Shopify B2B: how to sell wholesale with Shopify

How B2B is organized in Shopify: companies, locations and buyers

Shopify's B2B model is built on three pieces. The company is the business customer: a distributor, a retail chain or a restaurant. Each company has one or more locations, each with its own shipping address, billing address and tax details. And each location has buyers, the people who log in and place orders on behalf of the company.

This structure reflects how businesses actually buy. A chain may have a head office that negotiates terms and several stores that order separately, each with its own address. With permissions per buyer you decide who can order for which location and who can only view orders.

Catalogs: which products each customer sees and at what price

A catalog defines which products are available and at what price. You can apply a percentage adjustment to the general price or set specific prices per variant, and add volume pricing so the unit price drops above certain quantities.

Here lies the key difference between plans. B2B features are available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. On Basic, Grow and Advanced you can have up to 3 active catalogs, assigned per B2B market: every customer in the same market shares prices. Only on Plus is there no catalog limit, and you can assign a catalog to each company or each company location.

If your price lists are few and stable, for example one for distributors and another for retailers, the standard plans may be enough. If you negotiate prices customer by customer, you need Plus.

Payment terms and minimum quantities

In B2B almost nobody pays by card at the time of ordering. Shopify lets you assign payment terms to each company location: payment on order, a number of days after invoice, or on a specific date. The order comes in with payment pending and you collect it as agreed, without relying on manual draft orders.

Quantity rules are set in the catalog, per variant.

• Minimum quantity per order for a variant.
• Maximum quantity, useful with limited stock or allocated products.
• Order increments, for example cases of 6 or 12 units.
• Volume pricing applied automatically when each tier is reached.

The experience for business buyers

The buyer logs in to their account and sees their company's catalog, prices and terms. Checkout picks up the saved location, shipping address and billing address, and applies the assigned payment terms. From their account they can view past orders and reorder.

The theme has to support this too. A wholesale buyer ordering 40 SKUs does not want to open 40 product pages. That is why it usually pays to build a custom quick order page, with a variant table, quantities and visible volume pricing, and to adapt the product page so quantity rules are shown clearly.

One store or a separate B2B store

Shopify lets you combine direct-to-consumer and B2B sales in the same store. Visitors who are not logged in see public prices, and B2B buyers see their own once they log in. You share catalog, inventory and orders in a single admin, and avoid duplicating content and work.

A separate store makes sense when the two experiences are very different: catalogs with almost no products in common, a closed wholesale store that can only be accessed with an account, a different working language or a different team managing it. On Plus you can do this with an expansion store, without taking out another plan.

• One store: less maintenance, a single inventory and unified customer data.
• Separate store: independent design, navigation and rules, at the cost of managing two stores.

Integrating with your ERP

In most B2B businesses the ERP is the source of truth: it holds customers, price lists, stock and invoicing. The Shopify store has to read from and write to it without anyone copying data by hand.

Shopify's APIs allow you to sync companies, locations, catalogs, prices, inventory and orders. Depending on the ERP, there is a ready-made connector or a custom integration has to be built. Before choosing, define which system owns each piece of data and how often it syncs, because that is where problems show up.

• Customers and terms: usually from the ERP to Shopify.
• Prices and catalogs: from the ERP to Shopify.
• Stock: from the ERP or warehouse to Shopify, as often as possible.
• Orders: from Shopify to the ERP for fulfillment, invoicing and collection.

Where to start

Start by organizing your current price lists and terms: how many price lists you really have, which customers have special terms and which quantity rules you apply. With that you will know whether a standard plan is enough or you need Plus, and whether one store or two makes sense.

At Weblineo we work only with Shopify and we are a Shopify Plus Partner. In our Shopify B2B service we design the structure, build a custom theme for the business buyer and connect the store with your ERP, with training included for your team.