Powering Livingstone’s enterprise B2B operations on Shopify Plus
Livingstone International is an Australian supplier to businesses, households, and government sectors, offering over 65,000 products across hospitality, education, health, facilities, safety, hygiene, packaging, and scientific supplies.
Pipelabs partnered with Livingstone to replace its legacy ecommerce platform with a modern, scalable Shopify Plus solution, enhanced with the Pocketknife B2B feature suite and fully integrated with Pronto ERP to support complex B2B workflows and high volume product catalogues.
The Challenge
Livingstone had built a highly customised, internally managed platform to support its B2B customers. While this solution had evolved over time to meet specific operational needs, it had become increasingly complex to maintain and difficult to scale.
Core B2B requirements - customer-specific pricing, contract terms, approvals, account management, and integration with modern commerce workflows - required ongoing custom development and manual workarounds. This limited Livingstone’s ability to move quickly, introduce new features, and deliver a consistent experience across customers and channels.
The challenge was to transition away from this bespoke setup to a more scalable and best-in-class commerce foundation. Livingstone needed a solution that could retain the sophistication of its B2B workflows while reducing technical overhead, improving usability, and allowing more flexibility for marketing and sales teams.
This meant adopting the full Pocketknife B2B feature set alongside Shopify Plus, ensuring enterprise grade performance, flexibility, and a platform that could support both current operational demand alongside future growth.
Our Approach
We implemented a modern B2B commerce stack powered by Shopify Plus and the full Pocketknife B2B feature suite, replacing a legacy custom platform with a purpose-built solution designed for scale.
Shopify Plus provided a secure, high performance foundation, while Pocketknife layered in advanced B2B functionality including customer-specific pricing, quotes, saved carts, account hierarchies, approval workflows and self-service account management.
Rather than relying on excessive custom development, we leveraged Pocketknife’s features specifically to Livingstone’s requirements - enabling tailored workflows for enterprise and institutional buyers while continuing to evolve the Pocketknife product itself.
With support for extremely large catalogues (up to 100,000 SKUs), advanced search and smart filtering, complex ERP-driven pricing and inventory integration, and high volume performance optimisation, the platform was built to handle scale without compromising user experience.
This structured yet flexible approach allowed Livingstone to standardise and automate core B2B processes while maintaining the agility required for complex customer relationships.
The result is a unified B2B and D2C platform that integrates cleanly with existing systems, reduces operational overhead, improves product discovery and ordering efficiency, and provides a robust foundation for long term growth and continuous evolution.
Collaboration
Pipelabs worked closely with Livingstone’s internal teams, ensuring the platform workflows aligned with business processes, there was continuous testing and iteration, training and enablement for internal users and ongoing refinement post-launch.
The outcome
Pipelabs partnered closely with Livingstone to deliver a modern B2B commerce platform built on Shopify Plus and powered by the full Pocketknife B2B feature suite, replacing a legacy custom system with a scalable, future ready solution.
Shopify Plus provided a secure, high-performance foundation, while Pocketknife introduced advanced B2B capabilities including customer specific pricing, Quotes, Saved Carts, account hierarchies, approval workflows, and self-service account management.
This enabled Livingstone to streamline and automate core B2B processes while retaining the flexibility needed to support complex customer relationships.
The resulting unified platform now supports both B2B and D2C operations, integrates seamlessly with existing systems, and delivers tangible business improvements including faster product discovery, more efficient ordering, consistent catalog and pricing management, reduced operational overhead through automation, and strong adoption of new digital buying workflows.
