Selling to businesses is different than selling to individual customers. There are longer buying cycles, larger order volumes, special pricing agreements, and more back-and-forth with fulfillment teams. As your wholesale or B2B channel grows, managing everything manually becomes increasingly challenging.
That’s where automation steps in.
Shopify now includes native support for B2B selling, but automation is what makes it scalable. By setting up workflows that handle fulfillment logic, communication, and more, you reduce manual effort and build a smoother experience for both your team and your buyers.
Why Shopify B2B automation matters
Wholesale and B2B buyers expect more than just bulk pricing. They want consistent communication, faster order handling, and clear terms. But when your team is handling every tag, alert, and update manually, things start slipping through the cracks.
Automation helps you maintain accuracy without increasing your headcount. It ensures that the right customers are segmented, that the right team members are notified when complex orders come in, and that every part of your workflow happens on time. For growing stores, that means fewer mistakes, faster turnaround, and more time focused on strategy instead of order cleanup.
Common B2B workflows you can automate
Most B2B automation starts with the workflows your team repeats every day — especially around customers, orders, pricing, and communication.
Account setup and segmentation
When a new wholesale customer registers, you don’t want to manually review and tag every account. With automation, you can tag customers based on form responses, apply tax exemption status if the proper fields are filled, and sort accounts by location, industry, or assigned sales rep. These tags then drive access to pricing, content, or fulfillment workflows.
Order and fulfillment processes
B2B orders often include large quantities, custom SKUs, or fulfillment conditions that differ from DTC orders. You can build workflows that alert the warehouse when a tagged item is sold, send an internal message if the order value crosses a threshold, or escalate fulfillment if it hasn’t been touched after a certain number of days. This keeps orders moving and reduces the need for manual checks.
Pricing and product visibility
Shopify B2B lets you define custom pricing lists, but automation can help support visibility and logic behind the scenes. For example, workflows can update metafields when a product is added to a wholesale collection, or tag products based on which customers should see them. You can even schedule when specific products appear for key accounts, such as during limited pre-orders or seasonal campaigns.
Communication and follow-up
The more complex the order, the more important the communication. You can automatically send a formatted order summary to your vendor when a specific SKU is purchased, notify a sales rep when a top account places an order, or trigger an email follow-up for reorders after a set time. These workflows reduce lag and help your team stay ahead of customer needs.
Tools for building Shopify B2B automation
Shopify Flow can handle simple B2B automations, like tagging a customer when an account is created or alerting a Slack channel when an order is placed. But many B2B workflows require more flexibility than Flow currently offers.
That’s where high-powered automation tools like Arigato come in.
Arigato supports advanced triggers like customer updates, metafield changes, and custom order conditions. You can schedule workflows to run at specific times, delay actions until fulfillment, and connect with external tools like Airtable, Trello, Slack, or Google Sheets.
If you need to trigger workflows when a tax exemption ID is added, notify different vendors based on product tags, or manage internal handoffs without email chains, Arigato gives you the tools to build that logic. And if you’re just getting started, the Arigato workflow automation library for Shopify has prebuilt templates for B2B segmentation, inventory tracking, fulfillment coordination, and more.
Shopify B2B automation TL;DR
Running B2B on Shopify comes with extra layers — more logic, more people involved, and more potential points of failure. Automation doesn’t remove that complexity, but it makes it manageable.
With the right workflows in place, you can onboard accounts faster, process orders with less friction, and make sure the right people get the right information at the right time.
Arigato Automation helps you build those workflows — without writing code, switching platforms, or stretching your team too thin.