Selling to businesses with Shopify: B2B portal and reseller orders
Dedicated prices, minimum orders, 30-day payment: the options for selling to your resellers with Shopify, from native features to a custom portal.
By Léo Chuzel · Published on · 3 min read
Many brands sell both to consumers and to businesses: shops, concept stores, restaurants, distributors. And trade orders are often still handled by email, with a PDF catalogue and a spreadsheet. The result: data entry errors, wrong stock levels and a lot of wasted time. Shopify lets you do much better.
What a reseller needs
- Dedicated prices: wholesale rates, discounts by customer or by volume, prices excluding VAT.
- A suitable catalogue: some products reserved for trade, others not available wholesale.
- Ordering rules: minimum order, quantities by pack or by carton.
- Payment terms: 30-day payment, on invoice, by bank transfer.
- Simple access: an account, order history, quick ordering by reference, one-click reordering.
Option 1: Shopify’s native B2B features
Shopify offers built-in B2B features: company profiles with multiple buyers and addresses, specific catalogues and prices, minimum quantities, payment terms, draft orders and approval. Historically reserved for Shopify Plus, their availability across plans is changing: check what’s included in your subscription at the time of your project. It’s the most integrated solution when it’s available.
Option 2: wholesale apps
Several apps add wholesale prices, reseller sign-up forms and ordering rules to a standard Shopify store. It’s quick to set up and inexpensive. The limits appear with complex rules, or when the app weighs down the consumer side of the store.
Option 3: a custom reseller portal
When needs go beyond what the standard options offer, a dedicated portal is developed, connected to Shopify via the API. The reseller logs in to an interface designed for them, and every order is created in Shopify, where it joins the same stock and shipping flow as your online orders.
- A quick-order interface, as a grid by size and colour.
- Pricing and discount rules specific to your business.
- Order creation via the Admin API, with the reseller’s payment terms.
- Automatic invoice generation and sending to your accounting software.
- Statistics by reseller and automatic restock reminders.
One store or two?
Some brands create a second Shopify store dedicated to trade customers. It keeps the two activities well separated, but requires syncing stock and doubles the admin. In most cases, a single store with a B2B area, native or custom, is simpler to manage.
Automating what comes next
- A notification to the warehouse and a picking slip for every trade order.
- Syncing resellers into your CRM.
- Automatic reminders for invoices coming due.
- A monthly sales report by reseller and by product.
These automations rely on the tools presented in our article automating your business with Zapier, Make or n8n, or on a custom integration.
How to choose?
Start by listing your actual commercial rules: how many resellers, how many price lists, which payment terms, which volumes. With a handful of resellers and simple rules, an app is enough. Beyond that, or if your processes are specific, a custom portal quickly pays for itself. To go further on architecture, read our article on headless Shopify with Next.js.
Our Shopify agency in Marseille helps you choose the right option and sets up your trade area, and our API integrations connect it to your management tools.