Selling to Businesses? Use Custom Checkout Fields to Collect Tax IDs and Invoice Details
When a client needs a proper invoice with their company name and VAT number, don't chase it down after the sale — collect it at checkout.
Somewhere in your customer list is a buyer who paid with a company card, needs a formal invoice with a registered business name and a tax ID on it, and emailed you about it three days after the sale — after you'd already closed the laptop and moved on. You dig through your inbox, ask them to spell their company name twice, confirm their VAT number, double-check the billing address, and now you're manually building an invoice in a doc editor at 11pm instead of collecting the order. That entire scramble is optional. It exists because the checkout never asked for the information in the first place — and every one of your buyers who works for a company, runs an agency, or expenses their own tools is going to need exactly this at some point.
Why B2B buyers are a different animal at checkout
A creator selling a $47 Notion template mostly deals with individual buyers who pay, download, and disappear happily. But the moment you sell templates, courses, coaching, or done-for-you services to freelancers, agencies, or small businesses, the game changes. That buyer isn't paying with personal money — they're expensing it, or their accountant needs a specific invoice format before the purchase can be booked. If your receipt just says Payment to @yourname with no company name, no tax ID, and no billing address, you've handed them a document that's useless for their books. Some will quietly write it off as personal and never buy for business use again; others will email you, annoyed, asking you to reissue something you had every chance to get right the first time.
It's a bigger deal than it sounds. B2B buyers spend more per purchase, buy repeatedly (an agency licensing your template pack once is rarely a one-off), and refer other businesses when the experience is smooth. Losing that segment to a clunky invoicing experience means losing your highest-value repeat customers over something a form field would have fixed.
What custom checkout fields actually do
Every product on your store.fan storefront can carry its own set of custom checkout fields — up to 15 per product, though you'll rarely need more than a handful. Each field is a simple text box, text area, dropdown, radio choice, or checkbox that you label yourself, and you decide whether it's optional or required. There's no separate form and no extra step beyond the checkout the buyer is already completing — the fields sit right next to the payment button, and answers land in your order record automatically.
For a B2B-facing product, add a required text field labeled "Company / Business name", another labeled "Tax ID / VAT number", and a text area labeled "Billing address (for invoice)" — all required. A buyer can't finish checking out without answering, so you're not hoping the information shows up later; you're guaranteeing it before the sale is final.
The four fields worth adding to any B2B-facing product
You don't need a procurement questionnaire. Reserve required fields for products that attract business buyers — done-for-you templates, agency toolkits, courses marketed to freelancers, coaching sold to teams — and keep the list tight.
| Field | Type | Required? | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company / Business name | Text | Yes | Goes directly on the invoice header — the single most requested detail after the fact |
| Tax ID / VAT number | Text | Optional, or required if most buyers are international | Needed for tax-deductible expense claims and cross-border VAT compliance in many countries |
| Billing address | Text area | Yes | Required on almost every formal invoice format worldwide |
| PO number (if applicable) | Text | Optional | Larger companies often need a purchase order number matched to the invoice before finance will pay it |
Notice what's not on that list: nothing exotic, nothing that needs a dropdown of countries or a validation library. Plain text fields, clearly labeled, do the job. The goal isn't building a procurement system — it's making sure the four pieces of information an invoice actually needs are sitting in front of you the moment the sale happens, instead of scattered across a follow-up email thread.
Setting it up without hurting your conversion rate
The one legitimate worry is friction — every extra box is a chance to abandon checkout. The fix is being deliberate about which products get them, not avoiding them. A $19 ebook for hobbyists doesn't need a tax ID field; a $400 agency license should have one, since a buyer who'd bail over three text boxes was never completing a proper business purchase anyway. Segment by product, not storefront-wide default.
- 1Identify which of your products get bought by businesses, freelancers billing clients, or agencies — usually your higher-ticket templates, toolkits, courses, and coaching packages.
- 2Open that product in your dashboard and find the custom checkout fields section.
- 3Add a text field for company name and mark it required.
- 4Add a text area for billing address and mark it required.
- 5Add a text field for tax/VAT ID — required if you sell mostly to businesses, optional if it's a mixed audience.
- 6If you regularly deal with procurement teams, add an optional PO number field.
- 7Preview the checkout once yourself to confirm the fields read clearly and don't feel like a wall of paperwork.
The best invoice is the one you never have to reissue.— store.fan support notes
What this actually saves you
Run the math on one recovered back-and-forth: a buyer asks for a corrected invoice, you ask for details, they reply across two or three messages, you manually recreate the document, and send it back. That's easily 20-30 minutes spread across days, plus a buyer who now associates your storefront with hassle instead of instant delivery. Multiply that by every business buyer you'll ever have, and the setup pays for itself almost immediately.
There's a trust dimension too. A buyer purchasing on behalf of their company is quietly evaluating whether you run things professionally — it affects whether they come back and whether they buy the bigger package next time. A checkout that already knows to ask for a tax ID reads as competent. One that leaves them chasing you down reads as amateur, even if the product itself is excellent.
Before your next B2B-facing product launch
0/7It's part of a bigger invoicing habit, not a one-time fix
Custom checkout fields solve the data-collection half of the problem. The other half is having a storefront built to handle B2B buyers well in the first place — instant, automatic delivery so a business buyer isn't waiting on you to send a file, a clean receipt trail tied to your connected Stripe or PayPal account, and a customer record you can search when someone emails eight months later asking for last year's invoice again. If you're still assembling receipts by hand, this is the moment to fix the whole workflow, not just patch the invoice fields. Check a live example store to see how a fully set-up storefront presents checkout, or browse more guides on tightening the rest of your sales process.
Yes — they attach to any product on your storefront, whether it's a digital download, a course, a coaching call, or a membership. You choose per product which fields to add.
Only if you overdo it. Stick to 3-4 fields on products where business buyers are common, and skip them entirely on impulse-buy, low-ticket products where they'd add friction without adding value.
Yes — every custom field has a required toggle. Turn it on for anything you truly need (like company name or billing address) and the buyer can't complete checkout without filling it in.
They're attached to that order in your dashboard, alongside the buyer's purchase record, so you can reference them anytime — no digging through email threads.
Stop chasing invoice details after the sale — set up your checkout to collect them upfront.
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