This work was shipped by the team behind StoreSmith, before StoreSmith existed. The merchant keeps its name. Figures are rounded on purpose.
the problem
A wholesale distributor was running trade and retail customers across several legacy storefronts. Each had its own catalogue, its own pricing logic and its own idea of what was in stock. Trade buyers placed orders by email or by phone because the online route was slower than calling. Staff re-keyed those orders into the ERP by hand.
Stated the way the merchant put it: wholesale orders took too long, prices were wrong often enough that buyers checked every invoice, and the warehouse kept shipping things that were not on the shelf.
what we built
One store, two audiences. The storefronts were consolidated into a single Shopify Plus store using native B2B. Trade accounts became companies with their own locations, payment terms and buyers. Retail customers stayed on the same storefront and saw the same catalogue at retail price.
Price tiers by customer segment, not by spreadsheet. Each wholesale segment was mapped to a catalogue and price list. Tier assignment was automated from the customer record in the ERP, so a buyer moving segments got the right prices on their next session without anyone touching the admin. Quantity rules and volume breaks covered the cases price lists could not, with a Shopify Function handling the remaining discount logic at checkout.
Fast reorder for trade buyers. Trade buyers mostly reorder. They got a quick-order view keyed by SKU, saved lists and one-step reorder from order history. That, more than anything else, is what brought order time under 3 minutes.
Inventory and order sync with the ERP. The ERP stayed the source of truth for stock and customers. Inventory levels flowed into Shopify in near real time, with Admin GraphQL bulk operations used for the full catalogue reconciliation that ran alongside. Orders flowed back to the ERP from webhooks. Every sync message carried an idempotency key, so a retried webhook or a replayed batch could never create a duplicate order or double-decrement stock.
10k+ SKUs without a slow admin. Product data was loaded and kept current through bulk operations rather than per-product API calls, and the import pipeline validated every row before it reached the store.
how it shipped
The consolidation went store by store rather than all at once. Each legacy storefront ran in parallel with the new store until its customers, order history and open orders had been moved and checked. Trade buyers were invited to the new store in segments, so pricing could be confirmed with a small group before the rest arrived.
The sync layer ran in shadow mode first: it read from both systems and logged what it would have changed, without writing. Only when the logs matched what the warehouse saw did writes go live.
results
- Under 3 minutes per wholesale order, down from a phone-and-email process.
- Wholesale orders up double digits after consolidation.
- Zero fulfilment errors once real-time inventory sync was live.
- 10k+ SKUs and every customer segment managed from one Shopify Plus admin.
what we’d do the same again
Idempotent sync from day one. Shadow mode before writes. Moving buyers in segments rather than in one cutover. None of it is novel; all of it is why the error count went to zero and stayed there.
what we’d do differently now
The sync contracts, the import validators and the price-tier mapping were written by hand, one at a time. Today that is exactly the code the loop drafts first: AI writes the mappings and the tests against the ERP’s real payloads, and a senior engineer reviews and signs every merge. Same architecture, fewer weeks.
stack
Shopify Plus B2B (companies, catalogues, price lists, payment terms) · Shopify Functions · Admin GraphQL bulk operations · webhooks · idempotent ERP sync · custom quick-order app.
Planning something similar? See automation or read how we approach B2B tiered pricing.