Selling to a dealer network on Shopify

Tiered pricing is the question every manufacturer asks about first, and it is the easier half of the problem. Shopify can show different prices to different customers. What it does not do naturally is credit terms, order approval, and a dealer placing an order they will pay for in forty-five days — and in most building materials channels that is how ordering actually works.

Deciding whether Shopify suits your channel starts with how your dealers pay, not with how they see prices.

What does a dealer ordering system have to do?

Requirement	Shopify fit
Different prices per dealer or tier	Achievable, on the right plan or with apps
Login required to see prices	Achievable
Minimum order quantities	Achievable
Order on credit rather than paying at checkout	Limited — this is the hard one
Credit limit checked before the order is accepted	Not native
Ledger and outstanding balance visible to the dealer	Not native
Scheme balance and claim status	Not native
Order approval by a regional manager	Not native

The top half is a configuration exercise. The bottom half is a different system, and no amount of app-fitting changes that.

Why does credit break the model?

Because a cart assumes the transaction completes at checkout. A dealer order does not — it is a request that gets checked against an account before anyone dispatches anything.

Consider what your despatch desk actually does when an order arrives. It looks at the outstanding balance, how much of it is overdue, what is already committed but not dispatched, and whether this dealer has been drifting on payments. Sometimes it releases anyway. Sometimes it calls the regional manager. That judgement is the control that keeps your receivables under control, and it happens after the order is placed.

Shopify has no concept of it. You can accept the order and handle credit outside the system, which works — until the volume grows and nobody can tell which orders are held and why. We have written about the underlying problem in managing dealer credit without stopping the business.

When does Shopify suit a channel?

Three situations where it works well.

Dealers who pay on order. Smaller accounts, new dealers, or a business that has moved the channel to prepayment. If money changes hands at checkout, most of the objection disappears.

A secondary ordering channel. The main relationship runs as it always has, and Shopify handles top-up orders, sample requests and accessories — low-value, high-frequency items that currently consume phone calls.

Reaching beyond your appointed network. Contractors, small retailers and specifiers who are not dealers, who would never get a credit account, and who currently cannot buy from you at all.

That last one is often the strongest case and the least considered. It is additional demand rather than a change to how existing dealers work — which also means it does not require your channel to adopt anything.

What does a dealer actually want from a portal?

Worth answering honestly before building anything, because a dealer portal that only serves the manufacturer gets used for a month.

Ranked by what removes a phone call: is it in stock, where is my order, what do I owe, what is my scheme balance, and can I reorder what I bought last time in two taps. Notice that only the last is an ordering function. The rest are information, and they are what makes a dealer open the thing at all.

Shopify does the reorder well and the information poorly, because the information lives in your ERP rather than in a storefront. That gap is the honest reason most dealer portals in this trade end up custom — not the pricing, which is solvable, but the ledger, the schemes and the stock position.

We have written about why these fail in why your dealers do not use the app you built them.

What is the sensible architecture?

For most manufacturers: Shopify for whoever pays at checkout, a separate portal for the credit channel, and one catalogue feeding both.

Consumers and non-appointed buyers get a normal store. Dealers get a portal built around what they actually need — stock, ledger, schemes, order status, fast reorder — connected to your ERP. Product data lives in one place and publishes to both, so a price change or a new collection does not have to be entered twice.

It is more work than one system. It is considerably less work than making one system do two jobs it was not built for, and it means neither audience gets a compromise designed for the other.

Common questions

Does Shopify Plus solve the B2B side?

It adds real B2B capability, including customer-specific pricing and payment terms, and for some channels that is enough. Test it against your awkward cases — credit limits, held orders, scheme balances — rather than a feature list, because those are where it will or will not fit.

Will dealers use an online ordering system at all?

If it is faster than a WhatsApp message to someone who knows them, yes. If it is slower, no — and that comparison, not the technology, decides adoption.

Can we hide prices from non-dealers?

Yes, and it is common. Be aware of the trade-off: prices behind a login are invisible to search engines and to anyone evaluating you, which costs you the enquiries you would otherwise never know you missed.

What about selling direct alongside our dealers?

A commercial decision rather than a technical one, and it will be noticed. The usual approaches are selling at list price so dealers remain competitive, restricting the online range, or routing online orders to the nearest dealer for fulfilment. Decide it deliberately, before launch.

More on this: Shopify or custom build and choosing dealer management software. See also distributors & dealers.