B2B (schools, studios, brands) vs B2C (hobbyists), same store or separate?

Same Magento instance, segregated visibility. Splitting into separate stores is a tempting mistake, you end up with two catalogs to maintain, two checkout flows to test, and two analytics dashboards that never reconcile.

The right architecture:

• Shared inventory, one stock pool per warehouse, both DTC and B2B draw from it. Magento Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) handles multi-warehouse natively. Prevents the “school PO oversold the SKU because retail bought it first” chaos.
• Customer-group-based pricing, DTC customers see retail price (MAP-compliant), B2B school customers see institutional price (10-25% off retail), wholesale buyers see trade price (40-55% off retail).
• Hidden categories per group, bulk-pack SKUs (e.g. 144-count brush set) only visible to school B2B and wholesale; DTC never sees them.
• Different checkout, DTC pays by card or PayPal at checkout; B2B uploads PO and pays Net-30 via Apruve / Resolve / TreviPay; wholesale uses negotiable quotes with multi-step approval workflow.
• Different shipping rules, DTC ships via standard UPS/FedEx; B2B school orders default to PO-bill-to address + freight LTL for orders over 150 lbs.

Magento on Open Source needs Aheadworks B2B Suite or Magenest B2B ($800, $2,500 one-time) to get most of this. Adobe Commerce ships it native (B2B Companies module). The cost difference vs. operational complexity tradeoff usually favors Open Source + extensions below $10M GMV, Adobe Commerce above.