For many UK B2B ecommerce companies, they are stuck in a rut with their current ecommerce platform and dealing with challenges that are slowing down their online growth, or stopping it altogether.
With B2B buyers now expecting modern, self-serve, consumer-grade online purchasing experiences, many merchants are looking to change their ecommerce offering to provide that.
Shopify Plus, which is the Shopify B2B platform for enterprise level businesses, has emerged in recent months as a fast-growing platform built for speed, flexibility, and growth.
As a certified Shopify B2B specialist and MD of Shopify B2B agency Fluid Commerce, I’ve put together this guide for companies that are thinking of moving to the platform. The guide breaks down the main things ecommerce teams need to know when migrating to Shopify Plus, including handling complex B2B integrations, managing product/catalogue structures and ensuring your business workflow transitions without disruption.
Why B2B companies are moving to Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus has rapidly matured into an enterprise solution that supports advanced B2B functionality. Shopify appears committed to the B2B market and continuing to evolve Shopify Plus’ B2B capabilities. Below is a basic overview of current Shopify Plus features. You can read more about Shopify Plus’ B2B capabilities on the Shopify website.
- Company profiles with unique customer permissions
- Tailored customer catalogues, price lists and customer-specific discounts
- Purchase order workflows
- Net payment terms
- Customised B2B checkouts
- Customised B2B payments and terms
- B2B self-service customer portal
- Robust API ecosystem for deep integrations
Key considerations before migrating to Shopify Plus
1. Audit your existing B2B requirements
Even though, as with most B2B businesses, your ecommerce team is likely going to instruct a Shopify B2B specialist agency, fully understanding your company’s requirements from an ecommerce store can make the process of getting started much smoother. Conducting an audit is a great place to start.
Begin with a technical and operational review broken down as follows:
- What pricing rules the ecommerce store needs to provide?
- Pull together lists of your trade customer groups
- Account structures (multiple buyers under one organisation)
- Checkout rules (PO numbers, payment terms, VAT handling)
- Required ERP, CRM, PIM, and warehouse integrations
- Catalogue complexity (variants, custom products, configuration rules)
This pre-migration analysis ensures your Shopify Plus build matches (and ideally improves) your current workflows.
2. Evaluate your integration landscape
As your company’s back-office systems are pivotal to it even being able to function, successful integration of these systems with Shopify Plus is likely top of your list of priorities for your project. Your Shopify B2B integrations could include:
- ERP systems (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage, Netsuite)
- PIM/MDM
- CRM platforms
- WMS / fulfilment
- Accounting and finance systems
Shopify’s APIs and middleware partners make complex B2B integrations achievable, but careful planning is essential. This includes mapping product data, inventory syncs, order flows, pricing logic, and account hierarchies from day one.
The amount of data involved in B2B ecommerce websites means that integrations are usually deep, and setting out exactly what is needed from them is crucial. Ensuring your Shopify agency is experienced in carrying our deep B2B integrations is obviously key too. Work closely with your agency from the get-go to ensure integrations will be handled with the utmost care.
3. Plan your B2B catalogue and pricing model
B2B catalogues typically involve:
- Large SKU counts
- Multi-variant parent–child structures
- Customer-specific pricing
- Tiered or volume-based discounts
Shopify Plus supports all of this natively through Shopify B2B, but migrations require careful data mapping. A key facility in Shopify B2B that supports this is metafields. Metafields are custom fields that allow companies to store and display information about products, customers and orders. Metafields are useful because they can hold data that goes beyond what is usually stored in standard fields, e.g. shipping instructions
4. Map your customer data and company structures
Migrating B2B customer data is often more complex than B2C due to:
- Company records
- Multiple buyers per company
- Assigned roles and approval workflows
- Credit limits, PO numbers, and purchasing terms
Shopify Plus offers modern B2B account structures that consolidate this data cleanly, but it must be prepared properly before import which is typically driven by your ERP integration.
5. Expect to rebuild your site’s front-end
Migrating to Shopify Plus isn’t always just a lift-and-shift exercise and the front-end of your site will also need to be planned, redesigned and rebuilt. However this can be viewed as an opportunity to modernise. B2B buyers value speed, clarity, and convenience and your customer experience should reflect that.
Your step-by-step Shopify B2B migration roadmap
Work with your Shopify B2B specialist agency to follow the road map below for migration to the platform for the best chance of everything going smoothly.
Step 1: Discovery and technical mapping
Take a deep-dive into your data, customer logic, workflows, and integration requirements.
Step 2: Shopify B2B architecture planning
Define how you’ll use Shopify’s native B2B features vs. customisation.
Step 3: data preparation
Clean and standardise product, customer, order, and pricing data to avoid migration issues.
Step 4: integration development
Connect ERP, CRM, PIM, and fulfilment systems with reliable two-way syncs.
Step 5: theme and UX build
Created for performance, accessibility, and B2B conversion efficiency.
Step 6: QA, UAT and launch testing
Ensure your agency tests for real-world scenarios, not how the website is supposed to work. Order flows, account permissions, and price list checks should be included.
Step 7: launch and post-launch support
When Fluid Commerce is launching a new site, we monitor everything from its speed to any errors that are thrown up, to conversions and how the site is being received by customers.
A reminder of some of the advantages of Shopify Plus for B2B growth
- Unified B2B and B2C in a single backend
- Automation tools (Shopify Flow, Launchpad, Shopify Functions)
- Lightning-fast checkout with Shopify Payments
- Potentially better long-term total cost of ownership compared to other platforms (for some companies)
- Scalability without expensive infrastructure
Shopify Plus gives B2B merchants a modern commerce foundation designed for flexibility, performance, and long-term digital transformation and is earning a reputation as a leading ecommerce platform for B2B ecommerce companies.
Need advice on a Shopify B2B project or migration?
Fluid Commerce specialises in complex B2B builds and integrations and is a Shopify B2B partner agency. Find out more about our Shopify B2B service here, or if you are ready to get in touch with us, click here today to arrange a free technical consultation.
