DTC and Wholesale in One Platform—and One Store

With 80% of B2B commerce expected to take place online by 2025,(1) it’s time business-to-business ecommerce got a digital upgrade. Today, Shopify is launching a new set of features built specifically for B2B merchants, directly into our platform, and with access to all of Shopify’s most powerful customization features like store themes, discounts, and Functions—and it’s all included with Shopify Plus. This will allow you to manage your entire ecommerce business—whether it’s B2B, DTC, or both—all in one place.

Shopify’s new B2B offering makes it easier for merchants to sell to more customers without expensive third-party solutions or complex workarounds. You’ll be able to use the same simple, intuitive experience to set up and manage your B2B and DTC stores. Anyone on your team can use it—no coding experience required. Not to mention, developers and agencies will be able to reach even more merchants with updated B2B-specific apps and workflows—all leveraged with the power and simplicity of Shopify.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing B2B on Shopify 
2. What is included with B2B on Shopify?
3. Expand into B2B with ease

Introducing B2B on Shopify 

We’ve long heard from our merchants that they’d like to be able to sell wholesale and direct from one online store. To meet this growing demand, we’ve worked to build the most foundational and powerful features B2B merchants need directly into the heart of Shopify. This will enable any merchant who wishes to offer both their consumers and wholesale customers an easy-to-use buying experience from a single platform.

You now have the option of running both sides of your business from a single online store for both your direct and wholesale buyers. Or, you can choose to manage your wholesale business from a dedicated expansion store that is customized specifically to your B2B business and only used by your wholesale customers. Whichever you choose, you can manage it all from the same place—saving you time and money.

What is included with B2B on Shopify?

Company profiles

Give your B2B customers a unique buying experience with new company profiles. With these profiles, you can provide each B2B customer with distinct contact permissions, payment terms, price lists, and tax exemptions. For your more complex buyers, you can assign multiple contacts and locations to a single profile with different permission levels. With one central company profile, there is no need to manage separate records for every buyer and location you work with.

Price lists

Custom wholesale pricing is now easier than ever. Set fixed price and percentage-off price lists for all of your products and variants, and easily modify the currency. B2B merchants are also able to sell in multiple currencies within one store, increasing your global reach. You can assign price lists to specific companies and locations—without the need for tags or third-party apps. And, you can assign multiple price lists to a company, with the lowest price always winning out if there are multiple prices available for a given product.

Payment terms

You can now automate the manual process of assigning payment terms to orders or draft orders in the admin. Once you’ve assigned payment terms to the company location, you can track, sort, and collect on orders as they become due. Your customers will be able to checkout with the payment terms you’ve made available to them without any upfront payment required, and can always keep track of their upcoming payments when they log into their account.

B2B Checkout 

The checkout experience is now streamlined and personal for your wholesale buyers. They can view their assigned payment terms, payment methods and wholesale discounts at time of purchase. B2B Checkout ensures your customers have the information they need to place an order with confidence.

Customer accounts

With customer accounts, your buyers will see wholesale products and prices only after they’ve been authenticated. Once inside, they’ll have access to all of their pertinent account information to limit the amount of time your team needs to spend on customer support. B2B customers can manage their account, select the company location they’re buying for, edit buyer information, and view and filter order history.

Powerful customization

From a single platform, you can now leverage the power of Shopify to run your B2B business with the same level of customization that you have for your DTC store, including access to: 

• Store themes and Liquid customizations 
• Discounts
• Ecosystem of apps 
• API access
• Functions (formerly known as Scripts)

B2B analytics 

With B2B on Shopify, merchants will be able to apply new B2B-specific filters to their reports and have a clear view of their wholesale business when using one storefront. The new B2B filters will be available on all reports under the following sections: Sales, Orders, Profit Margin, Customers, and Finance. B2B filtered reports come with the same functionality as traditional reports: you can create, save and export custom reports in the edit columns section. This is yet another way that you can run two sides of your business from a single platform and a single admin.

Our goal is to make it more efficient to run your B2B business. B2B on Shopify shares the same simple, out-of-the-box setup and management as Shopify’s market-leading DTC offering, but is powerful enough to provide the personalized buyer experience a B2B business needs.

"B2B on Shopify allows us to leverage technology to streamline and automate our wholesale processes, so we can maintain a high level of focus on retail consumers." ~Andy Knox, Van Compass

Simpler integrations, more efficiency

We understand the challenges presented with creating workarounds to bring disparate systems together, so we built B2B on Shopify to address exactly that.

We’re partnering with global ERP providers like NetSuite, Acumatica, and Brightpearl to make running your business with your preferred tools friction-free. You can connect to your ERP through Shopify APIs or third-party connectors to automatically integrate your essential business data, like customers, products, pricing, and inventory, without the need for manual data entry.

“For years, B2B buyers have been asking for a DTC-like, personalized experience when procuring products for their business. Acumatica’s native integration to Shopify offers B2B merchants one unified solution for managing their entire B2B omnichannel sales experience." ~Josh Fischer - Director of Product Management, Acumatica 

More complex workflows from developers

Shopify’s advancements in B2B bring more opportunities for our partners as well. More B2B merchants using Shopify means agencies and developers are able to reach a larger audience. And, as we grow, merchant requests to solve more advanced use cases will only continue to become more common.

We see partners as a key piece to bridging any feature gaps in our core offering for merchants with more complex requirements. Our new and updated APIs will enable partners to develop more complex solutions to serve those advanced use cases and grow their business.

In addition to all of the above, our new offering makes Shopify a true hybrid platform that partners can recommend to their merchants with confidence. B2B is no longer an afterthought. The possibilities to build unique wholesale experiences are endless with new and updated B2B APIs, and merchants can truly manage both sides of their ecommerce from one platform, without sacrifices.

Look out for our new and updated API release in October 2022!

Expand into B2B with ease

With an expected global market value of $7.7 trillion, now is the time to expand into wholesale. Without sacrificing functionality or efficiency, B2B on Shopify gives you the tools to reach new customers and revenue streams from a single platform. A wholesale business model gives you the benefits of higher order volume with less time and costs involved.

With essential wholesale ecommerce features built directly into the core of Shopify, you can manage and grow both sides of your business from a single platform. On top of that, you have access to Shopify’s full power of customization for both your DTC and B2B customers—exclusively on Shopify Plus.

B2B on Shopify changes the B2B ecommerce experience for merchants, agency partners, developers, and of course, wholesale buyers. These new B2B offerings give you access to the customization and tools that make Shopify Plus so unique—empowering your business to build the B2B storefronts your customers need.

(1) Blum, Gartner Says 80% of B2B Sales Interactions Between Suppliers and Buyers Will Occur in Digital Channels by 2025