call with LIQUIDLAB. Bring your customer-group and pricing structure and how big your catalog is, and we will tell you honestly what is a configuration job, what needs real building, and what we have already solved once so you do not pay for the learning curve.