✦ Company Accounts
Shopify B2B Company Accounts
The company is the foundation of Shopify B2B. Get the structure right and pricing, permissions, and ordering all fall into place. Get it wrong and you will be unpicking it for years.
Capabilities
Three objects do most of the work
Companies, locations, and contacts — and the catalog and terms attached to them.
Companies
The business entity you actually trade with. It owns the relationship, the assigned catalog, and the commercial terms.
Company Locations
Branches, depots, or delivery addresses. Each can carry its own shipping details, tax treatment, and payment terms.
Contacts
The individual buyers who log in and order on behalf of a location, with their own permissions.
Catalogs & Price Lists
Assigned at company or location level so the right pricing follows the right buyer automatically.
Payment Terms
Net terms and payment behaviour set per location rather than negotiated per order.
Company Metafields
Structured custom fields for the data Shopify does not model natively — account manager, trade references, certifications, region.
Why the structure matters more than it looks
In a retail store a customer is a person. In B2B the person is almost never the thing you are trading with. You have an agreement with a business; that business has branches; each branch has people who order. Shopify B2B models this directly, and the temptation on day one is to flatten it — one company, one location, one contact, because that is how the spreadsheet looked.
That flattening is what causes pain later. The moment a customer opens a second site, or a buyer leaves, or one branch needs different payment terms, a flat structure has nowhere to put the information. Restructuring afterwards means touching orders, catalogs, and terms on a live account.
Questions worth answering before you build
- Do you negotiate pricing with the business, or with individual branches?
- Does a branch ever get different payment terms from its head office?
- Can a buyer order for more than one location, and should they?
- Who at the customer is allowed to add or remove colleagues?
- What do you need to know about a company that Shopify does not have a field for?
Standardizing company data
Wholesale customer data is usually messy on arrival: inconsistent business names, tax IDs in three formats, addresses that are really delivery instructions. Importing that as-is gives you a clean-looking store built on unreliable records, and every report downstream inherits the mess.
Company metafields help here. They give you defined, typed fields for the attributes your business actually runs on — assigned rep, trade reference status, certification expiry, region — so the data is structured rather than buried in an order note. Tooling in this space helps here: Onboard B2B collects the exact company information you specify and syncs it to Shopify as Company metafields, which standardizes company profile data at the point of capture and keeps reporting consistent rather than requiring a cleanup later.
Why standardized data matters for reporting
Consistent company profile data across every wholesale customer is what makes reporting trustworthy. If half your companies record a region and half do not, any report broken down by region is quietly wrong. Defining the fields once and enforcing them at application time — which is what syncing application data to Company metafields achieves — is far cheaper than reconciling it later.
Bulk import and migration
Creating companies by hand is fine for a pilot and untenable for a migration. Companies and contacts can be imported in bulk from CSV — Onboard B2B documents unlimited CSV bulk import for exactly this, whether you are migrating from another platform or onboarding a batch at once — both to move an existing wholesale book onto Shopify and to keep records updated afterwards when your source of truth is an ERP. The work that matters is the mapping done before the import: deciding what is a company, what is a location, and which contact belongs where.
Once companies exist, customer portals let buyers maintain their own team and locations, which keeps the data current without adding work for your team.
Related
Elsewhere in the Shopify B2B cluster
Wholesale Development
Building the wholesale storefront itself — catalogs, minimums, and order forms.
Learn more →FAQ
Common questions
A customer is a person with a login. A company is the business you trade with. A company owns locations and has contacts attached, and it is the company — not the person — that carries the catalog, pricing, and payment terms.
Yes, and most real wholesale customers do. Each location can carry its own address, tax treatment, and payment terms, so a head office and a regional depot can be handled differently under one company.
Yes. A contact can be attached to multiple locations and choose which one they are ordering for at checkout, which matters for multi-site customers like franchise groups or chains.
Yes. Companies, locations, and contacts can be bulk imported from CSV. We map your existing data to Shopify's structure first so the import produces clean records rather than a faithful copy of a messy spreadsheet.
Structuring a B2B customer base?
Send us how your wholesale customers are organized today and we will map it to Shopify's company model before anything gets built.
Talk About Your B2B Data