A Beginner’s Guide to Selling B2B on Shopify
Webla Digital
If you currently cater to B2B clients or are considering entering the B2B market, it’s essential to have an easy method for handling orders and providing a smooth purchasing experience for buyers.
According to Gartner, 80% of B2B sales interactions are expected to occur online by 2025. As businesses aim to grow through self-service buying and customized branding, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) style purchasing experience for wholesale customers is becoming standard practice.
Thus, it was inevitable that an e-commerce platform like Shopify, dedicated to enhancing the experiences of both merchants and customers, would expand its B2B services. Introducing B2B Shopify.
B2B on Shopify is integrated into the heart of Shopify’s platform, granting access to robust customization features typically used for DTC, such as bespoke themes, Functions, and discounts. As a result, selling to B2B clients has never been more straightforward.
So, how does B2B on Shopify differ from the Plus Wholesale Channel? This article will guide you in determining the most suitable solution for your company.
What is B2B on Shopify?
Shopify B2B is the latest approach to B2B sales on the Shopify platform, addressing numerous merchant pain points.
This solution provides a range of features integrated into Shopify’s core, allowing you to access various online store functionalities to tailor the wholesale purchasing experience.
The updated feature set also includes essential B2B elements like pricing lists, business profiles, designated payment terms, B2B checkout, and customer accounts.
What’s the difference between Shopify wholesale and B2B?
Shopify wholesale functions as an extra sales channel, similar to POS or Amazon, and currently offers two alternatives – the Handshake marketplace or a separate, password-protected store (an extension of your existing online store).
The Handshake marketplace is a wholesale platform where Shopify merchants can collaborate with retailers. It operates separately from your existing store, with administration managed in Handshake instead of Shopify admin. However, Handshake makes it more challenging to connect with a wide variety of customers and update pricing lists and payment terms.
Regarding the separate, password-protected storefront, you can provide customized pricing to wholesale clients and process orders in Shopify admin. However, the appearance and functionality may differ, sometimes appearing less polished than your D2C store.
On the other hand, Shopify B2B integrates your B2B offerings within the Shopify admin, making everything available in your DTC store accessible for B2B sales as well (with some considerations and limitations). This integration allows for a unified storefront catering to both B2B and DTC customers. In essence, Shopify B2B provides a more user-friendly, sophisticated experience for B2B clients and is more manageable for your teams.
Price lists
Price lists enable you to establish tailored pricing for B2B clients by using percentage-based or fixed-price discounts. Additionally, you can effortlessly adjust currency and exchange rates for international purchasers and, if necessary, apply multiple price lists to a single customer.
Company profiles
The Companies feature provides a convenient business profile management system that enables you to link multiple buyers and company locations while including built-in fields for all relevant customer information. These fields comprise:
- Contact permissions
- Assigned payment terms
- Price lists
- Tax ID
- Tax exemptions
Assigned payment terms
B2B clients require flexible payment options, but providing payment terms frequently results in increased administrative tasks for merchants.
Shopify payment terms feature streamlines the process of incorporating payment terms into B2B orders, enabling the merchants to monitor, organize, and collect payments as they come due. Merchants can now assign payment terms directly to the company location profile, which will be automatically added to customer orders during checkout.
B2B Checkout
Incorporating customer and location-specific data effortlessly is crucial for providing an outstanding checkout experience to B2B clients.
The B2B checkout feature allows merchant’s customers to access tailored payment terms, methods, discounts, and prices. Moreover, merchants can create orders for their customers and maintain a smooth order process with these functionalities. Shopify’s robust and seamless checkout ensures that merchants will have all the necessary information to place orders confidently.
Customer accounts
B2B customers appreciate the ability to self-serve and access essential information in real time, without the need for time-consuming email exchanges and phone calls. The customer accounts feature facilitates easy account management for merchant’s customers.
Within their account, customers can:
- Modify their buyer information
- View and filter their order history
- Choose the company location for which they’re placing an order
Customer accounts also function as an authentication method, granting customers access to the wholesale site only after verifying their email address and entering a six-digit code sent to their inbox.
Since it’s not a separate sales channel, merchants can set up their B2B store within the same interface used for DTC, allowing them to manage a single store for both B2B and DTC if desired. This results in a unified store for merchants to oversee and a single integration point for all APIs, ERPs, CRMs, and third-party applications.
Build your B2B ecommerce operations on Shopify
Whether you’re expanding into B2B, migrating your existing B2B business operations to Shopify, or seeking to grow your wholesale operations, our solutions offer powerful capabilities to help you scale your business, feel free to contact our Shopify experts.
