B2B Wholesale Portal with Company-Specific Pricing

The problem

The client's B2B business was running through a 15-year-old bespoke portal. Each company account had unique pricing tiers, minimum order quantities, and payment terms. Sales reps managed orders manually via spreadsheets. The ERP (NetSuite) was the source of truth — but nothing was connected. Orders were re-keyed twice. Errors were constant.

Technical challenge

Shopify's native B2B features (company accounts, catalogs, payment terms) had only been available for 18 months when this project started. Documentation was sparse and several edge cases around catalog inheritance and volume pricing required direct API experimentation. The NetSuite integration needed to be bidirectional — syncing orders out and inventory/pricing back in near-real-time.

Architecture

1. 1

   Native B2B foundation

   Used Shopify's native B2B APIs to create company accounts, contacts, and payment terms. Each of the 200+ accounts was migrated with their specific catalog and pricing rules via the GraphQL Admin API in a controlled batch process.

2. 2

   Catalog per account

   Each company was assigned a dedicated price list via the Catalog API. Volume pricing tiers were mapped to price list quantities. This eliminated the need for any third-party B2B app.

3. 3

   NetSuite connector

   Built a Node.js connector that syncs in both directions — orders pushed from Shopify to NetSuite via REST, and inventory + pricing updates pulled from NetSuite via webhook triggers on a 15-minute schedule during business hours.

4. 4

   Purchase order workflow

   Extended checkout with a Shopify UI Extension for PO number capture. PO numbers are stored as order attributes and flow through to NetSuite automatically.

Results