Building multi-tiered commerce experiences on Shopify
Scaling across channels and communities can unlock growth
While direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses are still profitable, today’s merchants are finding that relying on direct customer acquisition eventually limits their sales and growth. In order to reach new audiences, brands are increasingly looking for ways to empower customers or affiliates as contributors to their growth, effectively creating a distributed sales force.
But even though they can be great growth drivers, establishing and managing these programs comes with new operational demands and challenges.
This is where Shopify shines as a flexible commerce platform with native B2B primitives capable of supporting complex business models. It provides the infrastructure needed to build and scale across channels and embrace more distributed, network-based, and community-driven sales approaches.
As a Shopify Platinum Partner, we partner with top merchants on the platform to build high-growth, omnichannel commerce experiences. We’ll walk through best practices and options for customizing Shopify to your business.
What we’ll cover:
- Personalized portals and tools for professionals partners
- Tiered compensation or reward programs
- Referral and ambassador programs for customers
- Best practices for building and managing these experiences
Shopify experts
What is multi-tiered commerce?
"Multi-tiered commerce" refers to business models that leverage multiple levels or networks of individuals or companies in order to sell products or services. It expands market reach by enabling partners, affiliates, or ambassadors to participate in the sales process. This can involve:
- Referral Networks: Existing customers or advocates share unique links or codes, earning rewards for new sales they drive.
- Ambassador Programs: Individuals with influence promote products to their audience, often earning commissions or other benefits.
- Professional Resellers: Businesses provide dedicated access for businesses or independent professionals to purchase products at wholesale rates and resell them to their own client base.
Many of these features have been popularized by the success of multi-level marketing (MLM) businesses, but they are increasingly being adopted by more traditional DTC brands.
The goal is to drive growth by empowering a broader community, often leading to increased market penetration, enhanced customer loyalty, and diversified revenue streams.
Building multi-tiered commerce on Shopify
Building sophisticated systems to reward affiliates
For Paw Prosper, a family of health and wellness brands for pets, had an existing B2B storefront on Shopify, but were still using mostly manual processes to incentivize professional referrals and wholesale purchases.
Lazer helped them better leverage Shopify by architecting and building a custom B2B rewards and affiliate program.
We built Paw Prosper a multi-tiered system that incentivizes professionals and clinics to buy products and recommend them to clients.
- Affiliates track rewards and referral analytics, buy products, and access custom pricing for them and their referrals
- It's integrated directly into Shopify for flexible reward redemption, including discounts and gift cards
- The new DTC storefront, as well as referral and attribution logic, enables tracking across their brands
- We automated Paw Prosper’s existing admin processes with custom apps and integrations
Driving growth via customer and influencer referrals
Beauty Industry Group (BIG) is a holding company of more than a dozen beauty industry brands, specializing in professional and do-it-yourself hair extension products. We migrated their Zala Hair brand from Magento to Shopify and integrated Influence.io, a Shopify app that supports affiliate and influencer programs with tiered rewards and commission structures.
With this support, the Zala Ambassadors program invites influencers to earn commissions from social media posts, offering tiered rewards, gifts, and more.
Ollie delivers freshly cooked, human-grade food personalized to each dog's nutritional needs. Alongside migrating them from BigCommerce to Shopify, we helped them create a custom discounting app to support their discount and promotional programs, such as:
- Ollie’s Refer-A-Friend program gives customers the chance to give their friends a discount and receive their own personal discount if the friend makes a purchase.
- They also leverage unique discount codes for influencers and other social brand ambassadors.
Empowering partners with custom sales tools
Many brands need B2B solutions to better empower their partner businesses.
For a healthcare-related brand on Shopify like Dermalogica, there’s a huge opportunity for professionals or medical practitioners to use products in their services, as well as sell products directly to their patients.
Lazer has designed and built custom Shopify apps and platforms to help merchants manage their partners and allow the partners to make their own sales. Common features include:
- Personalized dashboards for partners to manage customer tracking, reward tiers, and discounts
- Merchant-branded portals for partners to sell products directly to their customers or members
- Integration with DTC storefronts, enabling partners to order their inventory or place orders on behalf of customers
- Custom logins with role-based permissions and a tailored user experience
- Comprehensive reporting for both partners and merchant admin teams
Our best practices for multi-tiered commerce challenges
Customer-specific pricing
Challenge: Implementing specific pricing tiers for B2B customers who sell to or refer customers, like an Avon or Herbalife, without the need for discount codes.
- Solution: Shopify company profiles and catalogs can enable customized pricing and product access for different groups or individual companies, along with self-serve accounts for placing their orders.
- Case study: Paw Prosper’s B2B rewards program provides access to eligible pricing for the affiliates and their referrals.
Referral and reward programs
Challenge: Driving growth by leveraging your existing customer base or external influencers through structured referral and reward programs.
- Solution: Robust tracking and automated rewards can make these programs a low-lift investment. There’s lots of Shopify apps that can help, as well as custom solutions for more complex rewards logic.
- Case study: Moonboon has seen more than $1M in affiliate sales using Shopify Collabs.
Product & inventory management
Challenge: Effective product and inventory management is key to distributed sales, particularly in having a centralized inventory across channels.
- Solution: Shopify's centralized inventory management can automatically update and track all sales channels, including affiliate sales. This can be managed through one storefront or across multiple.
- Case study: Ellana Cosmetics created separate store instances for its sales channels, including one for influencer and affiliate partners, which helps with inventory visibility, order fulfillment, and creative marketing.
Analytics & reporting
Challenge: Clear, actionable data is paramount for optimizing networks and staying on top of their sales.
- Solution: Shopify's native analytics provide a strong foundation for data collection, and third-party or custom apps can deepen your tracking across your referrals and partner sales channels.
Ready for next-gen commerce on Shopify?
While Shopify's vast app ecosystem and powerful B2B primitives can set you up for success, reaching your maximum potential can require expertise that goes beyond the out-of-the-box solutions. As a Shopify Platinum Partner, our experience and expertise run deep.
- Seamless migrations: We have a long track record seamlessly moving complex commerce ecosystems to Shopify, ensuring continuity of operations while leveraging their best-in-class platform to build powerful, scalable experiences.
- Custom builds & integrations: The sky is the limit; if you need to customize or extend Shopify’s platform, we can advise on and build any app or integration you need to engage customers and drive conversions.
- Strategic partnerships: We’re a true strategic partner; we don't just build, we strategize with you first, deeply understanding your business needs and translating them into high-performance Shopify solutions.
By partnering with Lazer, merchants implementing multi-tiered commerce models can unlock new revenue streams, empower their networks with efficient tools, streamline complex operations, and achieve scalable growth — all built on the robust, flexible, and future-proof Shopify platform.
Curious to explore how a tailored, multi-tiered Shopify experience could transform your business? Don't hesitate to reach out to explore how we can help you build your next-generation Shopify experience.
Our advantage?
