Shopify B2B Agency in Cleveland

The Cleveland, OH metro, as the Census Bureau defines it, covers six counties: Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina. Akron is a separate metro and is not counted here. In the Census Bureau's 2023 County Business Patterns, the metro had 2,951 manufacturing establishments and 2,876 wholesale trade establishments, so makers slightly outnumber wholesalers.

Manufacturing employed 123,303 people in that 2023 count, out of 971,092 employees across all sectors in the metro. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the more recent figure at 124.5 thousand manufacturing jobs in September 2026 (preliminary, not seasonally adjusted), up 1.9 percent from a year earlier, out of 1,083.9 thousand total nonfarm jobs.

Wholesale is the smaller group, and most of it handles durable goods. County Business Patterns counts 48,564 wholesale trade employees in 2023, and 1,920 of the 2,876 wholesale establishments are durable goods merchant wholesalers. Among them are 600 machinery, equipment and supplies wholesalers and 153 metal and mineral wholesalers.

Uncap builds Shopify B2B commerce for both groups: the manufacturers who sell to trade accounts, and the distributors and wholesalers who stock and resell their lines. Each store is connected to the ERP that already runs the business.

Inside manufacturing, the same 2023 County Business Patterns file shows where the jobs sit. Fabricated metal product manufacturing is the largest subsector, with 881 establishments and 27,373 employees. Machinery manufacturing comes next, with 339 establishments and 17,124 employees.

Several narrower industries fill in the rest of the picture:

• Paint, coatings and adhesives: 36 establishments with 3,276 employees, 26 of those establishments in paint and coating manufacturing.
• Primary metals: 76 establishments with 6,682 employees, including 37 foundries and 6 in iron and steel mills and ferroalloy manufacturing.
• Machining: 430 establishments in machine shops, turned products, and screw, nut and bolt manufacturing, 300 of them machine shops.
• Chemicals: 193 chemical manufacturing establishments with 10,637 employees.

Uncap has industry pages for two of these catalogs. The page on paint and coatings ecommerce starts from how a contractor actually orders a gallon: a base, a sheen and a container size, plus a colorant formula. The page on machinery and equipment parts covers builds around Uncap Diagrams, where buyers click the part they need straight off an interactive exploded diagram and add it to the cart, no part number required.

Shopify B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, according to Shopify's Help Center. It isn't available on the Starter or Retail plans. Below Plus, the differences that matter most for a trade store are the catalog limit and deposits.

To use Shopify B2B, you set up your trade customers as companies in the Shopify admin. From there, three settings shape what each buyer sees and pays:

• Catalogs: Shopify uses B2B catalogs to choose which products and prices go to B2B customers. On the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, you can have up to 3 active catalog assignments across active B2B markets. The limit doesn't apply on Shopify Plus, and on Plus you can also assign catalogs directly to company locations.
• Payment terms: payment terms define how long a company has to pay for an order. Shopify offers a net period, due on fulfillment and a fixed date, and you can set payment terms for each company location.
• Deposits: on Shopify Plus only, you can set up a deposit requirement as part of your payment terms, and the deposit is then due up front. Deposit requirements aren't available on the Basic, Grow or Advanced plans.

If your price lists would need more than three active catalog assignments, or you want to require deposits, you need Plus. Uncap works it out as part of the store architecture, before a plan is chosen. More on the setup is on the Shopify B2B page.

Plenty of B2B orders begin with a quote request. Uncap Quotes turns your catalog into instant, account-specific quotes: buyers configure, price and check out themselves, and reps stop rebuilding the same quote in a spreadsheet. The full configure, price, quote (CPQ) process runs inside the Shopify admin your team already uses.

When a quote needs a back-and-forth, Quotes keeps the version history as it is revised, and it moves negotiation and approvals along without losing the guardrails. When the buyer says yes, the approved quote becomes a Shopify order in one click. Nobody re-keys it into a second system.

A store can run both paths at once. Standard products check out instantly, and larger or custom orders route through a quote request. A buyer who already knows the part orders it from the cart, and a buyer who needs a price for a custom run asks for a quote on the same site. The Uncap Quotes page has the details.

The Port of Cleveland describes its Cleveland-Europe Express as "the only scheduled container service on the Great Lakes, offering direct import and export connections between the U.S. and Europe." The Port lists direct connections to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg and the United Kingdom, and a scheduled Cleveland to Antwerp service with an average sailing time of 13 days.

The cargo the Port handles includes steel, heavy machinery, manufacturing equipment, breakbulk, containers, dry bulk and oversized project cargo. Two Class 1 railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, serve it, and the Port is the grantee of Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) 40.

For a Cleveland manufacturer with buyers in Europe as well as the US, the storefront side of that trade comes down to markets and catalogs. In Shopify B2B, catalogs are assigned to B2B markets, and assigning the same active catalog to 2 active B2B markets counts as 2 assignments. One catalog assigned to both a US market and a European market already uses 2 of the 3 assignments available below Plus.

Uncap scopes markets, catalogs and price lists together as part of the store architecture, and that count is one of the inputs to which Shopify plan fits.

Uncap integrates Shopify with ERP and back-office systems from 13 vendors: Acumatica, Cin7, Epicor, Fishbowl, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Odoo, Oracle, QuickBooks, Sage, SAP and Syspro. The ERP integrations directory has a page for each, along with pages for specific editions such as Epicor Prophet 21, Infor SyteLine and SAP Business One.

Depending on the system, the integration runs through Uncap Connect or a managed integration, and the team confirms fit for your ERP and version directly. Uncap Connect starts at $8,000 to set up and then a flat $390 per month.

ERP and system integration is part of the build scope, next to architecture, design, theme and app development, and data migration with SEO redirects. Scoping turns on a few practical points: which system holds your items, customers and price lists, which version runs today and who owns it internally, and which data has to reach Shopify or flow back from it. Rough answers on the first call make that scoping quicker.

Uncap's team, based at its Chicago headquarters, travels on site for kickoff and key milestones. The rest of the work follows five steps:

1. Kickoff on site. The team comes to your plant, warehouse or office in the Cleveland metro to start the project with the people who run it.
2. Plan with Uncap Blueprint: four weeks at a $7,500 fixed price, producing a plan for architecture, integrations and total cost of ownership that is yours to keep. The fee is credited 1:1 toward implementation.
3. Build to a fixed scope. The Shopify build is fixed scope: timeline and budget are agreed before the build starts. A new build runs about 12 weeks from discovery to launch.
4. Migrate and launch. A migration from another platform typically takes 10 to 16 weeks, and Uncap's median cutover is around 14 weeks. The Shopify migrations page covers the phases. Launch comes with hypercare.
5. Improve after launch. Uncap can stay on after launch through a monthly growth engagement for conversion, order value, retention and operations. Plans run from $2,500 a month.

None of the case studies below is from the Cleveland metro: both clients are based outside Ohio. They are Uncap clients in industrial supply and electrical distribution.

• Welding Store: Uncap built weldingstore.com, a completely new B2B ecommerce website, for a business that had operated for more than half a century as Welding Industrial Supply Company (WISCO). WISCO wanted to serve a larger radius than its physical store allowed. The project scope was Quote-to-Order.
• ULE Group: an electrical, power and lighting supply distributor that moved its catalog of over 250,000 SKUs onto a Shopify B2B storefront built by Uncap, with an Epicor ERP integration that syncs inventory and pricing. B2B customers get account-based pricing.

On the review platforms, Uncap scores 5.0 on Clutch (77 reviews), 5.0 on Google (64), 5.0 in the Shopify Partner Directory (66) and 4.6 on Trustpilot (20). Every review can be read in full on the testimonials page.

If you make, coat, machine or distribute anywhere from Lorain to Ashtabula, start with a conversation about your catalog, your price lists and your ERP. Talk to Our Experts.