Hello @JonnaWiberg !
At the moment it is not possible to specify shipping rates on types of customers with the native features, but there are ways around this using third party apps that you could get something like this setup.
Starting from the moment a customer has to choose if they are a business or a consumer, I would recommend that you have your store split into Collections - ones for business and the others for consumers. If you would like those customers to see only one type of collections and not have them be able to access the other (i.e. consumers cannot see the business collections), you will need to use a third party app such as Locksmith.
The Locksmith app in particular is great for stores that are split like this because it can restrict customers from viewing certain content based on many different conditions such as their customer account tags, location or even the amount of orders they have placed in the past. If you find that the existing conditions don’t really meet what you’re looking for, you are also able to contact the developers of this app and look into the creation of a custom condition. They can be reached through the support options found on the app listing on the right hand side as you scroll down.
A downside to using the method I described above is that you will need to have duplicates of all products if you want both types of customers to be able to purchase everything as they have to be in separate collections for you to be able to allocate different shipping costs, which might be complicated when it comes to tracking your stock within the admin. The duplicate products will need to be placed in their own Shipping Profile for this to work.
For example, the products from collections for businesses can be in the General profile which is the one that is in place by default when you go to Settings > Shipping and Delivery in your admin. When you click to Manage rates on the General profile, you can set up the shipping rates for the different zones that you want to ship to following this guide here.
Going back to the Settings > Shipping and Delivery section, you can now Create new profile where you will add duplicates of all the products and set their shipping rates for consumers.
To learn more about creating new shipping profiles, please see this guide here.
I understand how the method described above can be inconvenient when it comes to stock and inventory, so there is another way to do this without the use of any third party apps.
You can specify within your shipping rates which ones should be chosen by consumers and which ones are for businesses, and in your Shipping policy you could explain the difference and why they should be separate. The way to make this most obvious would be by adding Business only or Consumer only to the names of your shipping rates:
The advantage here is that you won’t need to duplicate products as they can all be in the same Shipping profile which would avoid stock issues, but this method is not ideal as no matter what type of customer goes to checkout, they will still see both options available, which might result in you having to cancel orders in future if a shipping method is wrongfully chosen i.e. a business chooses consumer rates.
If none of the above suits you, please do tell me a little bit more about why it would be important for you to separate the shipping rates for businesses and consumers, and I will be more than happy to pass that feedback along to our developers so that we can hopefully see something like this in the future.
If you have any other questions, please let me know!
Thanks. -Lana
