Software coding fun fact: everyone does it differently. Which can often make seamless information flow across disparate ERP systems feel like the final boss level of software integrations (quality hard-to-accomplish software-adjacent reference).
With that in mind, let’s explore how we did it for CPC Signs’ recent NetSuite and BigCommerce B2B integration.
CPC Signs was ready for a website experience built for the modern customer. As a traffic, safety, and municipal signage supplier with a massive product catalog and government customers who often require specific pricing arrangements, CPC needed its move to BigCommerce to do more than look modern on the front end: The new eCommerce experience also had to preserve the business logic and data flow already running behind the scenes in NetSuite.
Anchor Group was brought in to integrate BigCommerce and NetSuite using Celigo, the middleware that moves data between the two systems. Celigo’s prebuilt B2C templates gave the team a strong starting point for connecting NetSuite and BigCommerce, but CPC Signs’ use case required more than a standard B2C integration. Using BigCommerce’s newer B2B functionality introduced additional requirements around customer records, company accounts, pricing, and order behavior, with customer-specific pricing being one of the clearest examples of that complexity.
The challenge
Inside NetSuite, CPC Signs had multiple ways to control what a customer pays. A customer could receive a certain price level across the board. They could receive special pricing for a specific group of items. They could even receive bespoke pricing for individual products when the business required it. CPC Signs was using a combination of price levels and group pricing for government customers, which made sense in NetSuite because NetSuite was designed to support that kind of layered pricing logic.
BigCommerce B2B Edition, however, handles customer pricing in a much “flatter” way. In broad strokes, BigCommerce allows a specific price list to be applied to a customer, which works well when pricing is relatively straightforward. What’s less straightforward, and significantly more complex is when the NetSuite has several pricing levers working together and the BigCommerce B2B platform expects those levers to arrive looking like one clean, flattened price list (we'll save our thoughts on the burden of expectations for another day).
The biggest challenge of all
One option would have been to rework CPC Sign’s robust NetSuite pricing model to fit BigCommerce’s simpler structure. Technically possible, sure. Operationally helpful? absolutely not. (For the record, forcing a company to change a system that was already working for the business, just to satisfy the limitations of the eCommerce platform is not best practice.)
Instead, Anchor Group solved the problem at the integration layer.
Using custom Celigo flows, the team built a data transformation process that could interpret CPC’s multi-layered pricing logic in NetSuite and translate it into a structure BigCommerce could actually support. In other words, NetSuite could keep doing what NetSuite does well, BigCommerce could receive pricing in a format it understood, and CPC Signs change its entire pricing model just to make the two systems shake hands.
During testing, Anchor Group stayed highly available through targeted calls and maintained daily “CPC Signs office hours,” helping CPC work through questions around data integrity, sync timing, and what information was moving between systems. As the team built confidence in the integration, more of the manual review process could be reduced and the new BigCommerce experience could start functioning the way it was intended: modern on the customer side, accurate on the business side, and mercifully less dependent on people manually reviewing every order that came through the site.
The result was a pricing integration that respected the complexity of CPC Sign’s NetSuite setup without making customers or internal teams pay the price for it.
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