Shopify gives B2B merchants a strong commerce foundation. Its native B2B capabilities include company profiles, price lists and payment terms, while its ecosystem allows businesses to extend the platform into areas such as ERP, EDI and punchout procurement.

That flexibility matters. But it can also create a familiar enterprise problem: every new requirement is answered with another app, another connector or another manual process.

One tool manages invoices. Another handles quotes. Contract pricing is imported from the ERP overnight. Sales representatives use a shared login or email orders to customer service. Procurement customers submit orders through a separate portal.

The individual pieces may work, but the buyer journey does not.

The result is a B2B storefront surrounded by disconnected workflows. Customers still wait for pricing confirmation, sales teams still rekey orders and operations teams still reconcile data across systems.

The objective should not be to minimise the number of tools at any cost. It should be to make the tools operate as one connected B2B workflow.

What connected B2B commerce looks like

A connected B2B experience begins with the buyer, not the technology stack.

When a customer signs in, the storefront should recognise the account, retrieve the correct contract pricing and apply the appropriate catalogue, payment terms and permissions.

The buyer should then be able to complete the tasks associated with that account without leaving the portal or asking an internal team to intervene.

That can include:

• Building a quote and moving it through an approval process
• Placing a bulk order by SKU or CSV
• Saving a cart for a colleague or later purchase
• Scheduling a recurring order
• Reviewing orders, backorders and fulfilment information
• Finding and paying an invoice
• Purchasing through cXML or OCI punchout

The customer sees one buying experience. Behind it, Shopify, the ERP and other operational systems continue doing the jobs they are designed to do.

Where Pocketknife fits

Pocketknife is the B2B customer portal and live ERP sync built for Shopify. It extends the storefront into the operational workflows that are often left in inboxes, spreadsheets and back-office systems.

Rather than treating every feature as an isolated add-on, Pocketknife connects the workflow around the customer account.

Customer-specific pricing can remain governed by the ERP and appear correctly throughout the Shopify buying journey. Orders can move from Shopify into the ERP without being rekeyed.

Invoice balances and documents can move back into the portal, where customers can review and pay them. Sales representatives can securely act on behalf of assigned customers with the correct catalogue, pricing and terms applied.

This creates a clearer division of responsibility

• Shopify delivers the customer-facing commerce experience.
• The ERP retains the operational and financial records the business depends on.
• Pocketknife keeps the data and B2B workflows connected between them.

Not every merchant needs every Pocketknife capability. The value comes from mapping the suite to the processes that create the most friction for customers and internal teams.

Sales Reps

Disconnected B2B workflows rarely look dramatic in isolation.

They appear as small, repeated tasks: forwarding an invoice, checking a price, recreating a cart, approving a quote or entering an emailed order.

At scale, those tasks become an operating model.

Bringing them into one portal changes more than the interface. It gives buyers a consistent place to manage their account and gives the business a controlled way to connect each action back to its source systems.

HART Sport case study

Pipelabs implemented Pocketknife as a B2B enablement layer across Shopify Plus and Pronto ERP. The resulting portal included account hierarchies, role-based permissions, customer-specific pricing, quotes, saved and recurring carts, invoice history and cXML/OCI ordering.

More than 90% of HART Sport’s B2B accounts logged into the portal within the first four weeks after launch.

That adoption matters because a B2B portal only creates value when customers can use it to complete the work they previously sent to a sales representative, customer service or accounts team.

The right B2B technology stack is not the one with the fewest applications. It is the one that makes complexity invisible to the buyer and manageable for the business.

Shopify provides the commerce foundation. Pocketknife extends it with the customer portal, ERP sync and operational B2B capabilities required to bring more of the purchasing journey online.