Shape
A merchant whose B2B buyers operated across multiple locations with their own credit limits, approvers, and invoice arrangements — none of which the storefront could see. The team wanted to bring Shopify B2B in alongside an existing ERP and needed the integration shape thought through before any build was commissioned.
What the engagement looked at
- Company hierarchy model — how to represent the buyer side (parent, location, buyer) so the model matches how procurement actually works on their side of the table.
- Ownership boundaries — for credit, pricing, customer master data, invoice history: which system owns what, what flows where, how conflicts resolve.
- Approval flow design — what an approval-aware checkout has to enforce at the platform level, and what’s better handled out-of-band in the ERP.
- Sync architecture at a high level — near-real-time vs. batched, what middleware would need to do, and how failures should be visible to ops.
What was handed over
A written integration architecture and an approval-flow design that the merchant’s engineering team and their middleware partner used as the brief. The Assessment defined the boundaries; build was elsewhere.