B2B Commerce and Wholesale
Company hierarchies, net terms, custom pricing — B2B commerce that works the way buyers buy.
· Reviewed by senior engineers
01 What it is
What this service is
B2B commerce is the engineering work that takes the same product catalogue that powers a DTC storefront and makes it usable for company-to-company buying — buyers logging in to see their negotiated prices, placing orders against purchase orders or net terms, requesting quotes, splitting shipments across locations, and integrating with their own procurement systems via punchout or EDI where required.
Shopify's B2B features have matured significantly in the last two years. Company profiles, location-based pricing, payment terms (net thirty, net sixty, net ninety), customer-specific catalogues, quote requests, and B2B-specific checkout behaviour are all native. For brands whose B2B and DTC catalogue overlap heavily, Shopify Plus B2B is now a serious option that previously meant a custom build.
Where Shopify B2B does not stretch — heavily configurable products with hundreds of variant axes, complex tier-based pricing with break points, mixed-rate sales tax across jurisdictions — we extend with custom apps, Functions, or move the workload to a composable stack on BigCommerce B2B Edition, Saleor, or commercetools.
02 What it's for
What it's for
B2B commerce is for any business whose buyers are companies, not consumers. A US-based wholesale food distributor with two thousand restaurant accounts, each with a custom price list and net thirty terms; a UK manufacturer selling to retailers across the EU with country-specific catalogues and VAT-ID-driven pricing; an Australian industrial supplier whose sales reps place orders on behalf of customers and need an admin-side ordering experience; a fashion brand running both a DTC site and a wholesale portal off the same Shopify Plus account.
It is also for brands transitioning from a sales-rep-driven model to self-service. Many of our wholesale clients want to free their sales team from order-taking so they can focus on relationship management and upselling. A well-designed B2B portal does that — and the customer prefers it because they can order at 11 pm when they realise they are out of stock.
B2B is not the same as DTC with bigger order quantities. The buying journey is longer, multi-stakeholder, and tied to procurement processes that DTC commerce assumes away. We design around that.
03 How to use it
How to engage devinsta
Engagements typically start with a process audit — how your sales team currently takes orders, what the negotiation and pricing logic actually looks like, where order errors happen today, and how your buyers experience the current process. This is the most important step in B2B because the workflows are bespoke; replacing them naively with a generic ecommerce flow breaks the business.
From there we model the company hierarchy, pricing rules, and credit terms in Shopify B2B or whichever platform we land on. We build the customer-facing portal, the admin tools your sales team uses to manage accounts and place orders on customers' behalf, and the integrations with your ERP and tax engine.
Launch is staged by customer cohort, not by feature. We onboard a handful of customers to the new portal, learn from real usage, then expand. By the time we open the portal to everyone, the rough edges have been smoothed by real buyers and your support team has the playbook.
04 How to deploy
How we deploy it
On Shopify Plus B2B, the portal is the same Shopify storefront with B2B-specific routing, customer authentication, and a B2B-only catalogue layer. Net terms and PO checkout are native; sales-rep-on-behalf ordering uses the Customer Account API and an internal admin app. Punchout (OCI, cXML) integration for procurement systems like Ariba, Coupa, and SAP SRM is built as a separate service that authenticates the buyer and hands them into the storefront with the right context.
For headless B2B we deploy on Next.js or Hydrogen with the Storefront API, and integrate the B2B-specific endpoints (company, location, catalogues) on top. ERP integration runs through a queue-based middleware service that translates between the ecommerce side and the ERP — typically NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or Sage — with the same idempotency and replay tooling we build for any integration.
Tax is the part that gets underestimated. B2B tax is significantly more complex than DTC, with VAT in the EU, VAT registration in the UK post-Brexit, US sales tax with reseller certificates, GST in Australia and India, and the long tail of exemption certificates. We integrate Avalara, Vertex, or TaxJar with full exemption-certificate workflows and document the tax-determination logic for your finance team and auditors. Observability covers order error rates, ERP sync lag, and credit-line exception flows, with alerts when anything regresses.
05 What we provide
What you get from us
- B2B process audit with current-state workflows and target-state design
- Company hierarchy, location, and customer-specific catalogue configuration
- Net terms, PO checkout, and credit-line management with ERP sync
- Quote request flow with sales-rep approval workflow and quote-to-order conversion
- Sales-rep admin app for order-on-behalf-of, account management, and reporting
- Punchout (OCI, cXML) integration for Ariba, Coupa, SAP SRM, and similar procurement
- Avalara, Vertex, or TaxJar integration with exemption-certificate workflows
- ERP integration (NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics) with reconciliation and exception handling
FAQ
Common questions
Can Shopify Plus really handle serious B2B, or do we need a B2B-specific platform?
For most brands, yes. Shopify Plus B2B has matured to the point where catalogue-driven B2B with company hierarchies, custom pricing, and net terms works well out of the box. For configurable products with deep variant trees, complex tiered pricing, or heavy procurement integration, BigCommerce B2B Edition, Saleor, or a custom build may be a better fit. We help you make that call honestly.
How do you handle pricing with thousands of customer-specific price lists?
On Shopify, customer-specific catalogues handle a lot of cases with native infrastructure. Beyond that we use metafields plus Functions to drive pricing rules, with pricing data synced from your ERP or PIM as the source of truth. Pricing logic stays declarative — a rule engine, not bespoke code per customer — so adding a new account is a data change, not an engineering ticket.
Can we run B2B and DTC on the same Shopify store?
Yes. Shopify Plus supports B2B and DTC on the same store with separate customer experiences, separate catalogues, and separate checkout behaviour. We design the storefront so B2B buyers see B2B context after login while the DTC site stays clean and conversion-focused.
What about EDI? Some of our larger customers require it.
We integrate EDI through SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, or a custom EDI gateway depending on volume and partner count. Inbound 850 purchase orders create Shopify orders; outbound 855, 856, and 810 documents go back to the partner with the same idempotency guarantees we use for any integration. EDI mapping is documented per partner and version-controlled.