Illustrative image generated with AI for Market Jack.
A Shopify B2B project starts with decisions about who can order, what they can see, how they are priced and where the order goes next. Settle those rules before choosing a theme or promising a launch date. They determine the Shopify plan, integration work and tests your store will need.
For a wholesaler or distributor, a working storefront is one part of the job. The buyer must see the correct catalog, your team must receive a usable order, and the systems behind the store must agree about inventory and payment. This checklist helps you define that work before the build begins.
1. Decide whether wholesale shares the retail store
A dedicated B2B store and a store that serves both retail and wholesale customers have different operating needs. Consider the product range, branding, staff workflow and customer experience. A separate store can give wholesale its own experience, but it also creates another store and integration to manage.
Write down which pages should be public, whether prospects can apply online, and what retail customers should see. Those decisions are more useful than a broad instruction to “add wholesale.”
2. Model pricing before choosing the Shopify plan
List the pricing arrangements you actually use: a common trade discount, several price groups, negotiated item prices, quantity breaks or different terms for different branches. Then describe how those arrangements become catalogs and account assignments.
Shopify currently offers B2B on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. On the first three plans, the limit is three active catalog assignments across active B2B markets. Assigning one catalog to two markets uses two assignments. Direct assignments to companies or locations require Plus, as do deposits and partial payments. Check Shopify’s current plan comparison against your pricing model.
The practical question is whether the plan can represent your agreements without a fragile workaround. Record any app, customization or manual process that the proposed solution needs.
3. Define applications, approval and buyer access
Decide who approves an account, what information they need and where that decision is recorded. A company may have several locations and several people placing orders. Define their permissions and how a buyer gets access to the right location.
Plan three experiences: a visitor, a pending applicant and an approved buyer. Avoid promising instant access if your team must review the application. Also check the access design: Shopify’s whole-store B2B restriction prevents company account requests, so a public application path needs a compatible setup. See Shopify’s customer-account guidance.
Price display and access control need separate testing. Check search, product pages, structured data, carts and each relevant sales channel, not just the login screen.
4. Name the owner of every important data field
If NetSuite or another ERP controls your operation, map the intended flow before selecting a connector. Identify the owner of product details, inventory by warehouse, customer records, pricing, tax status, orders, payments and fulfillment updates.
Ask the vendor to demonstrate the difficult cases with representative data. Can an existing ERP customer become the correct Shopify company and locations? Can each pricing agreement be represented? What happens when a sync fails, retries or receives an order edit?
For example, Oracle’s Shopify B2B documentation describes company sync from Shopify to NetSuite and catalog assignment at company level, applying across its locations. Those details matter if your intended workflow starts accounts in the ERP or prices each branch differently. Confirm the exact connector configuration before quoting it.
5. Write down the rules around an order
Your sales and operations teams know the exceptions that a website brief often misses. Ask about required purchase order numbers, case quantities, order minimums, quote requests, credit approval and payment terms. Decide which orders can proceed automatically and which need review.
Cover fulfillment with the same care: parcel shipping, freight quotes, pickup, drop-shipping, warehouse availability and cutoff times. Identify who supplies tax-exemption requirements and where supporting records belong. The implementation should follow approved business rules rather than inventing them.
For each requirement, write a short acceptance test. “A buyer cannot submit a quantity below the agreed case minimum” gives the team something concrete to verify.
6. Make migration and private-product checks part of the scope
Inventory the products, content, forms and URLs you need to carry forward. Clean up duplicate SKUs, missing weights and inconsistent units before loading data. Map important old URLs to their new destinations, and preserve the domain’s email records during cutover.
Keep public discovery separate from private ordering. Shopify’s agentic storefronts serve direct-to-consumer purchases; custom price hiding may not identify a product as B2B-only. Verify intended catalog and channel exclusions as well as storefront permissions. Shopify explains the B2B visibility considerations here.
7. Agree on what “ready to launch” means
Use a test company, representative buyer roles and an agreed test environment. Check the correct catalog and price, quantity rules, shipping result, payment or terms behavior, order import and fulfillment return. Test a failure and recovery path as well as a successful order.
Record which tests passed and which need a vendor or owner decision. Plan the cutover, rollback approach, staff training and support period. A pilot with selected buyers can reveal operational questions before a wider rollout.
Turn the checklist into a buildable scope
A useful project plan connects each requirement to an owner, a dependency and a completion test. It distinguishes confirmed decisions from assumptions and makes integration costs visible before implementation begins.
Market Jack can help with discovery, Shopify configuration, ERP integration planning and migration. Explore the Shopify B2B setup and migration service, or use the form below to discuss the decision holding up your project.
Ask about your Shopify B2B project
Tell us where you are starting and what you need to resolve. This is a service inquiry, not a newsletter signup.