From Zero to a 500k+ product B2B Distributor Platform in Five Months

Partbase is a new B2B commerce platform for industrial spare parts such as hydraulic pumps and motors. With Medusa as their foundation, the two technical founders, Franz and Ole, built the entire company and launched a full distributor platform in 26 EU markets with over 500,000 products in just five months.

Their shop provides a performant, consumer-grade storefront experience packed with advanced features like localization, deep PDP pages, tier-based customer groups, repair request flows, personalized customer checkout, dynamic delivery booking, and much more. Today, their customers range from local manufacturers and service companies to Fortune 500 enterprises operating in the EU.

A Modern Distributor Platform That Does Not Sacrifice Margins

In the traditional B2B spare parts market, ordering is still mostly manual via email or phone, with fragmented product data, unclear availability, and pricing hidden behind a login. Partbase set out to change that, but doing so required a high degree of control and extensibility at the platform level.

Most commerce platforms were either too rigid to customize or lacked the flexibility needed to support their model. On top of that, GMV-based pricing did not align with the economics of a low-margin distribution business.

The team turned their attention to Medusa due to its open-source, modular design and developer-friendly framework, which simplified the process of building complex customizations. Some of the core modules for their setup included:

• The Product Module supports 500,000+ SKUs enriched with extensive metadata, enabling powerful search and detailed product views.
• The Cart Module was extended to support cart sharing via URL, cart-to-offer flows, and line items with internal references.
• The Order Module handles B2B order logic and integrates seamlessly with PDF offer generation and future ERP workflows.
• The Customer Module enables validation of business vs. private buyers, linked to region-specific tax logic.
• The Tax Module ensures compliant VAT collection across all EU markets

Using Medusa’s Workflows, they seamlessly integrated Medusa with external services such as search, payments, and CMS, while fetching real-time inventory data from third-party partners handling fulfillment.

Medusa hits the sweet spot… it’s not taking too much away, but not throwing stuff at you that’s really hard to solve.

Franz Bewerunge

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Co-Founder of Partbase

From 0 to Launch in Under 5 Months

Partbase began development on January 1, 2025. By April, the platform went live, and within just a few weeks, it was fully operational across the EU. Just two people accomplished in under five months what typically takes a five-person team 6–9 months on other platforms. All while also building a new business, securing partner contracts, and handling the legal and administrative work needed to operate in Germany.

To accelerate development, the team leveraged the Medusa B2B starter and Medusa Cloud, allowing them to start building from day one without worrying about core B2B features or infrastructure. A key advantage was the ability to spin up multiple environments and test new features quickly using Medusa’s instant preview environments. Additionally, the infrastructure made it seamless to move into production with a catalog of over 500,000 SKUs and automatically scale with demand as new markets launched and traffic increased.

We’re hosting 500,000 products without a problem on Medusa Cloud. That’s something most platforms couldn’t handle.

Franz Bewerunge

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Co-Founder of Partbase

Industrial-Grade UX That Feels Like Consumer Tech

Partbase set out to build more than just a traditional distributor platform. Their goal was to create a user experience that rivals top consumer websites in both speed and design. Built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, the storefront delivers a modern, intuitive interface that remains highly performant, even with dynamic components and a large product catalog.

An example of the UX focus can be found in their product detail pages. Here users can view detailed specifications, series comparisons, download data sheets, and instantly access AI-generated ratings that highlight technical performance and part interchangeability at a glance.

Overall, the platform includes a range of features designed to streamline the purchasing journey, and improve the user experience:

• Localized store experience, powered by Medusa’s Regions Module, supports region-specific pricing and translations across the EU. Prices, delivery fees, currencies, and taxes adjust automatically based on customer location, allowing Partbase to serve multiple markets through a single backend.
• Dynamic delivery calendar, shown live on product pages and in cart, based on availability and shipping location. These are calculated via a custom service that queries delivery times and stores results as metadata on Medusa line items.
• Scalable product discovery powered by a third-party search engine seamlessly integrated with Medusa. Product data is managed in Medusa and synced via subscribers, enabling fast and accurate search across the vast catalog, without compromising performance.
• Repair request flow, where users can submit dimensions, upload images, and request a quote for part repairs. Medusa enables this by linking request forms to product metadata and sending structured data to the team for processing.

With core commerce features like products, carts, orders, and regions available out of the box, Medusa enabled the Partbase team to focus entirely on building features unique to their business, like repair requests, delivery logic, and PDF quoting.

It’s crazy what we’ve been able to build with such a small team, this would not be possible without Medusa.

Ole Dening

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Co-Founder of Partbase

A Checkout Flow Tailored to B2B Logic

Partbase built a highly customized checkout flow tailored to the needs of B2B buyers, made possible by Medusa’s flexible Cart and Order modules. Unlike traditional platforms with rigid checkout logic, Medusa allows full control over how the cart behaves, making it easy to adapt the checkout to specific B2B requirements.

For Partbase, some of these checkout customizations included:

• Business vs. Private VAT: The platform distinguishes between private and business for VAT calculations. At checkout, the system dynamically adjusts based on country and customer type, verifying EU VAT IDs in real time via the official EU API and, for example, charging VAT to German private customers while exempting verified EU businesses.
• Split shipments: Customers can choose to receive all items in a single shipment or have them delivered as soon as they become available, providing flexibility for critical time-sensitive deliveries.
• Custom payment and invoicing: A fully custom payment UI supports card, SEPA, and purchase-on-invoice through a BNPL-integration, which runs real-time credit checks on business customers at checkout. Customers can also set separate invoice emails and purchase order references.
• Automated PDF Quotes and Cart Sharing: Customers can generate a formal PDF offer from the cart with pricing, delivery estimates, and product details. They can also share carts via URL, allowing others to review or complete the order.

What comes next

In the next months, Partbase will be even more focused on the integration side of the implementation, with a real-time product configurator and a direct SAP integration as some of the next roadmap items.

If you’re exploring a B2B setup like Partbase and want to see how Medusa can support it, reach out at medusajs.com/contact to learn more.