SuiteCommerce to Shopify Plus
For B2B Merchants
Introduction
Mid-market businesses generating $5M+ in online revenue, especially in industries like apparel, furniture, automotive parts, and more often rely on NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce for their ecommerce platform. If you’re one of these businesses, this datasheet is for you. It outlines how migrating from SuiteCommerce to Shopify Plus can boost your B2B ecommerce growth and simplify your operations. We focus on the needs of mid-market B2B merchants who demand scalability, agility, and robust features to serve their wholesale customers.
Today’s fast-growing brands need an ecommerce solution that’s easy to manage, flexible to customize, and capable of scaling without ballooning costs. SuiteCommerce, while integrated with NetSuite ERP, can become costly and inflexible over time. Many merchants are now exploring Shopify Plus as a superior alternative to power both B2B and direct-to-consumer storefronts under one agile platform. In the sections below, we explain why Shopify Plus is the ideal choice and how our migration package ensures a smooth, successful transition.
Why Move to Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus offers mid-market merchant's significant advantages over SuiteCommerce in terms of usability, flexibility, performance, cost, and B2B functionality. Here's how Shopify Plus compares and why it's the better platform for B2B growth:
1. Ease Of Use & Support:
Shopify Plus is renowned for its user-friendly interface and admin panel, allowing your team to easily manage products, content, and orders without heavy technical help. In fact, Shopify Plus boasts a 4.5/5 average user satisfaction rating from thousands of reviews, reflecting its intuitive design and excellent support (dedicated launch managers, 24/7 support, and extensive online resources). Your staff can more rapidly adapt and operate Shopify, whereas SuiteCommerce often requires specialized NetSuite developers for changes.
2. Flexibility & Ecosystem:
Shopify’s ecosystem of third-party apps and integrations is unmatched, giving you freedom to extend functionality as needed. Want to add subscription sales, advanced search, or loyalty programs? There’s likely a pre-built app or integration available. This flexibility stands in contrast to SuiteCommerce’s limited app ecosystem, which can make it an inflexible, resource-intensive platform that hampers innovation. With Shopify Plus, you can integrate with countless solutions (marketing tools, 3PLs, CRM systems, etc.) and even connect seamlessly to NetSuite via connectors – all without compromising stability. (Shopify’s app store offers a wider selection of vetted apps for merchants).
3. Performance & Scalability:
Shopify Plus provides a fully hosted, cloud infrastructure that automatically scales to handle your growth. You won’t need to worry about server capacity or site speed – Shopify’s architecture ensures fast load times and high uptime even under peak traffic. The platform has proven it can handle enterprise-level volume, processing $11.5 billion in sales over Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2024 alone. At peak, Shopify handled 4.6 million dollars in sales per minute and 284 million requests per minute with ease with ease. This level of performance and global content delivery means smoother experience for your customers and no costly downtime for you. SuiteCommerce, by contrast, may require performance tuning and doesn’t benefit from the same massive, continuously optimized infrastructure.
4. Cost-Effectiveness (TCO):
Shopify Plus is a cost-effective solution with a lower total cost of ownership for many mid-market brands. SuiteCommerce licenses and maintenance (plus the need for NetSuite developer expertise) can drive up costs over time. Shopify Plus’s pricing is straightforward and includes hosting, security, and updates. More importantly, Shopify’s agility lets you deploy new functionality without the need for costly technical support or long development cycles. Merchants often find that they can reduce IT overhead and development expenses by moving to Shopify. In short, you pay for the platform, not for maintaining infrastructure or re-inventing common features
5. Native B2B Features:
Shopify Plus now comes with a suite of built-in B2B capabilities designed for wholesalers and business customers. Right out-of-the-box, you can set up company accounts (with multiple buyers per company), create custom price lists for different customer groups, offer volume/tiered pricing discounts, and even enable net payment terms at checkout. Shopify allows curated catalogs, custom pricing, personalized storefronts, flexible payment terms, and a self-serve portal for B2B buyers – all within the same store as your retail site if desired. Features like a dedicated wholesale storefront, quick bulk ordering forms, and customer-specific catalogs are readily available. By contrast, SuiteCommerce (while robust for B2B) often requires more custom development or relies on NetSuite’s back end for similar functionality. With Shopify Plus, you get agility and B2B innovation through frequent platform updates and a rich app ecosystem to fill any gaps.
In summary, Shopify Plus empowers your business with greater ease-of-use, faster innovation, and scalability. It eliminates many common pain points of SuiteCommerce (complex maintenance, 3rd party integration limitations, high costs), giving you a nimble ecommerce engine to drive both your B2B and DTC channels.
Migration Package Overview
Moving platforms might sound daunting, but our SuiteCommerce-to-Shopify Plus migration package covers everything needed for a smooth, hassle-free transition. We combine technical expertise with strategic planning to ensure your Shopify Plus store is launched successfully and integrated with your existing processes. Our migration package includes:
1. Real-time NetSuite Integration:
We set up a robust, real-time integration between Shopify Plus and your NetSuite ERP using proven tools like Celigo or NetSuite Connector. This ensures that orders, inventory, customer records, and fulfillments sync instantly between Shopify and NetSuite, preserving your single source of truth. For example, when an order is placed on Shopify, it can automatically appear in NetSuite as a sales order, and inventory updates flow between the systems. This tight integration means you keep the operational efficiencies of NetSuite on the back end while enjoying Shopify’s superior storefront – with no double data entry.
2. Commerce Categories to Collections:
All your existing SuiteCommerce category hierarchies (Commerce Categories) will be migrated into Shopify Collections. We’ll recreate the product organization and navigation structure on Shopify so that your buyers can browse intuitively just as they did before-often with improvements. This includes transferring category names, sub-category groupings, and product assignments into a logical collection structure native to Shopify. Additionally, we will migrate existing SuiteCommerce facets into Shopify’s product listing pages, ensuring that filtering and search functionality remains as robust as it was before. The result: your catalog remains well-structured and easy to navigate, making the transition seamless for your customers while preserving SEO value for category pages.
3. Shopify B2B Themed Approach:
We implement your new store using Shopify Plus’s B2B-optimized theme and features. Shopify provides out-of-the-box wholesale themes (like “Trade”, designed for B2B) and functionalities which we leverage to accelerate the build. Your Shopify Plus storefront will be equipped with all native B2B capabilities enabled – such as customer-specific pricing displays, display price breaks and volume pricing, quick order forms on PLP or PDP, B2B signup forms or smart product recommendations. The design will follow a “blended” B2B/B2C approach if needed: for example, showing retail pricing to casual visitors but wholesale pricing to logged-in B2B customers. Our team ensures the theme is configured and styled to meet your brand guidelines while taking full advantage of Shopify Plus features for wholesale.
4.100 Hours of Customization:
Every business has unique needs, so our package includes up to 100 hours of development/design customization to tailor Shopify Plus to your requirements. This time is used for:
A. Scoping & Solution Design: We conduct workshops and planning sessions to design a Shopify Plus solution that replicates or improves your current SuiteCommerce functionality. This includes mapping your requirements, documenting user flows, and designing any custom features or integrations needed.
B. Proof-of-Concept Development: Our developers will build proofs-of-concept using Shopify technology to validate critical custom functionalities. For instance, if you need a special B2B checkout flow or a complex product option logic, we prototype it early to ensure Shopify can meet the need. These de-risks the project and give you confidence in the proposed solution.
C. UI/UX Changes & Layout Adjustments: We customize the look and feelof your Shopify theme beyond the default, implementing your desired UI/UX changes. This could include tweaking page layouts, building custom sections, adjusting navigation menus, or applying your brand’s unique styling. The goal is to deliver a storefront that is not only functional but also provides superior
user experience for your customers.
5. Business Process Analysis & Design:
A successful migration isn’t just about moving data about aligning technology with your business processes. Our experts work with your team to analyze how your current SuiteCommerce site and NetSuite workflows operate (e.g. order processing, customer
approvals, pricing updates). We then design equivalent or improved processes in Shopify Plus. This might involve configuring Shopify’s settings or apps to handle things like customer-specific pricing, tax exemptions, or complex shipping rules. By the end of this analysis and design phase, you’ll have clear documentation of how each key process will function in the new Shopify environment, ensuring nothing is overlooked.
6. SEO Migration:
We take care of the critical SEO migration steps so that your hard-earned search rankings and traffic are preserved. This includes migrating to all relevant content pages (homepage, product pages, category pages, blog posts) with their meta tags, titles, and descriptions. We set up 301 redirects from your old SuiteCommerce URLs to the new Shopify URLs to retain Google’s index and page authority. Our team also ensures the URL structure in Shopify is as close as possible to your old structure (or uses SEO-friendly improvements while still redirecting). We verify that elements like schema markup, sitemaps, and site navigation are optimized on the new site. The result: your new Shopify Plus store will launch with minimal to no loss in organic search rankings
and customers will seamlessly find your site as before.
7. Training & Post-Launch Support:
To empower your team, we provide comprehensive training on the Shopify Plus platform. Before launch, we’ll conduct training sessions covering the Shopify admin, product management, order processing, discount setup, B2B customer management, and content editing-everything your staff needs to run the store day-to-day. Additionally, the migration package includes 10 hours of post-go-live support for bug fixes and hotfixes. This means if any issues arise in the first weeks after launch (for example, an integration glitch or a minor display bug), our team will address them promptly at no extra charge. (Note: This support allocation is for resolving unexpected issues or bugs; it doesn’t cover new feature development or enhancements postlaunch.) With this safety net, you can be confident in a smooth transition for you and your customers.
8. Marketing & Growth Connections:
Launching the new site is just the beginning-we also help set you up for long-term success. Through our network of trusted marketing and growth partners, we’ll connect you with specialists who can amplify your post-migration results. Whether you need help with SEO strategy, paid advertising, email marketing, or conversion rate optimization, we can introduce you to vetted experts familiar with Shopify Plus. This ensures that after your site is alive and stable, you have the right resources to drive traffic, improve your marketing, and fully capitalize on Shopify’s capabilities. Our goal is to not only migrate to your platform, but also to position your business for accelerated growth with Shopify Plus.
Ready to supercharge your B2B commerce by migrating to Shopify Plus?
We offer a Free Consultation to discuss your specific needs and assess the feasibility, cost, and timeline for your SuiteCommerce migration. This no-obligation session with our Shopify Plus experts will give you a clear picture of what migration entails and how it can benefit your business.
Don't hold back your growth!
Contact us today to schedule your free consultation and take the first steр toward a more agile, scalable ecommerce platform. We’re here to answer any questions and help you plan a successful move to Shopify Plus.
Reach out now and let’s explore how Shopify Plus can drive your B2B success!
