The Gap in Shopify Plus B2B
Shopify Plus includes a comprehensive B2B feature set: company accounts, custom pricing, multiple buyer locations, role-based permissions, and net payment terms. For most B2B use cases, it's the most capable native B2B implementation in the Shopify ecosystem.
But there's a significant operational gap: B2B buyer companies cannot self-manage their own users and locations. Everything requires merchant involvement.
- Add new users to their company account
- Modify user roles or permissions
- Create or update shipping locations
- Control which users can order to which locations
Every one of these tasks requires the buyer company to contact the merchant, who then logs into Shopify admin to make the change. For enterprise B2B customers—large procurement organizations with frequent personnel changes, multiple departments, and distributed locations—this creates constant friction and support overhead on both sides.
A fast-growing B2B merchant with 50 wholesale accounts might field dozens of "please add this user" or "please update our shipping address" requests per week. That's support overhead that doesn't add value to anyone.
Our Solution: Company-Level Admin Delegation
We built a custom extension to Shopify Plus B2B that enables true admin delegation at the company level. Merchants assign a primary administrator to each B2B company. That admin then has independent authority to manage their company's purchasing setup—without any merchant involvement.
- Create new company users and set their roles
- Modify existing user permissions
- Establish and manage shipping locations
- Control which users can order to which locations
- Manage product visibility for team members
- Create and maintain requisition lists for frequent purchases
Core Portal Features
Admin-Level User Management
Company administrators create and manage their own users independently. New employee joins? The company admin adds them in minutes—no merchant ticket required. Role changes, permission updates, and user deactivation are all self-service.
Location-Based Permissions
Administrators define which users can order to which shipping locations. A regional buyer can only order for their region. A central procurement manager can order for all locations. Ideal for distributed organizations where purchase authority is location-specific.
My Products View
Users with restricted permissions see only merchant-approved SKUs in their product catalog. This eliminates confusion and checkout errors where buyers try to order products they aren't authorized to purchase—a common problem in organizations with multiple product lines or restricted catalog access.
Requisition Lists
Buyers create curated lists of products they order frequently—standard supply kits, regular maintenance items, recurring product bundles. Add an entire list to cart with a single click. For repeat B2B buyers, this can reduce order placement time from minutes to seconds.
Who This Is Built For
Our B2B buyer portal delivers the most value for merchants whose wholesale customers have these characteristics:
- Multiple buyers per account: Companies with several purchasing contacts across departments or roles benefit most from delegation—otherwise there's only one user who needs to be managed
- Geographically distributed: Multi-location customers with location-specific ordering authority need location-based permission controls
- High reorder frequency: Customers who place the same or similar orders repeatedly get significant time savings from requisition lists
- Dynamic teams: Organizations with turnover, seasonal staff, or frequent role changes generate high support ticket volume without self-service user management
- Complex product access: B2B merchants with restricted SKUs, product tiers, or contract-specific catalogs benefit from the scoped product view
The Strategic Impact: Scaling Without Adding Overhead
The traditional model for B2B account management doesn't scale. As you add more wholesale accounts, more users per account, and more locations, your support burden grows linearly. Your team spends time on administrative tasks—adding users, updating addresses, managing permissions—that create no value for the business.
Admin delegation shifts that work to the people who should be doing it: the buyer companies themselves. They know their org structure, their locations, and who needs what access. Giving them the tools to manage that directly reduces support tickets, eliminates processing delays, and frees your team to focus on things that actually grow the relationship.
For Shopify Plus merchants managing B2B at scale, the portal is also a competitive differentiator. Enterprise procurement teams evaluate purchasing tools partly on operational efficiency. A self-service portal that gives their admin control over their own purchasing setup signals that your platform takes their operational needs seriously—not just your sales process.
Built on Shopify Plus, Extended for Enterprise B2B
The portal is built as a custom extension to Shopify Plus's native B2B infrastructure—not a replacement for it. Everything Shopify Plus does natively (company accounts, custom pricing, net terms, payment methods) remains in place. The portal adds the self-service admin layer on top.
This approach means you retain all Shopify's existing B2B functionality, native checkout, and platform reliability while extending it with the enterprise-grade admin delegation that large B2B organizations need.
If you're running B2B on Shopify Plus and finding that user management and location administration is creating support friction, get in touch to discuss how the portal can be implemented for your account structure.