If you’re setting up wholesale on Shopify Plus, “company accounts” is the concept everything else hangs off. Get the structure wrong and you’ll spend months fielding support tickets from confused buyers or manually fixing orders placed under the wrong pricing. Get it right and your B2B customers can self-serve orders the same way they’d expect from any modern supplier portal.
This post explains what a company account actually is on Shopify, how the roles and permissions work, and what the ordering experience looks like from the buyer’s side, the details that matter when you’re planning a real setup rather than just reading a feature summary.
What Is a Shopify Company Account?
A company account represents a business customer rather than an individual. Where a standard Shopify customer account is one person with one address and one order history, a company account can have:
- Multiple locations, separate shipping/billing destinations under the one business (think a retailer with several store branches, or a business with a warehouse and a head office)
- Multiple contacts, individual people tied to the company, each with their own login
- Company-specific pricing, via an assigned catalogue and price list
- Company-specific payment terms, net 30, net 60, or another term you’ve agreed to
- Ordering permissions per contact, not every person at the company needs the same level of access
This structure is what lets a single wholesale customer represent an entire business with several buyers, rather than forcing you to create a separate, disconnected customer profile for every person who might place an order.
How Roles and Permissions Actually Work
This is the part merchants most often underestimate. Within a company account, individual contacts (sometimes called “buyers” or “location users”) can be granted different permission levels, generally covering:
- Place orders, can check out and submit orders directly
- View-only access, can browse pricing and order history but not place an order
- Order approval workflows, a buyer can build a cart, but it requires sign-off from another contact (a manager or purchasing lead) before it’s submitted
That last point matters a lot for larger wholesale customers. A junior buyer at a retail chain often isn’t authorised to commit spend above a certain threshold, the approval flow lets you support that reality instead of forcing every order through a single login shared awkwardly between staff.
What the Buyer Actually Sees When They Log In
From the buyer’s side, once they’re logged into their company account:
- They land on a storefront that reflects their catalogue and pricing, not your standard retail pricing
- Products they’re not approved to buy (if you’ve restricted the catalogue) simply don’t show, rather than displaying at the wrong price
- Quantity rules apply automatically, minimum order quantities and case-pack increments are enforced at the cart level, so a buyer can’t accidentally order 7 units of something that only ships in cartons of 12
- At checkout, if the company has approved net terms, they see an invoice-based payment option instead of (or alongside) card payment
- If they belong to a business with multiple locations, they choose which location the order ships to and bills against
The experience is meant to feel like a self-serve version of what a good wholesale rep would do manually, show the right price, enforce the right minimums, and let the buyer transact without back-and-forth email.
Setting Up Company Accounts: The Practical Steps
- Decide your company hierarchy model first. Will each physical location be its own “location” under one company, or does each branch need its own separate company account? This depends on how your buyers actually operate and how you invoice them.
- Map contacts to real people and real permission levels, not just “everyone gets full access.” Ask your key wholesale customers who on their team actually needs to place orders versus just check status.
- Assign catalogues deliberately. A company account without an assigned catalogue and price list will typically default to standard pricing, which is rarely what you want for an approved wholesale buyer.
- Test the approval workflow end-to-end if you’re using it, build a test cart as a restricted contact and confirm the approval notification actually reaches the right person.
- Plan onboarding communication. Existing wholesale customers used to emailing orders need a clear, simple explanation of how to log in and place their first order, this is a change management task as much as a technical one.
Company Accounts vs. Standard Customer Accounts: The Key Differences
It’s worth being explicit about how different this is from Shopify’s standard customer account model, because merchants coming from a purely D2C background often assume company accounts are just customer accounts with a business name attached. They’re not.
- Ownership structure. A standard customer account belongs to one person. A company account belongs to the business, with people attached to it, if a buyer leaves the company, you remove their access without losing the account’s order history, pricing, or terms.
- Pricing visibility. Standard customers see your storefront’s regular pricing (or whatever’s discounted via a code). Company account contacts see pricing specific to their assigned catalogue, which they cannot see or access unless logged in as that company.
- Checkout behaviour. Standard checkout is built around individual card payment. Company account checkout can offer net terms, purchase order reference fields, and location-based shipping selection, a materially different flow.
- Data ownership over time. Because the account belongs to the company rather than an individual, your relationship data, order history, pricing agreements, contact permissions, persists even as personnel changes on the customer’s side, which matters a great deal for long-term wholesale relationships.
How Draft Orders and Rep-Assisted Ordering Fit In
Not every B2B order needs to come through pure self-service. Many wholesale brands still have sales reps who build orders on a customer’s behalf, particularly for large or complex orders, or for buyers who simply prefer a phone call to a portal. Shopify supports this through draft orders, where a rep can build a cart on behalf of a company account, apply the correct company pricing, and send it to the buyer for approval or payment.
This matters when you’re deciding how “self-serve” your B2B setup needs to be. A useful way to think about it: company accounts don’t force every customer into pure self-checkout, they give you the infrastructure to support self-serve buyers and rep-assisted buyers side by side, using the same underlying pricing and account data rather than maintaining two disconnected systems.
Reporting and Visibility Considerations
Because company accounts are native to Shopify rather than bolted on through an app, order and customer reporting treats B2B activity as first-class data. This means you can see order history, lifetime value, and reorder patterns per company (not just per individual login), which is far more useful for account management than trying to stitch together order history across multiple individual buyer logins from the same business, a common limitation of older, app-based wholesale workarounds.
Where This Gets Complicated
Company accounts are straightforward for a business with one location and one or two buyers. They get genuinely complex when you’re dealing with:
- National retail chains with dozens of store locations, each needing separate delivery addresses but consolidated invoicing
- Buyers who need to order against multiple different catalogues (e.g. a distributor who buys both retail-ready and trade-only product lines)
- Approval chains with more than one level of sign-off
- Syncing company and contact data with an external CRM or ERP so your sales team isn’t managing account structure in two places
This is where a lot of wholesale brands find the native Shopify admin experience workable for setup, but genuinely time-consuming to get right at scale, particularly the catalogue and pricing logic. Working with a team that’s built out Shopify B2B development projects before generally saves significant rework, especially around getting the company hierarchy modelled correctly the first time.
FAQs
Can one person be a contact on more than one company account?
Generally, a Shopify customer login is tied to one company account at a time in the standard configuration, so if someone genuinely represents two separate businesses, they’ll usually need distinct logins or the structure needs to be planned around that specific case.
Do company accounts work with guest checkout?
No, company accounts require the buyer to be logged in, since pricing, catalogue and payment terms are all tied to their account and permissions. This is different from your standard retail storefront, where guest checkout is normal.
Can I have different shipping and billing rules per location within one company?
Yes, that’s one of the main reasons the multi-location structure exists, each location can have its own address, and orders are typically invoiced against the location that placed them, which supports businesses that want centralised purchasing but distributed delivery.
What happens if a buyer isn’t approved for net terms yet?
You can require upfront payment for new or unapproved company accounts while still giving them access to their negotiated catalogue pricing, then move them to net terms once credit is approved, this is a common staged approach for onboarding new wholesale accounts.
Do I need a separate app for company accounts, or is this native to Shopify Plus?
Company accounts, catalogues and B2B payment terms are native Shopify Plus features, not a third-party app, though most wholesale brands still use apps or custom development to extend specific workflows like credit checks or advanced approval routing.
Ready to Set This Up Properly?
If you’re trying to work out how your specific wholesale customer structure, locations, buyers, approval chains, maps onto Shopify’s company accounts, a strategy call is a good next step to walk through your setup before you start building.
