Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
A company profile is the record that says this shop, at these addresses, with these people allowed to order, sees this catalogue at these prices and pays on these terms. It replaces the consumer idea of a customer, which is one person with one email and one card.
The difference sounds administrative and is not. Almost every messy wholesale account a brand ends up with is the same failure: two people from the same shop, two records, two order histories, and nobody sure which price was agreed. The company record exists to make that impossible.
Why a customer record fails a shop
Picture a homeware shop with an owner, a store manager and a bookkeeper.
The owner places the first order and gets a customer record with her personal email. Six months later the manager reorders and creates a second record, at retail prices, because nobody tagged him. The bookkeeper emails asking for an invoice copy and does not appear anywhere in your system at all. Then the shop opens a second location and asks for deliveries split between them.
With customer records you now have two histories, one wrong price, a delivery question you solve by hand every time, and no way to answer what this account is worth. With a company record you have one account, three contacts, two locations, one price list, and a total that means something.
That is the whole argument. Everything below is how to set it up so it stays true.
The three levels, and what belongs at each
The company is the business. Its legal or trading name, its tax or resale registration, the catalogue and price list it sees, and any account-wide note such as how it likes to be invoiced.
The location is a place goods go and money comes from. Its address, its own payment terms, and sometimes its own catalogue if a flagship store takes a wider assortment than a concession. A single-shop account has one location and you never think about it again. A chain has several, and this is the level that makes chains workable.
The contact is a person who can order. Name, email, and whether they can place orders themselves or only draft them for approval. Add the bookkeeper as a contact even if she never orders, because the invoice questions come from her.
The common mistake is to put everything at company level because the account has one shop today. Fill in the location properly anyway. Accounts grow, and retrofitting is far more annoying than doing it once.
Naming, before you have twenty of them
Naming discipline sounds trivial until you search for an account and find three plausible matches.
Use the trading name the shop actually uses, not the registered company name, because that is what you will type when looking for them. Put the registered name in a field, not in the title. Where a brand has several shops, name the locations by place rather than by number, so the address and the name agree.
Decide one convention for the awkward cases and stick to it: a shop that trades under two names, a concession inside a department store, a market stall with no fixed address. Whatever you choose, being consistent matters more than being right.
Do the same with tags. Tag companies by how you will want to segment them later: category of shop, region, and how they came to you. The last one is the most valuable and the one everybody forgets, because a year in, knowing which accounts came from a trade show and which from outreach changes where you spend next year.
Terms and catalogues live here, not on the order
Two settings belong on the company record and nowhere else.
Payment terms, because they are a property of the relationship rather than of a single order. A shop that has earned net terms has earned them on every order, and a shop that has not should not be able to reach them by ordering at an odd hour. The operational side of running those terms is in net terms in practice.
The catalogue and price list, for the same reason. If the price a shop pays is decided per order, it will drift, and it will drift downward. Setting it once at company level means the answer to what does this account pay is a record rather than a memory. How to organise the assortment behind it is in B2B catalogs.
A practical consequence: when you agree a one-off deal on a large opening order, do it as a documented exception with an end date, not by quietly editing the price list. Otherwise the opening deal becomes the permanent price.
Keeping the records clean as accounts change
Shops move, rebrand, close and change hands, and a trade account list rots faster than a consumer list.
Four habits keep it usable. Review the account list once a quarter and mark anything that has not ordered in a year as dormant rather than deleting it, because dormant accounts are the easiest reorders you will ever get. When a contact leaves, remove them rather than leaving an inbox nobody reads attached to your best account. When a shop changes owner, treat it as a new relationship and reconfirm the terms, because a new owner did not agree to anything. And when a chain adds a location, add it properly on the day, while someone still knows which address takes which assortment.
The one record never to let go stale is the one that says who to email. A trade account is a person who likes your product, and when that person leaves the shop, the account is at risk in a way no system will tell you about.
Where the data actually comes from
Company records are only as good as the application that created them, which is why the trade application form and the company structure should be designed together. The five fields worth asking for, and the approval flow behind them, are in the trade login.
If you are creating companies in bulk, from a spreadsheet or another system, that is one of the few places programmatic setup earns its keep, as discussed in the B2B API. For most brands, typing in an account takes two minutes and happens twenty times a year, which is not a problem worth automating.
What is worth investing in is having accounts to record. A tidy company structure with six shops in it is a filing system. If you are still assembling the list, paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, then work through them one at a time.
Questions brands ask about company profiles
Do you need company records for single-shop accounts? Not strictly, but using them from the first account means you never have to migrate later, and migration is where history gets lost.
Can one person buy for two different shops? Yes, and it happens more than expected. Attach the same contact to both companies rather than creating a duplicate person.
What happens to an existing customer record when a shop becomes a trade account? Link it to the company rather than deleting it. Their sample orders are useful history.
Should every contact be able to place orders? No. Give ordering rights to the people who order and view rights to the people who ask questions, which prevents the accidental order placed by someone checking prices.
How many locations is too many to manage this way? Dozens are fine. The point at which it gets hard is not the count but the assortment, when every location wants something different, and that is a commercial conversation rather than a records problem. The wider feature set that these records unlock is in what each B2B feature solves.