Retiring the Order Spreadsheet: A Shopify B2B Portal That Cut Wholesale Order Time by 81%
How eBizTrait built a self-service B2B ordering portal on Shopify Plus for a distributor managing 400+ wholesale accounts – and freed their sales team to actually sell.
Results At A Glance
-
-81%
Order Processing Time
per wholesale order
-
+$1.4M
Wholesale Revenue
Year 1 post-launch
-
400+
B2B Accounts Migrated
custom pricing & terms
-
-64%
Sales Team Admin Time
reallocated to selling
The Challenge
Hearth & Haven supplied home goods to 400+ independent retailers, and every one of those orders arrived the same way: an email, a phone call, or a faxed order form, manually re-keyed by a sales rep into their internal system. A single order could take 20 minutes of admin time before it even reached the warehouse.
Each retailer had negotiated pricing, minimum order quantities, and payment terms – none of which existed anywhere a customer could see them. Retailers had to call and ask “what’s my price on this?” for products they reordered every month. Sales reps were spending 60% of their week on order-taking instead of relationship-building or new account acquisition.
Their competitors had begun offering online reordering. Hearth & Haven was losing renewal orders not on price or product, but on convenience.
Our Approach
We built the portal on Shopify Plus’s native B2B functionality rather than a bolted-on wholesale app, giving Hearth & Haven a single Shopify instance serving both their consumer storefront and a fully separate, permission-gated B2B experience – one platform, one inventory source, two experiences.
The core of the project was company and pricing architecture: every retailer account needed its own catalog visibility, negotiated price list, MOQs, and payment terms (Net-30, Net-60), all manageable without a developer once we handed the system over.
We ran the migration in parallel cohorts – 100 accounts at a time – validating pricing accuracy against their legacy system before each cohort’s cutover, so no retailer experienced a pricing error on their first self-service order.
What We Built
- Shopify Plus native B2B storefront with company accounts, location-based ordering, and role-based buyer permissions
- Customer-specific catalogs and price lists for 400+ accounts, migrated from legacy spreadsheets with full audit trail
- Quick-order / reorder-by-SKU interface built for buyers who order the same 30-40 products every month
- Net-30 and Net-60 payment terms configured natively, with automated invoicing and payment reminder flows
- Quantity break pricing and MOQ enforcement applied automatically at cart level per account tier
- Sales rep “order on behalf of” tooling so reps can still place orders for accounts that prefer phone/email, without duplicate data entry
- Real-time inventory visibility for B2B buyers, including backorder and estimated restock date messaging
- B2B-specific analytics dashboard tracking reorder rate, average order cycle, and at-risk dormant accounts
Technologies Used
Results – Before & After
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Average Order Processing Time | 22 minutes | 4 minutes |
| Orders Placed via Self-Service Portal | 0% | 74% |
| Sales Rep Admin Time (weekly) | 24 hours | 8.5 hours |
| Average Order Cycle (reorder frequency) | 5.2 weeks | 4.1 weeks |
| Wholesale Revenue (Year 1) | Baseline | +$1.4M |
| Pricing Errors Reported | Frequent | 0 post-migration |
“Our reps used to spend their whole week being human order forms. Now the accounts that just want to reorder the same 30 SKUs do it themselves in four minutes, and our reps spend their time on the accounts that actually need a conversation. It changed what our sales team’s job even is.”
– VP of Wholesale, Hearth & Haven
Key Takeaway
B2B buyers increasingly expect the same self-service convenience as consumer shoppers – they just also need negotiated pricing, credit terms, and account-specific catalogs behind the scenes. Shopify Plus’s native B2B tools make that possible on the same platform as a consumer storefront, turning order-taking from an administrative burden into a self-service revenue channel.
Ready to achieve similar results?
