Resources
B2B commerce glossary
The terms the industry uses for negotiation, pricing, credit and governance in business-to-business commerce, and what each one means in CWS Platform.
Why some entries carry two names
CWS Platform names some things internally before the market has a name for them, and the result is a vocabulary that is more precise and less findable. Whoever is looking for a solution searches by the market's term, not by ours. So each entry opens with the market term, which is the way in, and carries the internal name as an apposition, which is where the difference shows: of 18 entries, 3 carry that pair.
- Assisted Selling ↔ Sales Hub
- Commerce Rules Engine ↔ CDL Workspace
- Contextual Pricing ↔ Pricing Engine
Governed Negotiation
Governed negotiation is the model where the terms of a B2B order can be negotiated, but within limits the company defines and the system enforces. It differs from fixed-price e-commerce, where there is nothing to negotiate, and from spreadsheet discounting, where there is no limit. Every concession carries a ceiling, an author and a recorded justification. In CWS Platform there are five negotiable dimensions, price, delivery, payment, quantity and composition, and the limits for each live in the Commerce Rules Engine.
See Governed Negotiation →AI Agents with Business Guardrails
AI agents that operate under the same business rules as a person, because they query the rules engine instead of inferring commercial policy from natural-language instruction. The point is not to constrain the model by prompt, it is to keep the commercial decision from depending on it. In CWS Platform the six agents consume the deterministic core through MCP (Model Context Protocol), under the same rules as human sellers. If the AI service becomes unavailable, the operation keeps running.
See AI Agents →Approval Workflows
Approval workflows define who may negotiate, within what limits, and what happens when a limit is exceeded. In B2B commerce the difference that matters is when the answer arrives: an asynchronous RFQ flow returns a verdict after the conversation is over, while a flow integrated into the cart answers during the negotiation. In CWS Platform there are three levels, from direct execution by the seller to commercial approval with mandatory justification, up to a block before the order exists at all.
See Governed Negotiation →Assisted Selling (Sales Hub)
Assisted selling puts the seller inside the same transactional core the buyer uses, with the same pricing, the same inventory and the same governance. It differs from CRM, which records the relationship alongside the system that executes the sale. The distinction becomes practical the moment a seller needs a price: in CRM they query another system and retype it, in assisted selling they are already inside it. In CWS Platform that negotiation desk is the Sales Hub.
See Sales Hub →Autonomy Gradient
An autonomy gradient grades what an agent executes on its own, what it proposes for human confirmation, and what it never does. It replaces the binary question "can the AI act?" with a classification by risk and reversibility, decided action by action. In CWS Platform there are three zones: in green the agent executes, in yellow it proposes and a person confirms with one click, in red it informs and escalates.
See Architecture and security →Barter
Barter settles a purchase with product instead of cash, and in Brazilian agribusiness grain plays that role: the farmer takes inputs now and pays in sacks after the harvest. Treating it as a payment method, rather than as a side agreement recorded in finance, requires pricing that converts between currency and sacks accounting for harvest, crop and rural taxation, and settlement only after physical and tax validation of delivery. In CWS Platform the grain balance is managed per customer and can combine with other methods in the same order.
See Checkout & Payments →Commerce Rules Engine (CDL Workspace)
A commerce rules engine holds commercial rules declaratively and applies them to every transaction, through configuration rather than code. Price by region, credit limit by tax ID, authority by role and tax treatment stop being scattered across systems and customisations and become auditable parameters with an author and a date. The consequence is operational: a tax change or a discount policy ships without a development queue. In CWS Platform this engine is the CDL Workspace, with 1,029 configurable parameters, and it applies equally to the human seller and to the AI Agents.
See CDL Workspace →Contextual Pricing (Pricing Engine)
Contextual pricing derives price from the context of the transaction: who is buying, which warehouse the item ships from, under which commercial terms and under which tax rules. It should not be confused with dynamic pricing, which adjusts price by demand and competition and comes from retail. In B2B the correct price already depends on the customer before any strategy, so the problem is not varying the price, it is resolving it correctly on the first query. When it does not match, the buyer goes back to the sales rep and the digital channel becomes a quote to be verified. In CWS Platform this is the Pricing Engine.
See Pricing Engine →Configuration over Code
Configuration over code is the principle that changing a commercial rule should be a parameter change, not a software change. The difference shows up in lead time: through code, a tax change joins a development queue and lands in weeks; through a parameter, it lands the same day. The hidden cost of the other model is the undocumented customisation that blocks the next upgrade. In CWS Platform there are 1,029 configurable parameters, each change carrying an author, a date and a justification.
See CDL Workspace →Customer Intelligence Panel
A customer intelligence panel gives the seller, at the start of the conversation, what they would otherwise request from three systems: financial health, available credit, agreed commercial terms and purchase history. The gain is not convenience, it is early disqualification: without it, the seller builds the entire proposal and only finds out at closing that the customer would be blocked for arrears or lack of limit, and both parties' time is already spent. In CWS Platform it opens from customer identification, inside the negotiation desk.
See Sales Hub →Discount Stacking Prevention
Discount stacking prevention stops discounts from compounding without anyone having decided so. The classic case is a seller's manual discount landing on top of an automatic campaign coupon: each is defensible on its own, the sum is not, and the loss only surfaces at month-end, when it can no longer be attributed to anyone. In CWS Platform the manual discount cancels the automatic one, with a visible alert at the moment of the concession.
See Governed Negotiation →4-Point Checkout Validation
Four-point checkout validation checks inventory, price, credit and taxes simultaneously before an order closes. The contrast is with sequential validation, where the buyer discovers one problem at a time and rebuilds the cart after each discovery, which is the most common cause of B2B cart abandonment. In CWS Platform the four checks happen together, with an immediate answer.
See Checkout & Payments →Freight Negotiation Thresholds
Freight is negotiated too, and freight negotiation thresholds are the limits on what can be conceded there. It is common for an operation to govern product discounting well and leave freight open, which turns freight into the exit door for the margin that the pricing policy just protected. In CWS Platform freight has its own approval threshold, separate from the price threshold, covering CIF and FOB, multi-warehouse and split delivery.
See Logistics Engine →Future Price Lists
A future price list is a table loaded before it applies, with a start and an expiry date, that takes effect on its own. Without it, a harvest turn, an annual adjustment or a time-bound agreement becomes a manual task on a specific date, and the typical failure is not forgetting, it is partial activation: part of the catalogue on the new price, part on the old one, with the discrepancy surfacing in a customer's order. In CWS Platform validity is an attribute of the list, so scheduling a price does not depend on anyone being on duty at the turn.
See Pricing Engine →Net Terms
Net terms means invoiced payment on 30, 60 or 90 days, treated as a payment method rather than as an exception negotiated at the counter. It is the dominant payment form in business-to-business trade, and its absence at checkout is often the reason a buyer who started self-service goes back to the sales rep. In CWS Platform the customer's credit limit is a native payment method in Checkout & Payments, not an external integration consulted afterwards.
See Checkout & Payments →Pre-Submission Guardrails
Pre-submission guardrails prevent the creation of an order that would be invalid from the start. Instead of accepting the order and rejecting it later in the approval queue, the interface blocks at the source and says why. The gain is the time of three people at once, the seller who would build it, the approver who would review it, and the customer who would wait for an answer that was already decided.
See Governed Negotiation →Payment Split
Split is a word the market uses for three things that behave differently, and conflating them is what makes a checkout look sufficient in a demo and fail in production. Cart split separates items by seller or warehouse and generates independent invoices, each with its own tax document and tracking. Split delivery divides one order into parts, with freight and tax calculated per fraction. Combined payment methods pay one order with more than one method at once, approving only when all of them confirm. In CWS Platform the three coexist in the same order.
See Checkout & Payments →Reason Codes
Reason codes are mandatory, standardised justifications attached to a commercial exception. They serve less to police the seller and more to make the exception analysable: without a code, a concession becomes free text that nobody can aggregate or compare, and discount policy ends up debated by impression. In CWS Platform every rule change and every non-standard concession requires one, and that is what gives each decision on price, credit and orders a trace, an author and a reason.
See CDL Workspace →Want to see these concepts in your operation?
Talk to us