Onboarding is the least glamorous part of a B2B build and usually the highest-return. It is also the part Shopify does least for you.
What happens by default
Natively, nothing automated. A prospective customer emails or fills in a contact form. Someone on your team reads it, opens the Shopify admin, creates a company, adds a location, adds the contact, assigns a catalog, sets payment terms, and emails back. Elapsed time: anywhere from two hours to a week depending on who is on holiday.
The costs are not just the labour. Manual setup is where inconsistency enters: one rep assigns a catalog, another forgets; tax IDs end up in the notes field; two branches of the same customer become two unrelated companies. A year later, your reporting is unreliable and nobody can say why.
The four jobs of an onboarding flow
- Capture. A real application form on your storefront asking for what you need to make a decision — business details, tax registration, resale certificate, trade references, document uploads.
- Review. A queue where applications can be approved, rejected, or sent back for more information, with the submitted evidence attached.
- Provision. On approval, the company, location and contact are created and the catalog and terms applied — without anyone retyping the form.
- Communicate. Acknowledgement, decision, and next steps, so applicants are not left wondering whether the form worked.
Approval presets
The single biggest consistency win. Instead of a reviewer choosing a catalog, a payment term and a tax setting individually each time, they pick a named preset — "Independent Retailer", "Regional Distributor" — and every consequence follows automatically. Your pricing policy is written once and applied identically.
Onboard B2B documents this directly: approval presets that set catalogs, payment terms and tax settings for different company groups, applied when a company account is approved and granted access to your wholesale storefront and checkout.
Request changes, do not reject
Most failed applications are incomplete rather than unqualified: a missing resale certificate, an unreadable upload, a mistyped tax ID. Treating those as rejections loses real customers. A request-changes action keeps the application open, says exactly what is missing, and preserves what was already submitted.
What to collect and verify
What you verify depends on your risk. Tax registration and resale certificates are standard for wholesale; trade references matter if you are extending credit. A custom application form can require all of them as fields or file uploads. Whether any of the checking is automated depends on the tooling you pick, and credit decisions should stay with a person regardless.
Treat it as a conversion problem
A wholesale application is a high-intent action from a buyer who has already decided to consider you. The measurable improvements are unglamorous: fewer fields, a clear statement of what happens next and how long it takes, and same-day approval instead of same-week.
More: B2B customer onboarding services and approval workflows.