The Shopify you knew three or two years ago — even one year ago — isn’t the Shopify we have today. Fast forward another year, and I’d bet Shopify will still be impressing us with more innovative B2B features.
Shopify is going all in on B2B eCommerce, expanding its capabilities and pushing the limits of innovation. In 2023 alone, Shopify invested $1.7 billion in research and development into the future of commerce. By 2024, Shopify earned its spot as a leader in B2B commerce solutions in the Forrester Wave report.
This level of innovation is exactly what businesses need to succeed and keep today’s customers coming back. 86% of B2B buyers are willing to switch suppliers if another seller’s website offers a better buying experience. Is your eCommerce platform keeping your customers around or driving them out the door? If it’s the latter, it’s time to give Shopify another look.
The gaps are closing — Shopify is tackling the limitations that once made it a tough sell for the complex demands of B2B. We’re unpacking the capabilities that have turned Shopify into a serious contender: customization, payments, and inventory and order management.
Customization
In B2B, customization is often necessary to support essential business processes and is more important now than ever for meeting the evolving expectations of modern buyers. Many eCommerce solutions have forced B2B companies to create and maintain custom workarounds just to get the functionality they need, stealing away time and resources. Shopify offers near limitless possibilities for customization, allowing businesses to add, remove, or scale without disrupting operations.
Composable Commerce, APIs, and Integrations
Take full control of your buyer and developer experiences with Shopify’s composable commerce. Its flexible architecture and extensibility framework lets businesses create unique storefronts, checkout experiences, and customer account portals. With Hydrogen, Shopify’s React-based framework and Oxygen, its global hosting solution, you can accelerate development and launch faster than ever.
Shopify’s robust APIs and integration capabilities make it a powerhouse for businesses with complex eCommerce needs. Whether you’re looking to connect existing enterprise systems or build custom solutions, Shopify offers the tools to make it happen seamlessly.
Customized Buyer Experiences
Give your customers a frictionless buying experience while streamlining operations for your teams. Using curated catalogs, you can tailor products and prices to a company location or specific buyer, removing the need for any frustrating workarounds. Your developers will thank you and your customers will see exactly what they need at the right price.
Take it one step further and make the buying process even smoother for everyone involved with customer-specific conditional rules for products and variants. Keep everything organized with set minimums, maximums, case packs, and increments tailored to each customer.
For international businesses, you can customize your store’s experience based on the buyer’s “market,” or region. That means your Canadian customers can see different products, banners, and content than those in the United States, providing a more relevant and localized experience.
Personalize checkout by giving buyers a clear view of their assigned payment terms, available payment methods, and wholesale discounts — right at the time of purchase. With full transparency, customers can move through the buying process with confidence and ease.
Customers can now store their credit cards on file, so they don’t have to enter their payment details every time they place an order. No more jumping between systems or handling payments offline. With newer self-service features like this, Shopify is bringing the convenience of B2C to B2B transactions.
Payments
The way your business handles payments should build trust with customers and drive efficiency for employees. But in B2B, we know that’s easier said than done when you’re dealing with larger transactions, longer payment terms, detailed invoicing, and strict compliance requirements. Shopify has created payment capabilities to help simplify the process, making buying and selling easier for everyone involved. With features like deposits and partial payments built natively into Shopify, you can streamline transactions without relying on complex ordering workflows.
Shopify Payments
Shopify Payments has come a long way. Once limited to businesses in the U.S. and Canada, it’s now available in 15 countries. This means businesses in these regions can take full advantage of Shopify Payments and sell in over 133 global currencies while settling in their own. Customers have the flexibility in choosing how they pay with over 100 international payment providers, digital wallets, and installment options.
Payment processors often hit businesses with frustrating fees and limits, but not Shopify Payments. When you process orders through Shopify Payments, you aren’t charged third-party transaction fees, so more money stays in your pocket. Plus, there’s no payment limit to the amount you can accept each month or per transaction — just focus on selling and growing without restrictions.
Inventory and Order Management
While Shopify does have built-in inventory and order management systems, its capabilities are limited when it comes to meeting enterprise-level demands. However, Shopify is working to close this gap. The platform might not be able to fully replace a dedicated inventory or order management system, but there are steps you can take to seamlessly connect systems, as well as native features being released frequently.
Concerns around Shopify’s ability to handle multiple selling channels, custom products, and workflows may have been valid in the past, but today — these issues and more have been addressed:
- Shopify merchants can now optimize their inventory with real-time syncing across locations and channels.
- Draft orders allow you to create custom orders, including additional costs or products that aren’t part of your standard inventory.
- Shopify Flow offers the control to create automated workflows to better manage inventory and orders.
For large B2B enterprises considering Shopify, chances are you already have existing inventory and order management systems that you want to integrate. As we mentioned earlier, seamless integrations are where Shopify shines. Here’s a few ways you can connect your systems to your store:
- The first option is building custom integrations, which gives you complete control but requires time and technical expertise.
- Depending on the solution you’re using, native or vendor-built integrations might already be available.
- The final option is using an iPaaS solution like TMG Fuse. Fuse allows you to easily connect your Shopify stores to SAP backend systems, enabling real-time data flow.
If you’re not tied down to a specific inventory or order management system, Shopify’s vast app ecosystem gives you plenty of enterprise-ready options. Certified Shopify partners like TMG can help you navigate these choices and select the best third-party solution for your business.
The Shopify Advantage
No eCommerce platform is perfect, but Shopify is proving that flexibility and scalability don’t have to come at the cost of simplicity. With rapid innovation and a steady stream of new features, Shopify is tearing down the barriers that once made it an unlikely choice for B2B companies. And as buyers expectations continue to rise, Shopify is ready to evolve right alongside them.
Replatforming isn’t just about moving to a new system. It’s an opportunity to take a step back, assess your entire business operations, and focus on the changes that will drive the biggest impact. Ask yourself, “How many people are we truly solving for? Could we make their lives easier in the process?” With this mindset, replatforming to Shopify can be more than just a technology shift — it can be a strategic business move that unlocks efficiency and fuels growth.
At TMG, we’ve witnessed the impact Shopify can have for our clients, but as vendor-agnostic partners, your business needs always come first. If you’re considering replatforming, our eCommerce experts can help you determine whether Shopify or another platform is the best choice for your business. But with the cascading advancements Shopify has – and continues to make – it’s definitely worth another look.
