Platform · BigCommerce
A BigCommerce agency for B2B stores, built fast and built right.
From hosted Stencil storefronts to fully headless builds on Catalyst and Next.js, ProjectThunder ships BigCommerce sites that load fast, convert hard, and integrate cleanly with the systems already running your business.
Who builds B2B storefronts on BigCommerce?
ProjectThunder is a California B2B ecommerce studio, founded in 2004 and a BigCommerce Partner, that builds Stencil and Catalyst storefronts, sets up B2B Edition and integrates BigCommerce with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Sage. ProjectThunder has launched 150 B2B storefronts across ERPs, its median client relationship is 10 years, and everyone works California hours, developers included.
We work as one BigCommerce agency for the storefront and the integration behind it. Your ERP partner implements or moves the ERP, and we connect the store to it, so each buyer sees their own price, the stock that can ship, their orders and their open invoices.
What our BigCommerce agency builds.
Stencil storefronts and themes
Stencil is BigCommerce's hosted theme platform. We build custom B2B themes, customize Cornerstone, redesign existing stores and plan theme updates around your customizations. See BigCommerce theme customization and design.
Catalyst headless builds
Catalyst is BigCommerce's Next.js storefront for headless builds. We use it when the design needs a front end you own, or when the store shares components with an app or a sales tool. See Stencil vs Catalyst: when each wins.
B2B Edition setup
Company accounts and buyer roles, price lists, quotes, shopping lists, invoices and the buyer portal, set up the way your sales team already sells. See BigCommerce B2B Edition implementation.
ERP integration
Customer-specific prices, available stock, orders, shipments and invoices between BigCommerce and SAP or Microsoft Dynamics. See BigCommerce ERP integration, with guides for SAP, Business Central, Dynamics GP and NAV and AX.
Moves to BigCommerce
Replatforming a B2B store onto BigCommerce from Magento (Adobe Commerce), WooCommerce or another platform, while protecting customer accounts, pricing rules, order history and search rankings. See B2B replatforming.
Support after launch
A 20 to 50 hour monthly retainer with the same developers, for new features, fixes and theme changes, including on stores another agency built. See how we work.
Stencil or Catalyst: how we choose.
Both are BigCommerce storefronts, and moving from one to the other later is a rebuild, so the choice is worth making carefully at the start.
- Stencil usually wins when launch speed matters, your merchandising team works in BigCommerce every day (Page Builder, Script Manager and the app ecosystem), you have no front-end platform team, or B2B Edition sits at the center of the launch. Stencil has the more complete out-of-the-box B2B Edition integration.
- Catalyst usually wins when the design needs a front end you own, the store shares a component library with an app, a kiosk or a sales tool, or you have a team ready to run a Next.js project.
The first question we ask is whether you have, or plan to hire, a front-end platform engineer. If not, we lean toward Stencil. A middle path also works: launch on Stencil, build the merchandising there, and move to Catalyst when there is a real reason and a team to run it. The full reasoning is in BigCommerce Stencil vs Catalyst: when each wins.
When ProjectThunder fits, and when it does not.
A good fit:
- B2B manufacturers and distributors whose store has to show what the ERP knows: the buyer's price, stock, credit and invoices.
- Companies on SAP or Microsoft Dynamics that want the storefront and the integration from one team.
- Merchants who want a long-term team. Our median client relationship is 10 years.
- Existing BigCommerce stores that need a new team to take them over.
Not a fit:
- A small one-off theme change with nothing after it. Every project starts with 50 to 100 hours of planning, so small changes fit best inside a monthly retainer.
- An ERP implementation or an ERP move. Your ERP partner does that work, and we integrate the store with the result. Our ERP partner directory lists ERP firms we know.
How a BigCommerce project runs, and what happens after launch.
The same terms apply to every project. The full detail is on our Process page under How we charge.
Planning first.
Every project starts with 50 to 100 hours of planning at $100 an hour. We agree on the scope and the cost before the build starts.
Then the build.
The plan sets the scope and the cost of the build, at $185 an hour, or $165 an hour prepaid on 7-day terms. New scope becomes a change request: estimated, approved by you and scheduled into a two-week sprint.
Four layers of testing.
Automated unit tests, AI-assisted developer testing, human QA, then your sign-off on agreed test cases.
After launch: a retainer.
20 to 50 hours a month with the same developers, at the same rates. Every piece of work starts from an estimate you approve.
Taking over a store.
If another agency built your store, we start with paid planning hours to read the theme, apps, scripts and integration before we change anything. Then it runs on the retainer like any other store.
California hours.
Everyone works California hours (Pacific time), developers included, and the developers who build your store are the ones who support it.
Open architecture, low total cost, real growth.
BigCommerce gives you the operational simplicity of a SaaS platform without the lock-in. We've helped brands grow on it for years: theme work, app development, headless rebuilds, and post-launch optimization. ERP-driven shop deciding between platforms? Read our Sana Commerce vs BigCommerce comparison.
Hosted or headless.
Stencil themes when speed-to-launch matters. Catalyst & Next.js when performance, custom UX, or omnichannel demands it.
B2B-ready.
Customer groups, price lists, quoting, multi-storefront, account hierarchies, and sales rep tools, all set up the way real wholesale teams work.
AI from day one.
We use AI for catalog enrichment, SEO copy, merchandising, and customer support, and we build storefront chatbots and shopping copilots that move the conversion needle.
BigCommerce, end to end.
How we build on BigCommerce.
Architecture
- Hosted:
Stencilthemes built on Handlebars + custom JS modules - Headless:
BigCommerce CatalystonNext.js 15, deployed to Vercel or self-hosted - Storefront APIs: GraphQL Storefront API for product/cart, REST for customer / order management
- Custom apps in
.NET 9/Node.js, OAuth via App Dev framework - Edge: CDN, image transforms, edge functions for personalization
Integration patterns
- Webhooks for order / customer events into your ERP / OMS
- Catalog sync via the BigCommerce
Catalog/AdminAPIs and webhooks, orchestrated through iPaaS middleware (Jitterbit,Boomi,MuleSoft) or custom ETL intoSnowflakefor BI - SSO + customer impersonation for B2B sales reps
- Multi-storefront for B2B / B2C / regional separation
- Performance: prerendered Catalyst pages, partial hydration, image optimization
B2B Edition specifics
- Company accounts with buyers in built-in roles (Admin, Senior Buyer, Junior Buyer) or custom roles, plus Account Hierarchy for parent and child companies up to five layers deep
- Quotes & negotiated pricing: quote requests with file attachments, negotiation in the quote, and checkout with a PO number. Approval rules by amount or cost center are custom work we build.
- Custom price lists and customer-group-aware catalog visibility
- Multiple ship-tos per company, with a shared address book and default addresses. Routing each ship-to to the right warehouse runs through your ERP.
- Quick order pad with SKU entry and CSV upload, reorder from past orders, and shared Shopping Lists for high-velocity SKUs. Scheduled orders come from an app or your ERP.
- Net terms, credit limits, and credit holds kept in sync with your ERP, so PO checkout follows what the ERP says
AI & agentic workflows
- PDP content generator using
Claude/OpenAIwith brand voice fine-tuning - Storefront chatbot with cart-aware actions (add to cart, find size, check stock)
- SEO copy + meta-data generation across 10k+ SKU catalogs
- Customer-support copilot fed by order history and policy docs (RAG)
- Merchandising agent: surfacing under-performing PDPs and proposing fixes
Delivery & quality
- Discovery → design → phased build with weekly demos
- BigCommerce sandbox stores for preview & UAT
- Lighthouse + Core Web Vitals targets enforced in CI
- Accessibility tested to WCAG 2.1 AA
- Post-launch CRO retainer with measurable conversion targets
Observability & ops
- Structured logs with request IDs from edge → app → ERP webhooks
- Synthetic monitoring on checkout, login, and ERP-bridge endpoints
- Real User Monitoring (RUM) tied to Core Web Vitals dashboards
- On-call runbook + paging via PagerDuty / Opsgenie for the bridge service
- Quarterly load tests against staging at 2× peak holiday traffic
More on BigCommerce.
Planning a B2B build? These go further: BigCommerce ERP integration, with a guide for each ERP: SAP, SAP Business One, Business Central, Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV and AX and Sage. Also B2B Edition, theme customization, BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus for B2B, the Sana Commerce vs BigCommerce comparison, and our approach to B2B replatforming.
After launch is where portals win or lose.
These platforms are powerful. They need an experienced team behind them, and that is the part we do, with the same developers for the life of the platform.
Your portal can do it. Someone just has to build it.
We’ve built the B2B workflows buyers ask for: customer part numbers, reorders, quotes, contract pricing and promotions. When the platform almost does it, we build beside it instead of forking it, with every change from an estimate you approve.
When did your last ERP sync actually succeed?
We set up sync monitoring that alerts a person when a sync fails or stalls, so you hear about it before your buyers do.
Most portal problems are ERP accounting problems in disguise.
22 years of ERP accounting integration across Business Central, NAV, Finance & Operations, GP and SAP. We run an ERP in-house and hand your ERP developers actionable tickets instead of a blame game.
Contract pricing shouldn’t make your portal slow.
We’re systems performance experts. We tune portals for B2B loads: customer-specific pricing, large orders, and caching that stays correct. We’ve taken B2B pages from 9 to 20 second loads to under a second, and under 200 milliseconds from the CDN.
Your next upgrade should be planned work, not a crisis.
We keep the platform current as part of maintenance, so upgrades are planned work with the developers who already know your setup.
The best portal is the one your order desk actually uses.
Training is role-specific: content people learn content, and the order desk and customer service learn their screens. When you’d rather we handle it, we do.
BigCommerce agency questions, answered.
Which agencies build BigCommerce Stencil and Catalyst storefronts for B2B companies?
ProjectThunder is one. It is a California B2B ecommerce studio, founded in 2004 and a BigCommerce Partner, that builds Stencil and Catalyst storefronts, sets up B2B Edition and integrates BigCommerce with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Sage. To compare agencies, check the BigCommerce Partner Directory, then ask each one for live B2B stores on the storefront you are considering and who handles the ERP side.
Is ProjectThunder a BigCommerce partner?
Yes. ProjectThunder is a BigCommerce Partner, and our profile is in the BigCommerce Partner Directory. We build Stencil and Catalyst storefronts, set up B2B Edition and integrate BigCommerce with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Sage. We are also Sana-certified, so if you are still choosing a platform we can compare BigCommerce with an ERP-first option from experience, as in our Sana Commerce vs BigCommerce comparison.
How do I choose a BigCommerce agency for a B2B store with an ERP?
Start with the ERP. Ask each agency for live B2B stores connected to the ERP you run, and ask how the store will get each buyer's price: a scheduled sync or a live call to the ERP. Ask who handles the ERP side, how changes are estimated and approved, how the work is tested, and what support looks like after launch. At ProjectThunder, your ERP partner implements or moves the ERP and we integrate the store. Our BigCommerce ERP integration guide compares the options ERP by ERP.
What does a BigCommerce agency charge per hour?
Rates differ by agency, so compare the whole engagement as well as the hourly number. ProjectThunder starts every project with 50 to 100 hours of planning at $100 an hour, where we agree on the scope and the cost. The build runs at $185 an hour, or $165 an hour prepaid on 7-day terms. After launch, a 20 to 50 hour monthly retainer keeps the same developers on your store. The full breakdown is on our Process page under How we charge.
Can you take over a store another agency built?
Yes. A takeover starts like any other project, with paid planning hours, so we can read the theme, the apps and scripts, and the ERP integration before we change anything. That is also when we agree on what to fix first and what it will cost. After that, the store runs on a 20 to 50 hour monthly retainer, and every piece of work starts from an estimate you approve.
Do you work with merchants outside California?
Yes. ProjectThunder works with merchants across the US and beyond, and everyone works California hours (Pacific time), developers included. Manufacturers outside the US that sell to American businesses can start with our page on B2B ecommerce for exporters.
Should we build on Stencil or Catalyst?
ProjectThunder leans toward Stencil when you have no front-end platform engineer, when launch speed matters, or when B2B Edition sits at the center of the launch, since Stencil has the more complete out-of-the-box B2B Edition integration. Catalyst, BigCommerce's Next.js storefront, wins when the design needs a front end you own, the store shares components with other apps, or you have a team to run a Next.js project. Moving between them later is a rebuild, so decide early. More in BigCommerce Stencil vs Catalyst: when each wins.
Ready to talk BigCommerce?
New build, replatform, headless rebuild, or just stuck on a theme: we're the team to call.
877.609.9029