A consumer store has one price for everyone. A B2B store almost never does. A distributor who moves a pallet a week pays less than a facility manager buying six units, and neither of them should see what the other pays. On top of that, the public shouldn't see any of it — competitors read your price list too, and a wholesale number sitting in the page source is a gift to them.
So "show the price" turns into three questions at once: who is asking, what is their price, and how do I make sure the wrong person never sees a number they shouldn't. Most e-commerce tutorials answer none of these, because consumer commerce doesn't have the problem. This is the gap I keep running into on B2B work, and the Pi-Pi deal portal is where I worked most of it out — an internal sales tool where every deal carries its own buyer, its own wholesale tier, and its own paperwork.
This article is the engineering behind gating prices: server-side access control so nothing leaks, per-account price lists, and a data model where the price on the screen and the price on the invoice can't disagree.
The Leak You Can't See in the Browser
Start with the failure mode, because it's the one people get wrong.
