B2B on Shopify: company objects, locations, and customer segments

Shopify Plus ships B2B capabilities built on two Liquid objects - company and company_location - plus customer segments for audience targeting. Merchants migrating from traditional DTC-only setups to B2B often underestimate how these pieces fit together. Getting the model right at setup saves quarters of retrofitting.

The core B2B objects

The company Liquid object represents a business entity purchasing from the store - not a single consumer, but an organization with potentially many buyers. Companies have:

• Name, external ID, tax registration
• Main contact, address
• A relationship to one or more company_location records
• A set of authorized buyers (Shopify customers) who can place orders on the company's behalf

The company_location Liquid object represents a specific shipping/billing location of a company. A company can have many locations - HQ, regional warehouses, branch offices. Each location has:

• Shipping address, billing address
• Assigned price list
• Payment terms
• Permission rules about which buyers can order to/from it

These objects are only available on Shopify Plus B2B stores. On standard Shopify, the closest equivalent is tagged customers + separate wholesale storefronts, which is workable but less rich.

Who this fits

The company/company_location pattern fits when:

• The same logical buyer (a business) places orders across multiple legal entities / branches
• Pricing varies per company or per location
• Billing terms differ (net 30 for some, net 60 for others)
• Approval chains exist (buyer submits order, company admin approves)
• Exclusive content or products should show only to business customers

DTC-only merchants don't need this. A merchant selling individually to consumers, where "business orders" are rare enough to handle manually, is fine without B2B features.

Exclusive content for business customers

A wholesale supplier wants to show specific content (private catalogs, volume pricing tables, industry-specific documentation) only to logged-in business customers. The Liquid approach:

The customer.b2b? boolean is true when the logged-in customer is authorized on a company. Content gates behind this check stay invisible to consumers and search crawlers.

For more granular gating (e.g., "only show for this specific company"):

Or using customer segments:

Customer segments as the audience primitive

Customer segments - introduced to replace the older tag-based filtering in many contexts - are Shopify's dynamic audience definitions. A segment is a saved query like "customers in Canada who placed an order in the last 90 days with AOV > $200".

For B2B, segments power:

• Which customers see which price list
• Which customers receive which marketing emails
• Which customers are eligible for specific products or checkout UI extensions

Segments update dynamically as customer data changes. A customer who hasn't ordered in 180 days automatically drops out of an "active customer" segment without manual intervention.

Price lists and per-company pricing

B2B pricing is controlled via price lists assigned to companies or company locations. A price list:

• Applies to specific products or variants
• Can be percentage-based (10% off retail) or fixed-price per item
• Scoped to a currency
• Assigned to one or more companies/locations

A company_location sees a product at its assigned price-list price. The storefront renders the right price automatically when the B2B customer is authenticated.

For complex tiered pricing (different prices for different volume thresholds), combine price lists with product quantity rules or with Shopify Functions for dynamic pricing logic.

Order approval workflows

Company admins can require approval on orders submitted by their buyers. Flow:

1. Buyer selects products and initiates checkout
2. Instead of directly placing the order, the checkout offers "Submit for approval"
3. Order lands in an approvals queue
4. Company admin reviews, approves or rejects
5. Approved orders proceed to the merchant

The merchant sees a fully-approved order; the B2B buyer's company handles its own internal controls. This maps to how enterprise purchasing actually works.

Separation from wholesale marketplaces

Shopify's native B2B features are for the merchant's own wholesale customers. They're different from:

• Shopify Collabs (affiliate/influencer marketplace)
• Markets Pro (cross-border DTC)
• Wholesale channel (older, being deprecated in favor of B2B on Plus)

Architects planning a B2B implementation on Plus should default to B2B features (company/company_location/price lists) rather than the deprecated wholesale channel.

Theme considerations

A theme supporting both DTC and B2B needs:

• Conditional rendering based on customer.b2b?
• Price rendering that respects price-list context
• Hidden content for non-authenticated visitors (B2B products often don't appear in sitemaps)
• A clear login/register path for business customers different from consumer signup

Default themes handle much of this automatically when B2B is enabled. Custom themes need conditional logic threaded through section code.

What ships with a B2B architecture

A production B2B implementation on Shopify has:

• Companies and company locations configured with tax registration, addresses, terms
• Price lists assigned per company/location matching negotiated contracts
• Customer segments defined for gating content and marketing
• Order approval workflows configured per company that requires them
• Theme sections conditionally rendering based on customer.b2b? and customer.tags
• Authentication flow distinguishing DTC self-service from B2B admin-approved
• Reporting via BYOD or Data Lake for cross-company analysis

B2B on Shopify Plus is a mature platform - the architectural work is in modeling the merchant's actual business relationships, not in bending the platform to fit.