Companies instead of individual customers
The core difference: in B2B mode Shopify manages companies, not people. A company can have several buyers who log in separately but share terms and addresses.
That sounds like a detail and is the heart of it. It lets you answer questions that make no sense in a consumer store: which employee may order, up to what amount, and on whose invoice.
Price lists: the actual lever
Instead of one store price you maintain catalogs with their own prices and assign them to companies. A long-standing customer sees different prices than a new one, without running two stores.
Volume tiers and minimum quantities come on top. A customer who gets a different price from fifty units no longer needs a manual quote.
- A catalog per company or company group
- Fixed prices or a percentage off list price
- Volume tiers and minimum order quantities per item
- A separate currency per company for international buyers
Payment terms and ordering on account
Business customers rarely pay by card at checkout. Shopify can store payment terms per company, for example net thirty days.
For accounting that means the invoice is created at order time and the payment arrives later. Automating both requires an integration that knows the difference. See the accounting guide for how that works with sevdesk or Lexware Office.
What is different on a B2B invoice
Two things appear in B2B that consumer sales never see. Supplying a business in another EU country with a valid VAT ID shifts the tax liability to the recipient — the invoice is issued without tax and with a note. See reverse charge on Shopify B2B sales.
And since 1 January 2025, German businesses must be able to receive electronic invoices in B2B. The e-invoicing timeline covers what that means and by when.
Where setups usually stall
Not on Shopify. In almost every project the bottleneck sits upstream: terms have grown organically, live in people’s heads or a spreadsheet, and nobody can state them in full.
Before anything gets configured you need three lists: which customer groups exist, what price or discount each one gets, and which payment terms apply. That is commercial work, not technical — but without it the store never ships.
When a custom app joins in
The standard feature set covers a lot. Custom development pays off when your terms follow rules Shopify does not know — prices based on annual volume, approvals above a threshold, or a catalog that comes out of your inventory system.
Then we build an app that models that rule, instead of rebuilding it in price lists and maintaining it by hand forever.
