How 49er Communications Transformed B2B Sales with a Custom Shopify Plus Build

49er Communications and its sister brand Bendix King Radios sell two-way radios and accessories to a customer base unlike most online stores. Their buyers are government agencies, tribal organizations, and mining operations, the kind of customers who are tax-exempt, who buy against negotiated or agency-specific pricing, and who order highly configurable equipment like antennas that have to be specified by frequency. On top of that, certain products ship with add-ons that their fulfillment system needs to see as distinct line items, not a single bundled SKU.

Running all of this across two separate Shopify Plus storefronts created a tangle of requirements that off-the-shelf apps couldn’t satisfy cleanly. Government customers needed to be recognized and made tax-exempt automatically rather than corrected by hand. Members and agencies needed to see the right prices the moment they logged in. Add-on products needed to stay separate through checkout so orders could flow into their downstream systems. And the business wanted a partner who would not just launch a set of features but stay on to maintain and extend them as the catalog and customer base grew.

Fyresite took on both stores as a continuous engagement, starting from a shared discovery process and working through the priorities that mattered most for launch and beyond. At the center is a custom B2B system: a webhook-driven app running on AWS that recognizes federal, government, and tribal customers by their email domain at signup and automatically applies the correct tax-exempt status, while a Government Catalog serves those accounts their appropriate discounted pricing.

We built the Miner Membership program so a paid membership unlocks member pricing, with the discount applied automatically based on what’s in the cart, and engineered the pricing logic that serves member and standard prices correctly across product pages. For their fulfillment workflow, we grouped add-on products so they display together on the product page but stay as separate SKUs through checkout, letting order data flow cleanly into their Activate app. Along the way we built a frequency selector for their antenna products, added sticky product imagery so details stay in view while customers scroll, and handled the SEO redirect plan for the catalog.

Because the relationship is ongoing, that same system keeps getting maintained and extended. Most recently, we migrated the tax-exemption app onto a current Shopify API and expanded the government and tribal exemption lists as new agencies came on board.