B2B Ecommerce Agency for Manufacturers & Distributors

Your dealers still order the way they did ten years ago. A purchase order arrives by email, someone keys it into the ERP, and a spreadsheet that only one person is allowed to touch says which account gets which price. The website is a catalog with a request-a-quote form. It cannot take an order, and the portal you tried instead was slow enough that the reps quietly went back to the phone.

We are Victoria Garland Creative Inc., a B2B ecommerce agency in Ontario that has built on Shopify since 2012. We do B2B ecommerce development for manufacturers and distributors as one project: the dealer portal, the catalog with its spec data, the quote flow, the move off the old site and the ERP sync, scoped by the developers who build it and delivered on one fixed quote.

B2B Ecommerce Development for Manufacturers

This page is for a manufacturer or distributor whose customers are dealers, distributors, contractors and trade accounts, and whose website (if there is one) was never built to sell to them. If your buyers need their own prices, net terms, case-pack quantities and a way to reorder without phoning a rep, that is the work described here. B2B ecommerce for manufacturers is a different build from a retail store, and it is the one we scope for.

Already selling DTC on Shopify and adding wholesale accounts? That is a smaller job: Shopify B2B and wholesale setup.

We build on Shopify because its native B2B objects (companies, catalogs, payment terms) match how trade accounts already work, on a platform your own team can run after we hand over. The projects below are named where the client allows it. They are the integration, catalog and migration builds that ecommerce for manufacturers rests on.

Custom Shopify app

Manual order routing, eliminated

The global leader in chemical-free decaf runs a marketplace where every order routes to an independent roaster. Routing on metaobjects, live carrier rates per origin, automated label dispatch.

See the Swiss Water project →

Capital Grills Catalog + search structure

A brick-and-mortar retailer's first online store

Years of in-store BBQ retail, no ecommerce. We catalogued premium grills and outdoor kitchen equipment, structured the site so customers find the right one without digging, and targeted the keywords and local searches their customers actually use.

See the Capital Grills project →

Shopify NZ → US

One bespoke theme, two regional stores

A complex theme built on metaobjects and metafields, migrated intact with store data to a new US store to open regional markets. No theme rework.

See the Waste Free project →

“Victoria Garland brought invaluable Shopify expertise and helped us streamline our process. They’ve truly been a great partner, and we continue to work with them.”

Who you'll work with

Victoria Garland Owner and Chief Creative Officer 13 years on Shopify

Alex Massaad CTO and Co-Founder 14 years on Shopify

You scope the project with the people who build it. The developer on the kickoff call is the developer on launch day.

What We Build for Trade Buyers

B2B ecommerce development for a trade catalog comes down to six pieces. Each one is settled in the audit before it is built.

Dealer and distributor portals

Each trade customer becomes a company in Shopify, with its locations and the buyers allowed to order for each one. A dealer with three branches is one company, three ship-to addresses and whichever people place the orders, each seeing the prices and terms set for that branch. New accounts apply through a form on the site and wait for approval, so nobody sees trade pricing until you have said yes. The logged-in experience is built for reordering: last order, saved lists, quantities typed straight into a table. All of it runs on the same site as your public catalog, so the B2B online ordering portal and the spec-rich product pages are one store with one set of integrations behind it.

Contract and tiered pricing

Pricing is where most B2B setups fall apart, because the rules were never written down. In the audit we go through them with whoever owns pricing: distributor tiers, a contract price on one SKU for one account, volume breaks at case and pallet quantities. Each rule becomes a catalog with its own price list, assigned to the companies it applies to, so a buyer logs in and sees their number without a rep checking. When the ERP owns pricing, the sync pushes it to the store, and the store never becomes a second place to maintain it.

Quotes and net terms

Not every order fits a cart. A freight-sized order, a custom configuration or a first order from a new account usually starts as a quote. We build the request-a-quote flow so a buyer can submit one from the product page, and the rep turns it into a draft order at the agreed price, which the buyer pays by card or puts on terms. Approved companies get net terms set on the company record: they check out without paying, the order carries a due date, and the invoice is tracked in Shopify and, if you want it there, mirrored in QuickBooks Online or the ERP.

Catalogs with spec data

A trade catalog is thousands of SKUs, each with the detail an engineer or an estimator needs before they order. Shopify products take up to 2,048 variants and 3 options per product, and the rest of the data (dimensions, materials, ratings, compatibility) goes into metafields and metaobjects so it is structured rather than buried in a paragraph. Spec sheets, CAD files, PDFs and installation guides attach to the product as files and appear as downloads on the page. Search and filters run on the specs, so a buyer can narrow by thread size or voltage instead of scrolling. That is the difference between wholesale website development and a retail theme with a login bolted on.

ERP and accounting sync

The ERP stays the source of truth. We decide, field by field, which system owns what. Usually the ERP owns items, inventory, cost and trade pricing, Shopify owns the storefront presentation, and orders flow back into the ERP as sales orders with the right customer and terms attached. Inventory and orders move close to real time; financial records can run on a schedule. We build the sync on Gadget.dev with retries, idempotent writes and a log your team can read, so a webhook that times out at 2am is retried rather than lost. The Shopify NetSuite integration and Shopify QuickBooks integration pages cover the detail, and the warehouse side is on our Shopify 3PL integration page.

Sales-rep ordering

Your reps keep their accounts. They place orders on a buyer’s behalf, at that buyer’s prices and terms, as draft orders from the Shopify admin, and the buyer pays the invoice online or on terms. A phone order is entered once, into the system the warehouse already watches, instead of being re-keyed twice. Shopify’s B2B tools cover this for most teams without custom code. Where a rep workflow needs more (a territory view, a commission field on the order), we build it as a small app rather than a workaround.

Moving Off WordPress or a Legacy B2B Portal

There are two usual starting points: a WordPress catalog site that has grown for a decade, or a B2B portal from a vendor that stopped improving it. Both carry something worth protecting.

A WordPress catalog site holds years of technical content. Spec pages, installation guides, PDFs and category pages that rank for the part numbers and product types your buyers search. That traffic is the asset, and it is the first thing a careless move loses. So every indexed URL gets a one-to-one 301 before anything moves, built from Search Console and the site’s own redirect table rather than from a crawl of the live pages. PDFs are in the map too: a spec-sheet URL that a distributor has linked to for six years redirects to the product that now hosts the file. Titles, meta descriptions and structured data carry over. The product data gets cleaned in the audit, because trade catalogs rarely arrive clean (units of measure that differ by customer, SKUs that changed three systems ago, specs that only exist inside a PDF), and that cleanup is in the plan rather than a surprise halfway through. The WooCommerce to Shopify migration page and our WooCommerce migration guide cover the mechanics.

A legacy portal is a different move. The accounts, their price levels, payment terms and order history come across, so a buyer logs in on launch day to the same prices they had and can reorder from last month. We do not ask your dealers to re-register.

Cutover runs with the old site left up as a fallback, the redirect map deployed in the same hour as the DNS change, and 30 days of watching the 404 log and the rankings for your top pages. We don’t promise zero volatility. Some movement is normal while Google reprocesses the map, and we say so up front. B2B ecommerce website development that respects the old site’s history is most of what keeps that movement short. Moving from BigCommerce, Magento or another platform instead? Our Shopify migration agency page covers each source.

Request a quote with your current site URL and a rough SKU count.

B2B Ecommerce Consulting Before Anything Is Built

Every project starts with an audit, and the audit stands on its own as B2B ecommerce consulting. The written plan is yours to keep, whether or not we build it.

Any B2B ecommerce agency should answer three questions before it quotes. First, platform fit. Shopify’s native B2B covers most manufacturers and distributors, and we will tell you plainly when it does not: a configurator with engineering rules, or a punchout requirement from your buyers’ procurement systems, changes the answer. Second, whether you need Shopify Plus. Core B2B (company accounts, catalogs with their own pricing, payment terms, quantity rules) ships on the standard plans. Plus matters if you need more than a few catalogs, pricing assigned company by company, deposits on large orders or a separate wholesale storefront. Our Shopify vs Shopify Plus post and the Plus break-even calculator show which side of the line you are on. Third, data ownership. Which system owns items, prices, inventory, customers and orders, written down per field, because two systems that both think they own a number is the most common cause of a broken sync.

If you want that senior read without a build attached, our ecommerce consultant and fractional ecommerce CTO engagements are the same people on a different footing. A B2B ecommerce consultant who also builds will only recommend what they would be willing to deliver.

How a B2B Project Runs

Remote by default, starting with a kickoff over video. We are based in Ontario and work with clients across Canada, the US, the UK and Australia. If an on-site day would help, we can add it to the scope.

The phases are the same every time. Audit: catalog, price rules, accounts and the systems they live in, reviewed with whoever owns each. Model: companies, catalogs, terms and product data designed on paper before anything is built. Build: the portal, catalog and ERP sync on a staging store. Buyer testing: a handful of your real accounts log in to staging and place test orders against their own prices, which is how the pricing rule nobody mentioned gets found. Launch: redirects, buyer invitations and the first orders on terms, then 30 days of watching. The dated milestone schedule comes with the plan after the audit. We do not quote a duration before we have seen the catalog and the ERP, because B2B ecommerce implementation is mostly data and rules, and the count of each is what sets the clock.

Why a Shopify Specialist for B2B

Most B2B ecommerce services are sold by generalist agencies that build on whatever the client names, and most Shopify agencies build retail stores. We are a Shopify-only team. We have built on the platform since 2012, including engineering time inside Shopify itself, and three apps of our own (JourneyGlow, PriceGlow and StockGlow) are live on the Shopify App Store, maintained through every API version. Software kept running through Shopify’s deprecation cycles is the same discipline that keeps a dealer portal’s ERP sync alive two years after launch. If you are comparing B2B ecommerce development companies, ask each one who maintains the integration in year two.

The integration work is the proof. Swiss Water runs a marketplace where every order has to reach the right independent roaster, with live carrier rates per origin and labels dispatched automatically. We built that as a custom Shopify app on Gadget.dev, with retries and monitoring, and it returned hundreds of hours a quarter to their team. Read the case study. A dealer portal syncing to NetSuite is the same engineering with different nouns.

We are a small team. The people who scope your project are the people who build it, and the person answering your questions wrote the code. When the portal needs a custom app around it, that is Shopify app development by the same team; here is when a store needs a custom app.

Related Services

• Shopify B2B and wholesale setup when you already sell DTC on Shopify and are adding trade accounts.
• Shopify NetSuite integration for orders, inventory, fulfillment and B2B price levels kept in step with NetSuite.
• Shopify QuickBooks integration for wholesale invoices and payouts that reconcile.
• Shopify integration services for the 3PL, CRM and custom systems around the portal.
• Shopify migration agency for the move itself, from any platform.
• Shopify Plus agency when the catalog count or checkout rules call for Plus.
• Shopify app development for the rep workflow or configurator a theme cannot do.
• Ecommerce consultant for the plan without the build.

Get a Fixed Quote for Your B2B Site

Tell us what you sell and to whom, how your trade buyers order today and which system holds the pricing. You will hear back from the developer who would build it, with a scoping call first and then a written plan and a fixed quote after the audit. Request a quote or book a 30-minute scoping call. A B2B ecommerce agency that quotes before it has seen your ERP is guessing, and we would rather look first.