B2B | Automate B2B order management

As you grow you may look for opportunities to make your B2B order management as smooth as possible and to reduce the number of manual actions you do. Bigblue makes this possible.

Why identifying automatically B2B orders?

Identifying B2B orders automatically and systematically opens many improvements:

1. It ensures orders are prepared following Bigblue’s standard B2B preparation.
2. It allows you to give instructions without manually switching the order type (More detail about B2B instructions here)
3. It makes it possible to filter orders in-app based on this type to have a consolidated view of your B2B orders.
4. It ease analytics and reporting as this also shows on the order export and soon in the invoice lines.

How to automatically identify an order as B2B?

It depends how your business is structured and the tools you use.

You have a dedicated sales channel for B2B

In case you have a dedicated Shopify or ERP integration with Bigblue from which all incoming orders are B2B, you can mark this channel as B2B in you Shop settings.

You use Bigblue’s API

You should fill the b2b field of the CreateOrder or UpdateOrder POST request to true as detailed in the API documentation.

You have a hybrid sales channel

⚠️ Shopify only

In some situations you may have a single shop from which comes both B2B and B2C orders, in this case you should add the tag bigblue-b2b to the order in Shopify to flag it as B2B at the moment it comes in.

Other CMS are not supported for the moment but reach out to us if you are in this situation and we will look for solutions.

How to automatically add instructions?

In order to push further automations, you can also automate the use of instructions templates! To do so you first need to create a Shopify Metafield. It may seem technical but it’s not, don’t worry we will guide you through this!

Creating the instructions template metafield

First go to your Shopify settings and select the Custom data tab, then click the button Add definition at the top right corner.

You are taken to a new page where you can define your instructions metafield. You will need to carefully set all properties. Make sure names exactly match the following otherwise it won’t work!

1. Name should be instructions_template
2. Namespace and key should be bigblue.instructions_template . The later part should be added automatically but you may have to rewrite the first part from custom to bigblue !
3. Description this one is free for you! Write the description that helps you memorising what this field is for.
4. You will then define the type of your metafield. It should be Single text so if it’s not the case, click on the Change button
5. To avoid mistakes, as orders can only have one instruction template make sure to click One value
6. It’s better to set validation rules to avoid typos in the template name. Typos could have a bad impact as the template wouldn’t be recognized and the order would be delayed! So click Limit to preset choices

7. Then write the template name ad shown in your shop integration

   Photo

   Click Add item to add new lines

8. Click create draft order definition at the bottom of the form, this will make your field available on draft orders too. It’s very useful if you plan to create orders manually because otherwise you must go back to the order after its creation to set the template.
9. And you’re good to go, click Save!

Using the instruction template metafield on manual Shopify orders

If you create orders manually in Shopify, you simply have to select the appropriate template in the Metafield block at the bottom of the order page, just before the timeline.

And that’s it! The template will be saved on the order in Bigblue!

Using the instruction template metafield on non manual orders

You may want to push automations even further! If your customers are ordering autonomously on your Shopify you can create a rule using Shopify flow to automatically set the right template based on order properties:

Select the trigger that makes the most sense for your business and your workflow, define the conditions when it should apply and eventually choose the Update order metafield action. Fill the metafield section by:

1. Registering bigblue (with no capital letter!) as namespace
2. instructions_template as key
3. And giving the exact template id in the value section. This full list of exact template ID values can be found in your shop settings:
4. Eventually chose Single line text as Type

How can I automatically add documents?

It is not possible to automatically add documents because this would require a way to share and transfer files which is not supported as of today.

Make sure the documents you want to upload are not already covered by Bigblue’s B2B standard preparation as we designed this service to reduce as much as possible manual actions from your end.