Manual onboarding costs more than you think

Long before “Shopify B2B” took the place of the now defunct “Wholesale channel” for Plus merchants, Helium has been building apps trusted by manufacturers and wholesalers to onboard and sell to new retailers.

We know a thing or two about what’s involved in reviewing and approving new buyers.

You aren’t just accepting an account; you are validating business credentials, assigning specific catalogs, determining payment terms, configuring tax settings, etc.

When you are just starting out, handling this manually for every applicant may be manageable. But as you scale, this administrative burden becomes a bottleneck.

Every minute you spend configuring a new wholesale partner is a drain on your team’s resources as well as a drag on your new B2B buyer’s momentum.

The momentum factor

B2B buyers increasingly expect a DTC-like shopping experience. The days of faxing in orders and waiting three days for an account confirmation are (thankfully) fading fast. Today’s wholesale buyers are used to the instant gratification ecommerce, and they bring those expectations to their business purchasing.

When a retailer finds your site and applies for an account, their intent to purchase is at its peak. If you force them into a holding pattern while you manually review their application, check their tax ID, and assign their price list, you are introducing friction.

Time kills deals. By the time you get around to manually approving their account, their immediate need may have passed, or they may have found a competitor who allowed them to checkout instantly.

The hidden cost of inconsistency

The problem with manual data entry isn’t just the time lost. It’s the inconsistency that follows.

If your company onboarding process relies on you remembering to tag a “VIP Distributor” correctly or manually selecting “Net 30” terms from a dropdown every time, you are building a system prone to human error. A forgotten tag or a wrong price list can lead to support tickets, incorrect orders, and friction right at the start of a new business partnership.

Scalability requires standardization. You need to stop treating every application as a unique edge case and start treating them as standardized cohorts.

Standardize your workflow

To simplify your workflow and decrease time-to-value for B2B buyers, the team at Helium developed Approval Presets for Onboard B2B.

We view presets not just as a time-saver, but as a governance tool for your store. By defining templates for your most common customer types (whether that’s “standard wholesale,” “regional distributor,” or “tax-exempt non-profit”) you ensure that the data structure of your B2B operation remains clean and consistent.

With approval presets, you define the rules of engagement once. When a new application comes in, applying those complex settings becomes a single decision rather than a series of twenty micro-tasks.

Default presets with flexibility for other company groups

Using Onboard B2B, you can assign a default approval preset that your team uses most often, while also creating variations or entirely unique presets for different groups of companies.

Moving from administration to automation

Once you have established these standards, you open the door to true automation.

When you combine Approval Presets with conditional logic, you may eliminate the need to manually review every standard application. You can leverage the Rules engine within Onboard B2B to detect specific criteria and conditionally apply the correct preset.

This allows you to approve new accounts instantly, providing near instant access for buyers without risking unauthorized access.

Reclaim your time

Your goal as a merchant should be to minimize the time you spend in the back office so you can maximize the time adding real value to your customers. By streamlining your Shopify B2B onboarding process, you ensure that your business infrastructure is ready to handle growth without adding administrative bloat.