B2B is the part of a Shopify Plus migration where most timelines slip. Not because the data is hard. Because the workflows are more bespoke than anyone wrote down. Custom pricing rules someone added in 2019. Approval thresholds that vary by region. A net-60 arrangement that exists in an email thread, not in the system. Migration is the moment to surface, document, and rebuild the workflow layer cleanly. Here's how it goes.
Why B2B is different
A B2C migration is mostly a data exercise. Products, customers, orders, design, redirects. Workflows are simple: someone visits, browses, adds to cart, checks out. The variations are limited.
B2B migrations have variations everywhere. Company hierarchies with multiple buyers per company. Pricing that varies by account, contract, volume, location, region, and time period. Approval workflows that depend on order value, product category, or customer tier. Payment terms that aren't credit cards. Quotes that get negotiated before they become orders. Punchout integrations into customer procurement systems. EDI feeds into accounting platforms.
None of this is impossible to migrate. All of it requires more thought than B2C.
Shopify Plus B2B in 2026
The Shopify Plus B2B platform has matured significantly over the last 24 months. Most of what used to require third-party apps or custom code now runs on native features.
Companies and locations. Each B2B customer is a company with one or more locations. Locations have ship-to and bill-to addresses, payment terms, and assigned approvers and buyers.
Customers within a company. Customers are assigned to company locations with permissions. Roles include location admin, ordering only, and view only. Multi-location buyers can be assigned to multiple locations with different permissions per location.
Catalogues. Product collections with custom pricing rules, attached to companies. A company sees the prices in their catalogue, not the public storefront prices. Catalogues support fixed prices, percentage discounts, and tier-based pricing.
Payment terms. Net-15, net-30, net-60, net-90, and custom term arrangements. Approval thresholds can be configured per company.
Approval workflows. Native order approvals based on order value or other rules. Approval requests route to the company's location admin or a designated approver.
Quotes and draft orders. B2B-specific quote workflows where the brand sends a draft order to the customer for approval. Once approved, the quote converts to an order.
B2B-specific checkout. Checkout includes purchase order number capture, payment term selection, and shipping/billing address selection from the company's saved addresses.
Customer accounts. B2B customers see their company's order history, can re-order from previous orders, and can manage their company's location addresses (with appropriate permissions).
What's still less mature: Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) for complex configurable products, deeply customised approval logic beyond order value thresholds, and some EDI patterns. These usually need apps or custom development.
The workflow audit
The workflow audit is the most important early-phase deliverable. Most B2B businesses have workflow logic in places nobody systematically documented.
The audit covers:
Theme and template code. Custom pricing display logic, tier-based discount displays, account-specific copy. Often hard-coded in Liquid or in the theme on the source platform.
Plugin and app configuration. B2B plugins (B2BKing, Wholesale Suite, B2B Pro on BigCommerce, custom B2B modules on Magento) have their own configuration that defines pricing rules, approval thresholds, and payment terms.
Custom apps and code. Bespoke logic that handles edge cases. A company that has a unique pricing arrangement. A region that has different shipping rules. A product category with custom approval workflows.
Email and notification rules. Order confirmations, approval request emails, invoice notifications. Often configured in Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or platform-native email rules with B2B-specific templates.
Accounting system integration. Net-term invoicing, payment matching, customer master sync. Usually integrated through middleware or custom connectors.
Sales team workflows. Manual processes that the sales team runs: quote creation, account-specific catalogue management, approvals routed to humans.
Customer-facing portals. Some brands have separate customer portals for B2B that handle re-ordering, approval, and account management. These need to translate to Shopify B2B's native customer accounts or stay as separate systems with API integration.
The audit interviews engineering, ops, sales, accounting, and customer service. Each surfaces workflow logic the others don't see. The output is a complete workflow inventory documenting what currently happens and where the logic lives.
Translating custom pricing
Pricing is the most varied B2B workflow. Different shapes translate differently.
Tier-based pricing. Volume tiers where the price drops at certain quantities. Maps to Shopify B2B catalogues with quantity-based pricing or to Shopify Functions for more complex tiers.
Account-specific pricing. Specific companies get specific prices. Maps cleanly to per-company catalogues. Each company has a catalogue with their negotiated prices.
Category-based discounts. Companies get a percentage off specific product categories. Maps to catalogues with discount rules per collection.
Volume-based discounts on the cart total. "10% off orders over $5,000." Maps to discounts or Shopify Functions.
Time-based pricing. Promotional pricing that runs for a specific window. Maps to scheduled discounts or catalogue updates.
Bundled pricing. "Buy X with Y for $Z." Maps to bundle apps or Functions.
Negotiated prices that don't follow rules. Specific items where the price is whatever was agreed in a contract. Maps to per-company catalogues with item-specific overrides.
Pricing that depends on order context (region, ship-to, payment term). Most complex. Usually requires Shopify Functions with custom logic that reads multiple inputs to determine the right price.
The principle: native Shopify B2B handles the common shapes well. Functions handle the edge cases. Apps handle the specialised cases (CPQ, complex bundling, regulatory pricing). Custom development is the last resort.
Company hierarchy migration
Source platforms model company hierarchies in different ways.
Magento B2B. Companies, company users, and shared catalogues. Maps cleanly to Shopify B2B with translation logic.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Customer groups and price books, often with deeper integration to Salesforce CRM. Maps to companies and catalogues, plus a separate question about whether to maintain the Salesforce CRM integration or rebuild.
SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris). B2B accelerator with sophisticated company structures, approval workflows, and budget management. Maps to Shopify B2B with workflow rebuild for the more complex pieces.
WooCommerce B2B plugins. Wholesale Suite, B2BKing, B2B for WooCommerce. Each has its own data structure that maps to Shopify B2B with explicit translation.
ATG. Organisation and contact model with deep customisation. The most involved translation because ATG was built for B2B specifically and the data model is sophisticated.
Custom platforms. Whatever the brand built. Translation depends on the source structure.
The translation in all cases follows a similar shape: companies become Shopify B2B companies, locations become locations, customers become customers assigned to locations, and catalogues become catalogues. The complexity is in the workflow rules attached to those entities, not the entities themselves.
Payment terms and approval workflows
Most B2B brands run net terms. Most use approval workflows for orders above a threshold.
Net term migration. Customer-specific payment term arrangements migrate as company configurations on Shopify B2B. Net-15, net-30, net-60, net-90 are native. Custom terms (e.g., "net-30 from invoice date but with a 2% early payment discount if paid within 10 days") need either custom field configuration or app-based handling for the discount logic.
Approval workflow migration. Native Shopify B2B handles order-value-based approvals. "Orders above $5,000 require approval from the location admin." More complex rules ("orders over $10K with new ship-to addresses require central office approval") usually need apps or custom workflows.
Purchase order capture. Native checkout captures PO numbers. The PO flows through to order details, invoices, and accounting integration. Most brands' PO requirements are handled natively.
Invoicing and payment matching. Net-term orders generate invoices, often through accounting system integration. Shopify Plus has native invoice generation, but most B2B-heavy brands use NetSuite, Xero, QuickBooks, or SAP for invoicing and payment reconciliation. The integration migrates with the rest of the migration but the configuration is its own workstream.
Punchout, CPQ, and EDI
Three integration patterns deserve their own scoping passes.
Punchout integrations. Customer procurement systems (Coupa, Ariba, Jaggaer) integrate with the supplier's ecommerce store via punchout. The buyer's procurement system launches a session into the store, the buyer adds products to a cart, and the cart is sent back to the procurement system as a requisition. Each punchout integration is its own project. Existing punchout integrations need to be rebuilt against Shopify endpoints. Apps like Punchout2Go and BigCommerce-style middleware exist for Shopify Plus. Plan 4 to 12 weeks per major punchout integration.
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ). Complex configurable products with constraint-based pricing (think industrial equipment, custom manufacturing, complex SaaS bundles). Native Shopify variants handle simple configurators. Complex CPQ usually needs specialised tools (Tacton, Configit, custom configurators built on Hydrogen) integrated with Shopify for cart and checkout.
EDI integrations. Electronic Data Interchange for purchase orders, invoices, and ship notices, common in retail and distribution. Usually flows through middleware (SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, Cleo) that connects to Shopify via API. Most existing EDI integrations can be repointed; some need to be rebuilt depending on how they were originally implemented.
For brands with all three (large industrial B2B, complex CPQ, deep EDI), the B2B portion of the migration is often as large as the rest of the project combined.
Customer migration for B2B
Customer account migration for B2B is more involved than B2C.
Companies and locations get reconstructed first. Customers get assigned to companies with permissions. Order history migrates per company, not just per customer. Shipping and billing address books on companies need to be populated.
Passwords still don't migrate (universal across platforms). Forced password reset on first login is the standard, with the additional complexity that the email goes to multiple people per company. Account managers usually want to coordinate this directly with top customers rather than relying on the broadcast email.
For B2B, the customer migration timeline is usually 4 to 8 weeks parallel to the broader migration. The data moves quickly. The configuration and validation take time.
Timeline reality
A B2B-heavy migration adds 4 to 12 weeks to a standard migration timeline depending on complexity.
Light B2B (under 20% of revenue, simple pricing rules): Adds 2 to 4 weeks. Companies and catalogues set up. Standard payment terms. No CPQ or punchout.
Moderate B2B (20 to 40% of revenue, custom pricing per account): Adds 4 to 8 weeks. Per-company catalogues built. Approval workflows configured. Account-specific payment terms. Possibly one punchout integration.
Heavy B2B (above 40% of revenue, complex pricing and workflows): Adds 6 to 12 weeks. Full B2B-specific workstream parallel to the main migration. Multiple punchout integrations. Custom approval logic. CPQ work. EDI integration. Sales team training.
B2B-only or B2B-dominant (above 80% of revenue): The B2B workstream becomes the primary timeline driver. Standard B2C migration tasks (catalogue, redirects, design) run in parallel and finish faster than the B2B work.
What we won't do on a B2B migration
A few principles that keep B2B migrations clean.
We don't replicate every pricing exception. Most B2B businesses have accumulated pricing arrangements that nobody can explain or justify. The migration audit surfaces these. Some get retired with the move. Others get formalised properly with named approvers.
We don't lift workflow logic from undocumented places. If approval logic lives in someone's head or a single Slack thread from 2022, the migration is the moment to formalise it. The new system runs on documented rules.
We don't ship without sales team sign-off. B2B sales teams test the full purchase journey on the migration sandbox before launch. Their workflows are different from the marketing team's.
We don't ship without integration sign-off. Every B2B integration runs end-to-end on staging with sample data. Punchout integrations get tested with the actual procurement systems they connect to.
We don't combine B2B migration with significant pricing structure changes. Migrating to Plus is enough change. Restructuring pricing tiers and renegotiating terms in the same window multiplies risk. Run the migration on existing pricing, then optimise pricing after the platform is stable.
Where to start
If you're planning a Shopify Plus migration with meaningful B2B revenue, the audit phase needs to include a B2B workflow audit covering pricing rules, company hierarchies, payment terms, approval workflows, integrations, and any custom code or apps. The output is a build spec that names every workflow in scope and a risk register for the undocumented ones.
For the related glossary entries, see Shopify B2B and customer account migration. For broader context on Shopify Plus migrations across all source platforms, see the complete migration guide.
For the platform-specific B2B considerations, the Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, and Oracle Commerce playbooks have detail on each source's B2B specifics.
For the operational architecture that runs alongside B2B (ERP integration, fulfilment, customer service), why your Shopify Plus store needs an operations strategy covers the layer that determines whether the migration actually pays back.
Or browse the rest of our Platform Migration insights for more on the decisions that come with a re-platform.
Frequently asked questions
How is B2B migration different from B2C migration?
B2B migration is a workflow rebuild, not a data exercise. The data moves quickly. The workflows take 4 to 12 weeks depending on complexity. B2C migrations are mostly products, customers, and orders. B2B adds company hierarchies, location-aware catalogues, approval workflows, payment terms, custom pricing rules, and integration-specific patterns like punchout and EDI.
Will my B2B custom pricing transfer cleanly to Shopify Plus?
It depends on the shape. Tier-based pricing maps cleanly to Shopify B2B catalogues with quantity-based pricing. Account-specific pricing maps cleanly to per-company catalogues. Volume-based discounts on cart totals usually need Shopify Functions. Complex rule chains (pricing that depends on region, ship-to, payment term, and time period) usually need custom Functions logic. The audit phase identifies which shape your pricing takes.
How long does a B2B migration take?
A B2B-heavy migration adds 4 to 12 weeks to a standard migration timeline. Light B2B (under 20% of revenue, simple pricing) adds 2 to 4 weeks. Moderate B2B (20 to 40% of revenue, custom pricing per account) adds 4 to 8 weeks. Heavy B2B (above 40% of revenue, complex workflows, punchout, CPQ) adds 6 to 12 weeks. B2B-only brands above 80% of revenue: B2B becomes the primary timeline driver.
Does Shopify B2B handle complex approval workflows?
Native Shopify B2B handles order-value-based approval workflows: orders above a threshold require approval from a designated approver. More complex rules (orders requiring central office approval for new ship-to addresses, multi-level approval chains, approval based on product category) usually need Shopify Functions or specialised B2B apps. Plan extra scoping work for any approval logic beyond simple thresholds.
What about punchout integrations during B2B migration?
Punchout integrations (Coupa, Ariba, Jaggaer) need to be rebuilt against Shopify endpoints. Each major punchout integration is its own 4 to 12 week project parallel to the main migration. Apps like Punchout2Go and BigCommerce-style middleware exist for Shopify Plus. For brands with multiple punchout customers, plan resource for sequential rebuilds rather than trying to do them all at once.
Can Shopify Plus handle CPQ for complex configurable products?
Native Shopify variants handle simple configurators. Complex CPQ (industrial equipment, custom manufacturing, configurable bundles with constraint-based pricing) usually needs specialised tools like Tacton or Configit integrated with Shopify for cart and checkout. Hydrogen-based custom configurators are also viable for specific use cases. Plan a separate CPQ workstream of 6 to 12 weeks if your B2B includes configurable products.
What happens to my B2B customer accounts during migration?
B2B customer migration is more involved than B2C. Companies and locations get reconstructed first. Customers get reassigned to companies with appropriate permissions (admin, location admin, ordering only). Order history migrates per company. Address books on companies need to be populated. Passwords still don't migrate (universal across platforms), so a forced password reset email goes to all B2B customers, ideally coordinated by account managers for top accounts.
Should I optimise pricing during the B2B migration?
No. Migrating to Plus is enough change. Restructuring pricing tiers and renegotiating terms in the same window multiplies risk. Run the migration on existing pricing, then optimise pricing after the platform is stable. Most B2B brands have accumulated pricing arrangements that nobody can fully justify, but the migration is not the moment to clean them up. That's a separate post-launch project.
A Shopify Plus Agency for Strategic Design & Advanced Engineering
Building something ambitious?
- B2B migration is not a data exercise. It's a workflow rebuild. The data moves quickly. The workflows take 4 to 12 weeks depending on complexity.
- Shopify B2B on Plus has matured. Companies, locations, catalogues, payment terms, and approval workflows all exist natively. Most workflows that needed custom code on other platforms now run on native features.
- The workflow audit is the most important early-phase deliverable. Most brands have B2B logic in places nobody documented: theme code, plugin configuration, custom apps, email rules, and accounting system integrations.
- Custom pricing translates differently depending on its shape. Tier-based pricing maps cleanly to catalogues. Account-specific pricing maps cleanly. Volume-based discounts and complex rule chains usually need Shopify Functions or apps.
- Punchout, Configure-Price-Quote, and EDI integrations need their own scoping passes. Each one is its own project parallel to the main migration.
