Shopify Plus B2B: A Guide to B2B Merchant Features

Shopify is the most popular ecommerce technology in the world. That’s because it helps you start an online business without touching code or worrying about the technicalities of hosting, managing, or securing a website.

But is it capable of supporting the complex needs of a B2B company? That’s what we’re here to find out.

In this guide, we’ll explore the best Shopify Plus B2B, aka the enterprise version of Shopify, to help you decide if Shopify is the right fit for your B2B business.

Ready to start? Let’s get straight to it.

The 7 Best Shopify Plus B2B Features

Shopify offers a suite of B2B features on the Shopify Plus plan. Here’s a quick breakdown of our favorite ones.

Blended and Dedicated Stores

With Shopify Plus, you can choose between setting up a dedicated B2B store or a “blended” store that supports B2B and DTC selling. This provides the flexibility of managing your storefront from a single platform.

You don’t need to alternate between sales channels or implement complicated workarounds to organize your business data. Instead, you have a single source of truth that offers deep business insights.

Additionally, you can segment inventory between your B2B and DTC stores to offer exclusive discounts to B2B customers.

For example, suppose you own a DTC apparel business and want to start selling B2B. In that case, you can create a new store for your B2B buyers to offer custom pricing and payment terms for B2B buyers.

Organization Management

Shopify’s organization management feature is an enhancement of the standard Shopify admin interface that helps you manage multiple stores at an organizational level.

The organization management admin makes it easier to manage your store from a unified dashboard. It allows you to perform tasks such as:

• Manage stores from a single admin dashboard.

• View store-wise and organizational reports.

• Create and manage user access and permissions.

• Build and manage event-based automation.

For instance, if you sell both online and offline, you can create a user role for your staff in your brick-and-mortar store to restrict access to the Point of Sale channel.

Company Profiles

Company profiles in Shopify are a type of customer account that supports multiple sub-users, custom price lists, special payment terms, and tax exemptions. Enabling company accounts on your Shopify Plus B2B store allows you to offer B2B buyers the convenience of ordering for multiple branches of their company from a single user account.

You can create a company profile for a customer and add one or more of their business locations to the account with special pricing, payment terms, and checkout options for each location. Additionally, you can add and remove customers to companies and assign which locations they can access.

With a company profile, you don’t need to manage multiple records for customers from the same organization. You only need to manage one profile to control all buyers and locations within a company.

Draft Orders

Data from Statista reveals that besides ecommerce, email and phone are the top two preferred purchase channels for B2B buyers worldwide.

Shopify Plus allows you to create draft orders when B2B customers place orders via alternate channels. It automatically assigns custom pricing and payment terms to the draft order based on the B2B customer profile settings.

Once a draft order is created, you can instantly send the invoice to your customer for payment. And that’s not all. Even if you’re using Shopify Markets to sell globally in multiple currencies, you can configure the invoice to display your customers’ local currency by changing the market for the order.

Price Lists

Shopify Plus allows you to set custom pricing for B2B buyers using its price list feature. You can assign a price list to each company, company location, and B2B buyer. Further, you can set pricing based on percentages or apply fixed prices to products and variants.

For example, suppose you sell led bulbs for $10 each. In that case, you can create a price list with a 10% discount for a company. When a customer from that company places an order for those bulbs, they’ll be charged $9 per bulb whereas all other customers will pay full price for it.

Payment Terms

B2B transactions are often carried out in large amounts and require multiple levels of authorization. Thus, companies selling B2B generally allow their customers anywhere from 30 to 90 days to complete transactions.

The payment terms in Shopify Plus B2B allows you to assign a duration for companies or individual company locations to pay for their orders. You can set payment terms for each customer account as Net 7, Net 15, Net 30, Net 60, or Net 90.

Once customers place their order, they can pay for it online at any time starting from when they place it until the time it’s due based on the payment terms you offer them.

Ecommerce Automations

B2B tasks and processes are often highly interdependent and complex. However, ecommerce automation allows you to use software to automate repetitive tasks and increase efficiency as your business scales.

Shopify provides multiple ecommerce automation tools such as Shopify Flow, Scripts, and Functions to automate tasks. For instance, you can create trigger-based workflows using Flow, customize Checkout using Scripts, and offer custom discounts using Functions.

When Shopify Plus-based brand Tropeaka started offering a free gift with purchases using Scripts, their average order value (AOV) increased from AU$89 to AU$94. That’s a 5% increase in AOV from one automation.

Simplify Selling With Shopify Plus B2B

Shopify Plus offers all the features you need to sell B2B online. Here’s a quick recap of everything you can do with it:

1. Sell B2B and DTC from a single store or create two separate stores.

2. Manage multiple stores from a unified dashboard.

3. Create, assign, and manage company profiles and locations.

4. Create draft orders and assign them to B2B customer accounts.

5. Offer custom pricing using the price lists feature.

6. Set custom payment terms for B2B accounts.

7. Automate workflows and customize logic using automation tools.

What we love about Shopify Plus B2B features is that it offers enterprise-grade attributes while maintaining the code-free store management experience you would expect from a Shopify store. Selling B2B doesn’t get any easier than this.

If you want to leverage Shopify Plus B2B for your wholesale business, let’s jump on a call and figure this out. We’ll help you plan, build, and launch your B2B store on Shopify Plus. Contact us to learn how.