Why is it not possible to assign a customer to multiple companies in B2B, we’re currently limited to 1 and makes it hard for us to onboard B2B customers. Our sales reps could benefit from it, to place orders for their customers while benefiting from storefront apps.
It’s not uncommon at all for a company to have many accounts depending on account setup/location/cost centre differences.
Yeah this is just how Shopify B2B works right now, one customer one company, that’s the rule. You can assign them to multiple locations within the same company but crossing company lines is a no go.
The “workaround” people use is duplicate customer profiles with tweaked emails which honestly feels like a step backwards for a Plus tier feature.
Best bet for now is submitting feedback directly to Shopify since this has been a complaint for a while and somehow still hasn’t been addressed.
Yes, at the moment, it’s an issue with Shopify B2B feature as a whole. one customer can be associated with just one company. You may link customers to various locations within that company, but linking one customer to two or more companies is not possible right now.
However, merchants usually create duplicate customer records using a slightly altered email address as a solution, although for an approach like this used in the B2B Plus model, it certainly looks archaic.
The best way forward right now would seem to be raising this concern with Shopify through their support/feedback system. This has been asked by many merchants who have sales representatives, multiple branch buying, and procurement organizations.
Hello @keithkhoo
Right now, Shopify B2B operates on a rigid company-to-customer model, in which each customer is associated with a single company context. This is primarily to ensure uniformity of pricing, tax rules, payment terms, etc. and to prevent conflicts on order creation.
This limitation is felt most strongly in exactly your use case, as real world companies often have multiple branches, stores, or cost centers under different buying relationships.
One of the “popular” workarounds merchants do is to organize companies by location, or entity rather than the individual buyer, then employ the company locations, tags and permissions more like multi account access. Some also do sales rep ordering via draft orders associated to the correct company record for cleaner reporting.
Hi, @keithkhoo
Totally agree this is a major limitation for B2B onboarding.
It’s very common for one buyer or contact to manage multiple company accounts due to different locations, cost centres, or separate business entities. Right now Shopify B2B only allows one customer assigned to a single company, which forces us to create duplicate customer accounts just to work around it.
This creates extra admin work, messy order history fragmentation, and hurts the workflow for our sales reps who need to place orders on behalf of different companies while using storefront B2B apps.
It would be extremely helpful to allow one customer to be linked to multiple companies natively to support real-world B2B account structures.
Yeah, this limitation is tricky because real-world B2B account structures are often more flexible than the current customer → company model.
A related gap we’ve seen is on the sales team side: even when companies and locations are set up in Shopify, reps and store owners still need clearer visibility into who owns which accounts, which orders/draft orders are connected to each rep, and how the overall team is performing.
We’re working on this angle with Scopo - not changing Shopify’s native customer-to-company relationship, but helping B2B merchants assign companies and locations to sales reps, give reps a focused view of customers/orders/revenue, and give store owners clearer visibility into ownership and sales activity.
Adding this here in case it helps anyone reading later who is looking at the sales-rep/account-visibility side of the problem: Scopo B2B Sales Rep Hub - Help B2B sales reps focus on orders and track revenue | Shopify App Store
Seconding this… the one-company-per-customer limit and the duplicate-account workaround comes up constantly. What did you end up doing to solve this issue?