Delegate — overview
Where: Your OnAccount admin + your buyers' customer accounts + your online store Who: You turn it on once; your B2B company admins run it day to day
Delegate lets your B2B customers manage themselves. A company can invite its own staff, decide which of your locations each person can buy from, set spending limits, and require approval on larger orders — all from inside their customer account, without emailing you. You stay in control of the master switches; they handle the day-to-day.
It's built around a two-tier model:
- You (the merchant) decide which companies get self-service, choose which features each one gets, assign each one a company admin, and can switch any of it off at any time. You also own the company locations (they're Shopify B2B, and they control which catalog and prices a buyer sees) and get a store-wide audit log.
- The company admin (your customer) manages their staff, spend rules, and approval flows, and assigns each staff member to the locations you've set up — but never creates or edits the locations themselves.
Delegate isn't a single on/off switch — it's a self-service portal made of three feature modules you grant per company: Staff management, Purchase rules & approvals, and Payments. You set what every company gets by default and override any company individually (see Choose which features each company gets). The Payments module also hosts two things covered in these guides: a Finance role for the people who settle invoices, and the monthly outstanding statement emailed to a company's accounts-payable contacts.
Delegate's modules map to OnAccount plans: Staff management and Purchase rules & approvals are on the Governance plan; the Payments module (lump-sum payments, monthly statements, and the Finance role) is on the Payments plan. Delegate relies on Shopify's native B2B (Companies, Locations, contacts), so the Getting started B2B setup is a prerequisite. Collecting payments (lump-sum + buyer self-pay) additionally requires Shopify Plus; monthly statements work on any store — see Customer-account payments.
The pieces, and why each matters
Delegate is one console plus its enforcement, and which parts you need depends on the feature modules you grant each company. The console is always the hub. The two storefront enforcement parts exist only to serve the Purchase rules & approvals module — a company that only uses Staff management or Payments needs neither.
Part | What it does | Needed for | If it's off |
|---|---|---|---|
Turn on Delegate + assign a company admin | Chooses which companies are governed and who runs each one | Every company (a Payments-only company needs no admin — see below) | Delegate off → no company is governed, every console disappears. No admin → the staff/rules console is unreachable, but a Payments-only company stays reachable by a Finance contact |
Delegate console (customer-account page) | The self-service UI: staff, rules, approvals, requests, payments | Every company | Admins and buyers have nowhere to manage or track anything |
Delegate gate (theme app embed) | Shows buyers when a cart needs approval and blocks storefront checkout | Purchase rules & approvals only | No wall is shown, and there's no way to submit a cart for approval |
Delegate checkout rule (checkout validation) | Server-side backstop so the wall can't be bypassed | Purchase rules & approvals only | The wall is client-side only and can be bypassed at checkout |
If you use Purchase rules & approvals, the two enforcement parts — the gate embed and the checkout rule — are the pair that makes approvals binding. Turn on both: the embed alone can be worked around, and the rule alone has nothing to act on. If you're only using Staff management or Payments, skip them.
How these guides are organized
Delegate has a lot of moving parts, so it's split across several pages:
- Set up Delegate — turn it on, assign company admins, add the console, wire up storefront enforcement, and choose each company's feature modules.
- Staff, roles & the Finance role — what a company admin manages: staff, location access, and who can settle invoices.
- Spend rules & approval flows — how admins set limits and build approval chains.
- What your buyers experience — the staff buyer, the approver, and the emails they get.
- Audit logs & monthly statements — the store-wide audit trail and the monthly outstanding-order statement.
- Test & troubleshoot Delegate — a quick end-to-end test and a fix-it table.
Updated on: 31/08/2026
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