B2B Commerce buyer licences: who needs which one?

According to Trailhead, buyers and buyer managers in a Salesforce B2B Commerce store need a Customer Community Plus licence. Merchandisers who maintain the store need the “B2B and D2C Commerce” licence, developers and site builders a full Salesforce licence. The pricing page of the Commerce editions, which Salesforce bills as a share of gross merchandise value, lists none of these user licences. At the Experience Cloud for Manufacturing list price, a buyer costs $35 per member or $15 per login and month. Whether member or login licences are cheaper depends on how often your dealers actually log in.

Which licences does B2B Commerce need?

Salesforce B2B Commerce, which Salesforce now also markets as “Agentforce Commerce for B2B”, runs the store as a site on Experience Cloud. Everybody who works with the store needs a licence, and which one depends on the role. Salesforce’s description of personas and permissions names these roles:

Role	What the role does	Licence	Permissions
Buyer	Views and buys products for a company	Customer Community Plus	B2B Commerce User, Flow User
Buyer manager	Approves purchases, manages buyers	Customer Community Plus	B2B Commerce Super User, Manage Account Address, Delegated External User Administration
Merchandiser	Runs catalogue, store features and launches	B2B and D2C Commerce	Through the licence on the internal user
Developer, front-end builder	Loads product data, builds checkout and pages	Full Salesforce licence	Customize Application, Author Apex, Create and Set Up Experiences

The B2B Commerce pricing page1 lists 6 or 10 storefronts, 20 inventory locations, Order Management, Data Cloud credits, the Merchant Agent and 3 or 5 users each for CRM Analytics and Knowledge. Buyer licences do not appear there. They come on top of the GMV fee, which I cover in B2B Commerce pricing: what the GMV model costs.

Buyers and buyer managers need Customer Community Plus

Both get Customer Community Plus. According to Salesforce Help on external user licences2, this licence is meant for external users who need reports, dashboards and standard sharing. Partner Community is described there for business-to-business sites that need sales data, such as partner relationship management. Trailhead does not mention Partner Community for the store.

Buyer and buyer manager share the licence and differ in their permission set. A buyer manager, according to Trailhead:

• manages buyers in one buyer account or across several,
• reads, creates and edits carts and orders, like a buyer,
• edits address fields on contact point addresses, which buyers can only read.

With Delegated External User Administration, the dealer’s buyer manager onboards new staff without a ticket to your inside sales team. In a rollout this saves more work than most store features, which is why I describe it in the dealer rollout.

Member or login licence: which is cheaper?

Help explains the two models like this. A member licence is assigned to one person, who can log in as often as they like. For login licences you buy a number of logins per month, and each login to the site uses one. Several logins by the same person on the same day count once, Salesforce calls this a daily unique login.

The Experience Cloud for Manufacturing page3 lists these list prices, billed annually:

Licence	Per member and month	Per login and month
Customer Community Plus	$35	$15
Partner Community	$50	$20

The break-even is simple. A buyer with two login days a month costs $30 on login and $35 as a member. From three login days, at $45, the member licence is cheaper. Anyone who orders weekly therefore gets a member licence, anyone who orders a few times a year a login licence.

Worked example: a manufacturer with 250 dealers, each with one buyer manager and two buyers, so 750 users. 150 of them order several times a week and get member licences: 150 × $35 = $5,250 a month. The other 600 log in once a month on average: 600 logins × $15 = $9,000. Together that is $14,250 a month, or $171,000 a year at list price. With member licences for all 750 users it would be $26,250 a month, or $315,000 a year.

Roles and the Account Switcher limit the plan

Some limits sit next to the licence and show up late if nobody checks them. The Commerce developer guide on buyer limits4 and Help name these:

• Roles. Customer Community Plus and Partner Community need roles for external users. The default limit is 50,000 roles across all portals of an org. According to the developer guide, Salesforce can extend this for B2B, and above one million shoppers you talk to your account team. Help also mentions account role optimization, which creates a role only when an account has a second user.
• Buyer users. 1.5 million buyers and buyer managers combined, as a soft limit.
• Account Switcher. A buyer who orders for several accounts, for example central purchasing at a dealer group with many branches, switches between them. The soft limit is 200 accounts. Beyond that, performance degrades, and at 2,000 accounts the switcher fails. Above 200 you need your own switcher.
• Report subscriptions. Customer Community Plus does not include them. A buyer manager who expects a weekly report by email will not get it this way.

What about sales reps and inside sales?

Internal staff work in Salesforce with their internal licence. The Trailhead persona list for the store has no sales rep. Two current features are aimed at them:

• Order templates, generally available since September 2026 according to the Commerce innovations page5: buyers and sales reps create, save and reuse common orders.
• Reorder portal: a rep invites a buyer to a page with past orders ready to reorder. According to Trailhead6, integrating it with Sales Cloud needs an Agentforce Commerce licence and an enabled digital experience.

My advice: write down per internal group what they do in the store, for example look at it as a dealer would, order on a dealer’s behalf or maintain the catalogue, and have Salesforce confirm in the quote which licence covers each activity. Which internal users really need a full licence is covered in Salesforce licences: does everyone need a full one?.

Count login days per buyer

Build a list with four columns: role, number of people, login days per month and licence. Fill it from your order data of the last twelve months: who ordered how often by phone, email or portal. Then check the limits above, especially roles and the Account Switcher for dealer groups. Whether a store or a portal fits your dealers at all is the question in B2B Commerce or dealer portal, and the whole cost picture is in chapter 1 of the B2B Commerce masterclass. Licence forecasts like this are part of my work on make-or-buy and licences.

Sources6

1. 1B2B Commerce pricing page (opens in a new tab)salesforce.com
2. 2Salesforce Help on external user licences (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
3. 3Experience Cloud for Manufacturing page (opens in a new tab)salesforce.com
4. 4Commerce developer guide on buyer limits (opens in a new tab)developer.salesforce.com
5. 5Commerce innovations page (opens in a new tab)salesforce.com
6. 6Trailhead (opens in a new tab)trailhead.salesforce.com