Credit Limits, Payment Terms and Invoices: What Really Makes a B2B Checkout Different From Retail

It is a Thursday afternoon at a distributor near Rotterdam. A long-standing customer, a regional contractor, wants to push through a larger order than usual: an extra site has come up and they need the materials before the weekend. In a retail shop this is trivial. You add to cart, you pay by card, you are done. But this customer does not pay by card. They buy on account, settle their invoices at the end of the month, and the order desk knows roughly how much they already owe. The question that decides whether this order goes through in two clicks or turns into three phone calls is simple: how close is this customer to their credit limit, and are any of their invoices overdue?

That single question is the thing that really separates a wholesale checkout from a retail one. Everything else, the catalogue, the cart, the search, looks broadly similar. But the moment a customer buys on credit rather than paying up front, your webshop has to understand trade finance, not just shopping. Get that part right and your buyers self-serve without anyone watching their balance for them. Get it wrong and the portal becomes a way to ship goods to customers who should have been put on hold.

Why wholesale checkout is not retail checkout

Retail is paid-in-advance. The money clears, the parcel ships, and the relationship is settled at the moment of purchase. Wholesale runs the other way round for most established customers: you ship first and invoice later, trusting the buyer to pay within agreed terms. That trust is not unlimited goodwill, it is a number, the credit limit, and a deadline, the payment term. A B2B platform that ignores those two figures is really just a retail shop wearing a trade badge.

So a proper B2B checkout has to answer a different question than a consumer cart. Not just whether the item is in stock and the card has cleared, but whether this customer is allowed to take this order on account right now. That depends on what they already owe, what they are entitled to owe, and whether anything they owe is already late. None of that lives in the shop by nature. It lives in your accounting or ERP system, which is exactly why the integration matters as much as the storefront.

Credit limits, and what happens at the edge

A credit limit is the ceiling on how much a customer can owe you at any one time. The interesting moment is not when they are comfortably under it, it is when an order would push them over. A platform that handles this well does not silently let the order through, and it does not just throw a blunt error either. It shows the buyer where they stand and gives the order desk a say.

In practice that means a few different behaviours at the edge, depending on how you choose to run your business:

• The order goes through on account because there is still room under the limit, and the remaining headroom quietly shrinks.
• The order would exceed the limit, so it is held for review rather than confirmed, and someone on your side decides whether to release it or ask for partial payment first.
• The customer has an overdue invoice, so new orders on account are blocked until it is settled, even if they are nowhere near their credit ceiling.
• The buyer is offered a way to complete the order anyway by paying the excess up front, instead of being turned away with nothing.

The point is that the rule is consistent and visible. Your team is not the last line of defence, squinting at a balance in another window while a customer waits on the phone. With Selldi, the credit limit and the customer's current exposure come from your ERP through the API, so the checkout enforces the same number your accountant works from. If finance lowers a customer's limit on Monday, the shop respects it on Monday, not whenever someone remembers to update a spreadsheet.

Payment terms: net 14, net 30 and the small print

Alongside the limit sits the term: net 14, net 30, sometimes longer for a strategic account, sometimes stricter for a newer one. The term is part of the customer's identity in a B2B relationship, and it should be applied automatically rather than retyped on every order. A buyer on net 30 expects to see that their invoice is due in thirty days, not to negotiate it again at checkout. A buyer who has not earned terms yet should see that they are on prepayment, without anyone having to explain it.

This is where keeping the term tied to the customer record, rather than to the order, saves a lot of friction. The term lives on the account in your ERP, the platform reads it, and every order that customer places inherits it. When terms change, they change in one place. The webshop is not a second rulebook that drifts away from the first.

Showing balance and open invoices after login

One of the quietly transformative things a B2B portal does is let a customer see their own financial position. After logging in, a good account area shows the current balance, how much credit is still available, and a list of open invoices with their due dates. That sounds like a small feature. In day-to-day terms it removes a whole category of phone calls, the "can you tell me what I still owe" and "which invoice was that" conversations that eat an order desk's afternoon.

It also changes customer behaviour for the better. A buyer who can see two invoices about to fall due is more likely to settle them before placing the next order, because the consequence is right there on screen rather than hidden until you ring them. Selldi shows this balance and the outstanding invoices behind the login, drawn from the same ERP data that drives the credit check, so what the customer sees and what your accounting shows are the same figures, not two versions that have to be reconciled.

Mixing pay-on-account with card and local payment

Pay-on-account is not the only way customers want to settle, and forcing everyone onto it is as wrong as forcing everyone to pay up front. A new customer without terms, an occasional buyer, or someone topping up beyond their limit may want to pay immediately by card or a local payment method. A regular on net 30 wants the invoice. A healthy B2B checkout supports both side by side and picks the sensible default for whoever is logged in.

So the same shop offers the trusted account customer a one-click "confirm order, invoice to follow", while offering the prepayment customer a card or local online payment, and lets the buyer near their limit clear the difference up front to release a held order. Selldi runs online payments by card and local methods alongside pay-on-account, which matters even more across borders, where payment habits differ from one market to the next and a checkout built for a single country's expectations tends to get abandoned in another.

Keeping it honest: the ERP owns the numbers

Everything above shares one dependency: the financial figures have to be current. A credit check against a stale balance is worse than no check at all, because it looks authoritative while being wrong. This is the strongest argument for letting your ERP or accounting system stay the single source of truth and having the platform read from it, rather than the platform trying to keep its own ledger.

Selldi connects to any ERP or accounting system over its API and syncs both ways on a regular schedule, so balances, limits and invoice status track what your finance team actually sees. A payment recorded in the morning frees up that customer's credit at the next sync, and an order placed in the shop lands back in the ERP as a real document without anyone retyping it. The orders that still arrive the old way, by email, PDF or a spreadsheet from a customer who refuses to log in, can be read by the AI order-entry feature and pushed into the ERP too, so even those pass through the same credit and terms logic instead of bypassing it.

When this is not worth it

Be honest about your own situation first. If every customer pays up front, by card or transfer, before you ship, then credit limits and net terms are machinery for a problem you do not have, and a simpler checkout serves you better. The same is true if you have a handful of trade accounts you know personally and manage their credit in your head without strain. Software to enforce limits earns its place when there are enough accounts, and enough orders, that no single person can hold the whole picture in their memory.

There is also a data caveat. Automated credit control is only as trustworthy as the figures behind it. If your ERP balances are not reliable, if payments take days to be recorded, or if invoice statuses are routinely out of date, then a shop reading those numbers will block good customers and wave through risky ones. Fix the bookkeeping discipline first, because connecting a checkout to bad data just makes the bad data act faster.

Where it clearly pays off is the familiar case: a distributor with a growing book of trade accounts, a mix of prepayment and on-account buyers, and an order desk spending too much of its day acting as a manual credit controller. Selldi handles this with limits and terms pulled from your ERP, balances and open invoices visible after login, and card or local online payment alongside pay-on-account, on an implementation fee plus subscription with no commission taken on your sales. If you want to see how the account side looks before committing anyone's time, the live demo is at demo.selldi.pl/showcase, and you can describe your own credit and terms setup to the team at helpdesk@selldi.pl.