Shopify B2B gets sales agent support.

Lots of B2B solutions include some concept of a two-tiered system in which there are two types of customers: wholesale customers (i.e. the typical B2B user) and sales reps (i.e. employees or contractors that work with the merchant and facilitate sales for the former).

This can be a complex set up, and the sales agent requirement can lead merchants who would normally be happy with Shopify's B2B solution to instead seek out some bespoke solution or over-engineered middleware.

Enter the new "sales staff" feature, now available in early access on Shopify Plus.

The cool part about this feature is that it's basically just an additional set of permissions for your Shopify users. Staff with these new special permissions can:

• View companies and locations (and if desired, only a subset of them)
• Place orders on their behalf
• Any other regular staff permissions you wish to add

There is also word from unconfirmed sources that part of the 2024 roadmap is to allow sales staff to make storefront-based orders (i.e. sales staff can view the storefront as a B2B customer and make a purchase via the front end on their behalf).

With this and other recent updates, it really looks like B2B is a top priority for Shopify internally and I am excited to start seeing more and more case studies as a result.