Test one: what happens when an over-limit company checks out?
Pick a real company account that your credit manager knows is over its limit, or temporarily set a test company’s limit below its current balance. Sign in as that company on your own storefront and take an order on terms through to the confirmation page. Do not cancel it. Watch what the ERP does with it.
What you observe next is the whole diagnosis. There are only four outcomes and each one points at a different fix. Write down which one you got and the time it took, because the delay between confirmation and the hold is the part your customer experiences as broken.
Run the same test with a company comfortably inside its limit, so you know the difference you are seeing is the credit check and not something else refusing the order.
| Criterion | What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| The order goes through and shipsThis is the case that costs real money, and it is more common than teams expect on a first launch. | Confirmation email, order picked, no hold anywhere. Nobody in finance saw it until the invoice. | Nothing is checking credit on this channel. The ERP credit rules are either switched off for imported orders or the order type used by the connector is not subject to them. | Start with the ERP, not the storefront. An order that arrives and holds is a solved problem compared to an order that arrives and ships. |
| The order goes through and lands on hold in the ERP | The buyer gets a confirmation. A day later somebody in credit control phones them. The order does not ship. | The check is at import. This is the Shopify default shape, and your credit rules are working exactly as designed. | Decide whether the delay is acceptable. Ask your credit manager how many orders held last month. Two is a non-problem, 80 is a queue. |
| Checkout refuses terms as a payment method | The buyer reaches payment and the invoice or purchase order option is not offered, or is offered and rejected. | A check is running at checkout. Now find out what number it is checking, because a static number that never moves is not a credit check. | Go to test two below. A checkout check on a stale figure blocks good orders as often as it blocks bad ones. |
| The order goes to draft or to a review queue | The buyer is told the order needs confirmation. No payment is taken and nothing reaches the ERP as a firm order. | Every order for that company is being reviewed rather than only the risky ones. On Shopify this is the checkout-to-draft lever set on a company location. | Fine as a control for a handful of watched accounts. Expensive as a default, because it removes self-service from customers who never breach anything. |
Checked against: Shopify Help Centre: B2B payment terms, read 20 August 2026, Shopify Flow: update checkout to draft for a company location, read 20 August 2026
Test two: is it the limit, or the limit minus what they already owe?
This is the test almost nobody runs, and it is the one that explains why a storefront with a working credit check still lets customers overspend. Available credit is the limit minus the open accounts receivable balance minus the value of orders taken and not yet invoiced. A check against the raw limit is not a credit check, it is a size check on one order.
Take one company and collect four numbers on the same afternoon: the credit limit on the customer record in the ERP, the open accounts receivable balance, the value of unshipped orders, and whatever credit figure your storefront is holding for that company. Then do the subtraction.
If the storefront figure equals the raw limit, every order is being measured against the same number and a customer can place that amount repeatedly. BigCommerce documents this behaviour explicitly for B2B Edition: when limitPurchases is true the purchase order payment method is disabled for orders exceeding availableCredit, and existing orders and open invoices do not reduce the availableCredit value shown. So the field is real and keeping it aligned with your ERP is integration work you own.
If the storefront figure equals limit minus open accounts receivable but ignores unshipped orders, you are exposed by exactly the value of your open order book for that customer, which for a distributor with long lead times can be larger than the receivable itself.
And if there is no figure on the storefront at all, as on Shopify B2B where payment terms exist and no credit limit is documented, then the check is not at checkout regardless of what anyone told you.
Storefront figure equals the raw credit limit: the check is a per-order cap. One customer can place it three times in an afternoon.
Storefront figure equals limit minus open invoices: closer, and still blind to the order book. Ask what your average unshipped value per account is before deciding that is good enough.
Storefront figure equals limit minus invoices minus unshipped orders, and it moved when you shipped something today: you have a live position and this page is not your problem.
No figure exists on the storefront: the check happens after the order arrives in the ERP, or not at all.
Checked against: BigCommerce docs: company credit and payment terms in B2B Edition, read 20 August 2026, Shopify Help Centre: overview of B2B features, read 20 August 2026
Why does a customer inside their limit still get stopped?
Because a credit limit is not one rule. Acumatica runs credit verification when a document is saved and checks several conditions separately, including the limit itself and how far past due the oldest invoice is. A customer well inside their limit can be stopped for a single overdue invoice, and a customer with nothing overdue can be stopped for the limit.
This matters for the diagnosis because it changes what your storefront would have to model to make an honest promise at checkout. A storefront that models the limit and not days past due will approve orders your ERP is going to stop, and every one of those is a confirmation email your customer stops believing.
If your holds are mostly days-past-due holds rather than limit holds, the storefront is the wrong place to spend money. The fix is in collections, and the useful storefront feature is showing the buyer their own overdue invoices so they can see why they are stopped.
Checked against: Acumatica help: credit verification rules, Acumatica Shopify B2B Connector datasheet, dated 23 September 2025
What can you do this week without building anything?
Four controls exist on platforms you already have, and all four are configuration rather than development. None of them gives you a live position. All of them stop the specific customers who are costing you money now, which is usually what the person asking this question actually needs.
Do the arithmetic before you choose. If five accounts cause all of your exposure, a manual control on five accounts is the correct engineering answer and building a live credit integration for the other 900 is not.
On BigCommerce B2B Edition, set creditHold on the specific companies. BigCommerce documents that this blocks all transactions except invoice payments for every user on that company.
On Shopify B2B, set the company location to checkout to draft so those orders arrive for review rather than as firm orders.
Take payment terms off the worst accounts entirely and leave them on card or prepay online. They can still order, they just cannot order on account without a person.
Run a daily exception report out of the ERP: every web order from a company whose available credit is negative. This is a report, not an integration, and it turns a monthly surprise into a morning task.
Checked against: BigCommerce docs: creditHold blocks all transactions except invoice payments
What does the durable fix cost, and when should you not build it?
There are four durable answers and your finance team owns the choice, not your developers. The failure mode is choosing by accident, which is what happens when nobody asks the question and the platform default wins.
The honest disqualifier is the last row. If credit holds are rare in your business, letting orders through and holding them in the ERP is cheaper than any integration and nobody notices. Buy the live check when holds are routine, when the delay between confirmation and phone call is doing reputational damage, or when your credit team is spending real hours on a queue.
| Criterion | How it works | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Hold it in the ERP after import | The storefront accepts every order on terms and the ERP runs its credit verification and holds the document. | Nothing to build. You pay in trust and in credit-team hours, and the bill scales with how often customers breach. |
| Push a nightly snapshot of available credit | A scheduled job writes the ERP figure onto the company record on the storefront, and the platform enforces against it. | Modest development. Honest if you label the figure as of last night, dangerous if you present it as live, because a stale number that blocks a good order costs a sale you never hear about. |
| Call the ERP at checkout | The storefront asks the ERP for the live position when the buyer selects terms as the payment method. | Development plus an ERP dependency at the worst possible moment. You need a written rule for what happens when the ERP does not answer, and blocking the order is rarely the right one. |
| Take terms off the storefront | Online is card or prepay only. Account orders go through a rep, EDI or a quote. | You have scoped the problem out rather than solved it, and you may suppress adoption among the accounts you most want online. Reasonable for a first release, weak as a destination. |
The wider picture
This page answers one narrow question. Acro Commerce covers the strategy around it.
Common questions
- Does Shopify B2B enforce a credit limit at checkout?
- No, as of 20 August 2026. Shopify B2B documents payment terms with templates for net 7 through net 90, due on fulfilment, and a fixed date on draft orders only, and neither the payment terms documentation nor the overview of B2B features describes a credit limit or an outstanding balance check. Enforcement on Shopify therefore happens after the order reaches your ERP, or through custom work at checkout. The nearest native lever is setting a company location to checkout to draft, which reviews every order from that company rather than only the risky ones.
- BigCommerce shows an available credit figure. Why do customers still exceed it?
- Because BigCommerce evaluates that figure per order and documents that existing orders and open invoices do not reduce the availableCredit value shown. A company with a $50,000 figure and $48,000 of unpaid invoices can place another $50,000 order and B2B Edition will allow it, since each order is measured against the same static number. Keeping availableCredit aligned with the real position in your ERP is integration work that belongs to you.
- Should the storefront block the order, or let it through and hold it?
- Ask your credit manager how many orders went on hold last month, and how many of those were released the same day. If holds are rare, holding in the ERP is cheaper and nobody notices. If holds are routine, blocking at checkout with a clear message is worth building, because the alternative is a queue for your credit team and confirmation emails your customers learn to distrust. Do not block on a stale number: refusing a good order because last night’s snapshot was wrong costs a sale you will never hear about.
- Can we show the buyer their own credit position?
- Yes, and it defuses most of the argument, but say when the number was calculated. A figure labelled as of this morning is useful and defensible. The same figure presented as live is a promise you have to keep every time a shipment goes out. Showing open and overdue invoices alongside it is the feature B2B buyers ask for most once a portal exists, and it will cause your customers to start correcting your ledger, which is usually good and should be flagged to your accounts receivable team first.
- Our ERP holds the order but our warehouse ships it anyway. Is that a credit problem?
- No, that is a process problem wearing a credit problem’s clothes, and no integration will fix it. If a held document can still be picked, the hold is not connected to the pick list or someone has the rights to release it and is using them under pressure. Find out which before you spend money on the storefront, because a live check at checkout is worthless if the downstream hold is advisory.
Last updated 2026-08-20. Facts on this page last checked against source 2026-08-20.