Shopify B2B Store Setup
When you're in the process of setting up your Shopify B2B store, there are two ways to go about this:
- Set up as a new standalone Shopify store
- Enable wholesale functionality on existing Shopify store
Both have positives and negatives and it's ultimately a business decision as to which is the best route to take. You can even read our blog post on the topic!
Considerations to bear in mind A major benefit of SparkLayer is being able to integrate it without needing to duplicate stores. If you're looking to implement SparkLayer in this way, it's important to consider the following:
- Stock and warehouses: currently, it's not possible to route B2B orders to use specific stock locations in Shopify when using the checkout. This means that, if you're installing SparkLayer on your main Shopify store, B2B orders will need to share the same stock pool. This can have knock-on effects on stock allocation and the impact needs to be carefully considered.
- Verify your apps: Do you have any apps installed that may interfere with the B2B experience? E.g. apps that send 'leave a review' emails or any post-purchase follow ups. Many will allow you to exclude interactions based on customer tags; remember, all customers that use SparkLayer will have a tag of b2b assigned.
- Analytics and reporting: SparkLayer will show in Shopify as a Sales Channel called B2B Ordering which makes it easy to split out your reports.
- Affiliate and tracking pixels: your Shopify site and Shopify checkout may have special tracking code installed to monitor sales; you'll need to make sure this is excluded for B2B customers. Within Shopify, go to Settings, choose Checkout and look for Additional scripts. It's possible to hide and show Additional scripts based on criteria such as the customer tag (e.g. b2b) so consideration will need to be given if certain tags need to be excluded. Learn more
It may be necessary to create a separate Shopify store to manage your B2B channel. Although this may sound daunting, the good news is it's relatively straightforward to set up and you can automate a lot of the process.
The most common reasons why you'd create a secondary Shopify store include:
- Stock levels: You need to separate out your B2B stock from your DTC
- Products: You want to create a totally different product catalogue for your B2B customers
- Integrations: you need to integrate your B2B channel with a different system and keep it separate from your DTC channel
- Website URL: you need to create a separate website URL to access the store such as b2b.yourstore.com.
Our recommended approach is as follows:
- Set up your main B2B store. This will mean installing SparkLayer, and then configuring and customising your Shopify store as you require. For example, setting up a storefront theme, customising the homepage and product pages, etc.
- Set up your storefront theme. It's likely you'll want these to use the same design, so the first step is to export your theme from your main B2B store and import it into your additional stores. This Shopify guide shows you how to do this.
- Install SparkLayer on your additional stores. Just as with your main store, you will need to install SparkLayer on each additional store. We're happy to assist in this process and also discuss a combined pricing rate.
It's likely that you will need someone with Shopify expertise to help in this process and we are happy to advise where possible.