RFQ to Checkout: The Missing Workflow in Shopify Plus B2B

Shopify Plus has shipped meaningful B2B primitives over the last few years. Company accounts, customer specific catalogs, payment terms, price lists and draft orders are all real building blocks. What is still missing for most merchants is the workflow that connects those building blocks into a single deal lifecycle.

RFQ is where most B2B deals actually start. A buyer needs a price on a specific configuration, often with delivery constraints, sometimes with a target budget. Today, that request usually arrives by email or contact form, gets pasted into a spreadsheet, and then becomes a PDF that someone sends back. Nothing about that loop is visible to the storefront.

Approvals are where governance lives. Most enterprise buyers cannot place an order above a certain value without internal sign off, and most sellers cannot offer a discount beyond a certain threshold without their own internal sign off. When approvals happen in chat or email instead of in the system that issues the price, the audit trail you need for finance simply does not exist.

Checkout is where the rules must finally be enforced. If the buyer has agreed to a quoted price, the cart should not allow a different price. If the agreement is for net thirty terms, the payment options at checkout should reflect that. If a minimum order quantity applies, the buyer should not be able to bypass it by editing the cart.

Today, RFQ, approvals and checkout usually run on three different systems that do not talk to each other. The gap between them is filled by people, and people are the most expensive and least reliable part of the workflow. They are also the part that does not scale, which is why teams hit a ceiling on how many quotes they can process before quality drops.

Closing this gap does not require replacing Shopify Plus. It requires an orchestration layer that captures the request in a structured way, routes it through the right approvers with clear service level expectations, locks the agreed terms into a checkout the buyer can actually pay, and writes the entire history back so finance and operations see one consistent record.