How do multi-location company hierarchies (headquarters plus regional branches, each with different pricing) migrate to Shopify B2B's company/location model?

How many levels does Shopify B2B's company model have?

Shopify's business-to-business (B2B) company model has only two levels: a company and its company locations. Shopify calls a company "the parent organization for one or more company locations" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Its developer docs describe a company location as "A location or branch of a Company" (Shopify developer docs, October 2026). The Company object has fields for locations, contacts, roles, orders and metafields, and none for a parent or child company (Shopify developer docs, October 2026). So a headquarters-to-region-to-branch tree loses its middle level on import, and branch prices then meet the 3-catalog cap below Shopify Plus.

Ten thousand locations means flattening is rarely a capacity problem. Fifty customers per location is the ceiling a large branch with a wide purchasing team hits first.

What lives on the company, and what on each company location?

Shared settings live on the company, and almost everything that makes a business-to-business (B2B) branch different lives on its company location, which is why flattening keeps it. Each location can have its own tax ID, tax exemptions, addresses, pricing, payment terms and contacts (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).

What you lose is the region as an addressable level. Neither level has a credit-limit field, so branch credit limits migrate as metafields.

Where does a region go when it can't be a level?

A region becomes a location attribute, a business-to-business (B2B) market or a separate company, depending on why it exists.

• A metafield on each location. Set a region metafield on every company location at import. Shopify's Admin API (application programming interface) filters a company's locations by metafield value (Shopify developer docs, October 2026), and Shopify Flow has an "Update company location metafield" action (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). This is our default, because most regional tiers exist for reporting and a price band.
• A B2B market. A market can include "All company locations within a region", and locations added later that match join it automatically (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Below Shopify Plus, the region's catalog is one of the store's 3, and a branch with prices of its own needs a market of its own, another of the 3. On Plus, a branch can carry its own catalog directly. Where it prices the same product as the regional catalog, the store "displays the most specific price for that item", the branch's own (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
• Separate companies. Regions that are separate legal entities, with their own credit, terms and tax registrations, become separate companies, and the group lives in your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Which rule decides the company boundaries?

The rule that a customer belongs to only one company decides the boundaries. Shopify says "You can add a customer only to one company, but you can add a customer to multiple company locations within a company" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Matrixify's import documentation states the same rule: "One Customer of the store can exist only in one Company" (Matrixify, October 2026).

So a central buyer at headquarters who orders for six branches puts all six in one company. Model the regions as companies and the import can't link that buyer to more than one of them. Find every buyer who orders against more than one node of the source hierarchy. Those buyers draw the company boundaries, not the org chart. A buyer who also shops retail stays one customer record, with the company role layered on top.

In what order should the hierarchy migrate?

Migrate the hierarchy buyers first and structure second, in seven steps:

1. Export the source hierarchy with ship-to nodes marked and each node's last order date. A node that ships and gets priced is a candidate location.
2. Map every buyer to the nodes they order against. This step sets the company boundaries.
3. Draw companies so no buyer spans two. Where that's impossible, you've found a genuine multi-entity case: separate companies with separate buyers.
4. Create companies and locations with each legacy node's ID in the external ID field, which both carry (Shopify developer docs on companies and locations, October 2026).
5. Set payment terms on the company for all its locations, then set terms only on the branches that differ (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
6. Assign catalogs. On Shopify Plus, assign them to locations, up to 25 each; below Plus, assign them to business-to-business (B2B) markets. Our catalogs and price lists record scores an enterprise resource planning (ERP) feed into catalogs CUSTOMIZE at scale (October 2026).
7. Assign contacts with roles, up to 50 per location.

Matrixify imports companies, locations, linked customers with location roles, payment terms from net 7 to net 90, location store credit and, on Plus, each location's catalogs (Matrixify, October 2026). So most mid-market hierarchies load in bulk rather than by script.

When should a node not become a company location?

A node should not become a company location when it is a separate legal entity, has never placed an order, or exists only in reports.