Shopify Development for B2B and Wholesale Brands That Sell on Terms | Digital Heroes

Your reps still take wholesale orders by email. A buyer sends a list of style numbers and quantities, someone rekeys them into a draft order, and every few weeks one ships at last season's tier price and comes back as a credit note. The same buyer reorders the same twelve SKUs every six weeks, and sends that same email every six weeks to do it.

The store itself is fine. It sells to consumers beautifully. It also has no idea that this account buys in cases of twelve, sits on tier three pricing, pays net 30, and is 41 days past due on an invoice your finance team knows about and your checkout has never heard of.

That gap is the job. A wholesale buyer is not a shopper. They are raising a purchase order against a negotiated price list, on terms, in units your warehouse can actually pick.

Why Digital Heroes for this work

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Contracting runs through an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so the intellectual property in your store assigns under your own law. Delivery is from India. Every build opens with a signed product requirements document, and on a wholesale store that document is where the pricing model, the unit of measure and the system of record get settled, before anyone writes a line of Liquid.

What that buys you is a team that has already had the argument about whether tier three is a percentage adjustment or a fixed price list, and knows exactly what changes the next time you raise a retail price.

The comparison, side by side

Three columns. What we say about ourselves, and what to go and look at on every other name on your shortlist. The third column is an instruction, not a claim.

Do not take the middle column on trust. Every row was chosen because you can settle it in a browser tab. The right hand column takes about twenty minutes for a shortlist of four agencies, and will cut it faster than any proposal deck.

What a wholesale channel actually demands from the build

Shopify's B2B vocabulary is specific, and knowing it separates a build that fits the platform from one that fights it. Companies and company locations hold the trading relationship. Catalogs attach a price list and a product publication to a company location, so a buyer sees their prices and only the products you are willing to sell them. Price lists carry either a percentage adjustment against retail or a fixed price per variant, with volume price breaks underneath for quantity tiers. Quantity rules set a minimum, a maximum and an increment. Payment terms cover due on receipt, a fixed date, and net 15, 30, 45 and 60. Checkout collects a purchase order number. Draft orders carry quotes.

The vocabulary is rarely what is missing. What is missing is a decision about which word applies to which part of your business, and those belong in the specification:

• Unit of measure. Is the variant an each, an inner, a case or a pallet? The price break table, the quantity rules, the pick list and the invoice line all inherit that answer. Get it wrong in week two and you rebuild in week ten.
• Tier shape. A percentage adjustment follows your retail price forever. A fixed price list holds its number until you change it. Each tier has to be a deliberate choice, not whatever the first developer clicked.
• Location granularity. A franchise group, a distributor with three depots and a retailer with a central buying office each split differently between company and company location, because terms, catalogs and ship-to addresses hang off the location.
• Catalogue visibility. Publications decide what an account can even see. Exclusive lines, closeouts, samples and pre-books are visibility problems before they are pricing problems.
• Tax status. Resale certificates for United States accounts, exemption handling through Avalara or an equivalent, VAT reverse charge and VAT number validation for European trade, and tax exclusive display.
• Ordering surfaces. A quick order pad keyed on SKU or GTIN, CSV upload, reorder from order history, saved lists. A buyer placing a routine reorder should never see a product grid.
• System of record. For every object, one side wins. Write it down before anyone integrates anything.

If you also ship into national retail accounts, the storefront is only half of your order intake. Those accounts trade on Electronic Data Interchange, not a web checkout. An EDI 850 purchase order arrives, you return an 855 acknowledgement, you pick against the retailer's routing guide with GS1-128 carton labels, you send an 856 advance ship notice before the truck reaches the door, and you invoice on an 810. Miss the advance ship notice window or mislabel a carton and the chargeback lands on that same invoice. Most Shopify projects never mention any of it, which is how a brand's largest accounts stay stranded on a manual process.

Bejaad sells both retail and wholesale. Digi Instruments is a business to business platform. American Dream Printing runs print on demand with bulk ordering. Three categories, and each specification opened on the same four questions: who is looking, what may they see, in what units, and what do they pay.

The four things that hurt, and what we do about each

Pricing that lives in a spreadsheet

Take 180 trading accounts across six tiers and a catalogue of 2,400 sellable variants. That is 14,400 price points that have to be true at the same time. When they live in a spreadsheet that someone re-uploads each season, the errors do not surface at upload. They surface as credit notes six weeks later, after the goods have shipped, and each one costs a rep an afternoon and a customer a little confidence.

It happens because pricing was modelled as a customer tag plus an automatic discount rather than a catalog with a price list attached. A discount is applied to a cart. It stacks, it competes with consumer promotions, and the number the buyer sees is a subtraction rather than a price. Then a cost increase arrives and nobody can say whether tier three follows retail up or holds its own number, because nobody ever decided.

Digital Heroes settles the shape of every tier in the product requirements document: percentage adjustment or fixed price list, with the consequence of each written next to it. Pricing then lives in catalogs attached to company locations, with volume price breaks for quantity tiers, and price list updates driven from your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) rather than a person with a CSV. Consumer promotions are scoped so they cannot reach a B2B catalog. Tier three stops being a discount and becomes a price.

Minimum order quantities that only exist in the theme

Your case pack is twelve. A buyer orders seven. The warehouse either breaks a case, repacks it and eats the labour, or somebody picks up the phone and the order sits for a day. On several hundred orders a month, a rule that holds only on the product page breaks every week.

The mechanism is almost always the same. The minimum was implemented as JavaScript on the product page, so the server never sees it. A cart permalink bypasses it, and so do the Storefront API, a rep building a draft order, an abandoned cart link and reorder from history. Underneath sits an unresolved unit of measure: the variant is an each while the warehouse picks cases, so a quantity of seven means something nobody on the floor can act on.

Digital Heroes puts the rule where the platform enforces it. Quantity rules go on the catalog with a minimum, a maximum and an increment, and a cart and checkout validation Shopify Function holds the same rule server side however the cart was assembled. Minimum order value is handled the same way, not with a warning banner. Pack size lives in a metafield your ERP maps to, and what the variant represents is answered in week one, not discovered in week nine.

Net terms with no credit control

Net 30 is a loan you did not price. At a 20 percent gross margin, a single unpaid invoice of 50,000 dollars has consumed the entire margin on 250,000 dollars of shipped goods. The account that is 60 days out placed another order last night, because nothing in the flow asked whether it should be allowed to.

Payment terms record when money is due. They do not decide whether an order should be accepted. The credit position lives in your accounting system as a receivables balance and a limit, and the checkout holds no opinion about either. The order then reaches the fulfilment queue before finance sees it, so the first human control point is a warehouse that has already picked.

Digital Heroes treats the credit ceiling as state rather than paperwork. The company location carries a balance and a hold flag synced from your accounting or ERP system, a validation function stops or diverts checkout when the ceiling is breached, and orders over the line land in a review status instead of the fulfilment queue. Terms are configured per company location rather than per company, because a group can have one branch current and another 90 days out, and only one should be stopped.

An ERP sync finance cannot reconcile

The first month end after launch is where wholesale builds are actually judged. Sales in Shopify does not equal sales in the ERP, and nobody can say why. In our own projects, a finance team arriving at that month end without a written mapping loses two to four days to it, and loses them again the following month, until somebody fixes the model.

The causes are boringly consistent. Order level discounts allocated one way in Shopify and another in the ERP. Tax on shipping treated differently at each end. A partial shipment raising two invoices against one order. A refund landing as a credit memo with no link back. A retried webhook creating a duplicate because nothing was idempotent. Beneath all of it, nobody owns the integration: it was switched on by a connector during a trial and no one wrote down what it does.

Digital Heroes writes the system of record per object before the integration is built. The ERP owns cost, price lists, credit and inventory. Shopify owns the order, the session and the customer record. Writes are idempotent on the Shopify order id, so a retry cannot duplicate. Discount allocation, tax codes, credit memos and partial shipments are mapped explicitly in a table your finance lead signs off, and failures go to a queue with a named owner. Whether you run NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central, SAP Business One, Acumatica, QuickBooks Online or Xero, that mapping table is the deliverable finance actually cares about.

Running wholesale and direct to consumer on one store

Most brands arrive asking whether wholesale needs its own store. Usually it does not. One store is cheaper to run: product data, inventory and content stay in one place, your team learns one admin, and catalogs and publications do the separation so a logged out visitor never sees a trade price.

One store costs you something in three places. Inventory is pooled by default, so a large wholesale commitment can strip the stock your consumer channel was counting on unless you reserve against it deliberately. Theme logic doubles, because a template rendering for both a consumer and a buyer with quantity rules and a purchase order field grows conditionals fast, and untested conditionals are where launch bugs live. Reporting mixes two businesses with different margins in one dashboard until you tag orders at source.

Two stores make sense when the two sides share almost no product data, when a separate legal entity invoices the trade, or when the wholesale catalogue would distort the consumer store's search and navigation. Decide it with numbers during the specification, not by preference afterwards.

What a Shopify B2B build costs, worked through

These are professional bands from a senior team, not marketplace pricing. On the builds Digital Heroes has priced, the ranges look like this:

• B2B configuration on an existing store. Companies, catalogs, price lists, quantity rules, payment terms, account onboarding. 6,000 to 15,000 dollars.
• Wholesale storefront build. Quick order pad, reorder from history, saved lists, purchase order capture, buyer permissions. 18,000 to 45,000 dollars.
• Combined consumer and wholesale store. Shared product data, split catalogs, reserved inventory, tagged reporting. 30,000 to 70,000 dollars.
• ERP or accounting integration. Products, price lists, inventory, orders, invoices, credit memos, receivables balance. 15,000 to 60,000 dollars, driven by object count rather than order volume.
• Quote to order with approvals. Negotiated line pricing, expiry, rep approval, conversion to order. 20,000 to 55,000 dollars.
• Retained team after launch. 6,000 to 20,000 dollars a month.

Here is a build of this shape costed the way Digital Heroes quotes it. It is a model priced from our own project history, not an account of a particular client. An apparel and homeware brand carrying 2,400 sellable variants, 180 trading accounts on five price tiers, case packs of six and twelve, net 30 on about sixty of those accounts, Dynamics 365 Business Central in the back office, fourteen weeks to a first live order.

• Specification and data model, three weeks: 9,000 dollars.
• Catalogs, price lists and onboarding for 180 accounts: 11,000 dollars.
• Quantity rules, case pack increments and minimum order value enforcement: 7,500 dollars.
• Wholesale storefront, quick order pad, reorder from history, saved lists, purchase order capture: 16,000 dollars.
• Quote to order with rep approval and quote expiry: 12,000 dollars.
• Business Central integration across products, price lists, inventory, orders, invoices and receivables balance: 28,000 dollars.
• Tax exemption capture, resale certificates and VAT handling: 6,500 dollars.
• Quality assurance, a rehearsed migration and launch: 10,000 dollars.

That totals 100,000 dollars over fourteen weeks. Move any input and the total moves: 400 variants instead of 2,400 cuts the catalog work sharply, and a single tier with no negotiated prices removes most of the pricing phase.

Two costs go missing from almost every quote you will read. In our own projects, data migration runs 10 to 25 percent of the build cost, and on a wholesale store it is at the top of that range, because account records, historic pricing, open orders and outstanding credit all have to arrive intact and reconciled. On our engagements, year two runs 15 to 20 percent of the build annually for maintenance, platform changes and the changes your trading terms will need. Budget both at the start and you will not be having an awkward conversation in month seven.

How the work runs

Specification first, always. Two to three weeks with your sales lead, warehouse manager and finance lead, ending in a signed product requirements document naming the pricing shape per tier, the unit of measure, the quantity rules, the terms policy, the tax treatment and the system of record for every object. You own that document whether or not you build with us.

Build runs in reviewable increments against a staging store loaded with real account data, not fixtures. Your reps test with their own accounts and price lists, because a rep finds in twenty minutes what a developer will not find in a week. The integration is rehearsed against a sandbox company in your ERP before anything touches production.

Launch is staged. A pilot group of ten to thirty accounts goes live first, chosen to cover every tier and both terms and prepaid. Then the rest, in waves, with the manual order path open until the last wave is clean.

After launch the team that built it stays on retainer. Not a support inbox, not a new team reading a handover document. The people who chose your data model are the people who change it when you add a tier, open a market or switch ERP.

What to ask any agency before you sign

• Is tier pricing a percentage adjustment or a fixed price list, and why? If the answer does not depend on your pricing policy, they have not thought about it.
• Where is the minimum order quantity enforced? If the answer is the product page or the theme, it will be bypassed in the first month.
• What stops an account past its credit limit from ordering? A blank look here is the most expensive answer on the list.
• Which system owns price, and which owns inventory? If they cannot answer per object, the reconciliation problem is already scheduled.
• How do you make integration writes idempotent? If retries are not mentioned, expect duplicate orders.
• What happens to a partial shipment in the accounting system? This separates people who have shipped wholesale from people who have only shipped stores.
• Who holds this in month seven, and at what cost? An unpriced answer is not an answer.
• Can I see the specification before I pay for the build? If the specification is the build, you are buying a deck.

Who we are wrong for

A brochure site under five thousand dollars belongs on a hosted builder. Buy the template, spend the difference on photography, and come back when there is a trading channel to build.

If your board needs engineers sitting in a United States office, look elsewhere. Delivery is from India. The contracting entities sit in India, the United States and the United Kingdom and the intellectual property assigns under your own law, but the engineers are not down the corridor.

If you want hands working under your own architects, hire contractors instead. Digital Heroes owns the architecture it ships, which is the whole reason the data model holds up, and that does not fit a team wanting to direct it decision by decision.

And if the project has to start before anything is written down, we are not the right call. No signed specification, no build. On a wholesale store the specification is where the money is saved.

Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.