Customer accounts
Customer account area and extensions in Shopify
The account area is where a wholesale buyer lives: their history, their outstanding orders, their price tier, their location. I build that area with customer account extensions and the front-end that makes it useful instead of decorative.
Why it matters more in B2B than in B2C
A B2C customer visits their account once, to see where the parcel is. A wholesale buyer logs in every week: it is a work tool. If they cannot find what they are looking for, they do not go to a competitor, they phone — and your team pays for that call.
What I build, in order of how much it gets used
- Reorder the last order. The most used feature of any wholesale portal. A button that recreates the order in the cart, with its quantities, and flags whatever is no longer available.
- Outstanding balance and due dates. If the company is on payment terms, this is the first thing they check. It has to be there, and it has to match the invoice.
- Downloadable invoices, where the buyer looks for them rather than in an email from two months ago.
- A location picker, if they buy for several branches — and in the header, not buried in here: switching location can change every price in the cart.
The detail about prices
The rule I repeat on every project: if the visitor is not B2B, the price must not reach the HTML. The Liquid condition on customer.b2b? is the right way; hiding it with CSS leaves the price in the page source, visible to anyone who looks and to any crawler.
What does not depend on the plan
Almost everything above is built in the theme and works without Plus. What needs Shopify Plus is custom-written account extensions, because they ship inside a custom app. It is worth knowing which part of the budget depends on the plan before promising it.