B2B Token

In B2B scenarios, the customers frequently represent more than one company. They can belong to more than one legal entity that they act and make purchases on behalf of. Therefore, the storefront needs to identify which legal entity a user is acting on behalf of during each session to properly resolve the right data access and scope level.

Example use cases:

• Orders: The customer's assigned legal entity can be crucial for accessing orders information. B2B customers need to access their own orders, but also the orders assigned to their legal entity.

• Products availability: With customer segments, product visibility can become segment-based. Therefore, the endpoint responsible for retrieving products on the storefront has to return only these products that the customer has access to with the selected legal entity.

Legal entity in authorization token

To ensure that the storefront properly reads a B2B customer's selected legal entity and determines the relevant access to resources, the authorization token generated by the OAuth Service gets updated with the legalEntityId parameter. The token-based approach to pass the legalEntityId parameter guarantees that the relevant services use that information to retrieve relevant data. The legalEntityId header is injected in the requests.

How it works

1. The B2B customer logs in and chooses the legal entity they represent.

2. The Customer Service verifies the user's assignment to the selected legal entity.

3. A new refreshToken is issued to a customer by the OAuth Service, embedding the selected legal entity.

4. In the case the customer changes the legal entity, the storefront triggers the Refreshing a token endpoint to generate a new token based on the previous one but with the changed legalEntityId information. Thanks to that the customer isn't forced to log in again.

5. The token with the selected legal entity is passed to other services to determine the right scopes for the user.

The diagram shows how the legal entity information is fetched and passed:

sequenceDiagram
    participant User
    participant Storefront
    participant CustomerService as Customer Service
    participant CustomerManagementService as Customer Management Service

    User ->> Storefront: Login request
    Storefront ->> CustomerService: Login request
    CustomerService -->> Storefront: Generate and return initial token

    Storefront ->> CustomerService: Fetch /me
    CustomerService -->> Storefront: Return user info

    User ->> Storefront: Select legal entity
    Storefront ->> CustomerService: Refresh the token with selected legal entity
    CustomerService ->> CustomerManagementService: Validate user access
    CustomerManagementService -->> CustomerService: Validation success
    CustomerService -->> Storefront: Generate and return new token

Passing the legalEntityId parameter in the authorization token is the recommended way of handling the B2B customer legal entity information across services. The token approach ensures a consistent user experience, and centralized security enforcement while enabling the required legal entity-based access control.

Find out more about the OAuth Service and token generation in the API reference OAuth Service documentation.