Wholesale on the store you already have.

What changed, and why it matters to you

For its first few years, Shopify's native B2B toolkit was a Shopify Plus feature, and that single fact shaped how a generation of D2C brands run wholesale. If you could not have companies and price lists, you improvised: tag the customer as wholesale, build a hidden collection, hand out a discount code, take orders over email, raise the invoice somewhere else. Nearly every brand we work with that sells to stockists has some version of that stack.

Shopify's documentation now states plainly that B2B is available on all plans. The workaround is no longer the only option, and the improvised version is now costing you more than the alternative, because every workaround is a manual step somebody performs and occasionally gets wrong.

Two of our own guides were written while the old constraint held, and their framing of B2B as a reason to move to Plus no longer stands. The Plus case is still real for checkout customisation and scale, but B2B alone no longer carries it.

What you get on any paid plan

The mental model: B2B replaces "a customer with a tag" with a real business object.

• Companies and company locations. A stockist is a company. It can have several locations, and several people authorised to buy on its behalf. Payment terms, tax exemptions, shipping addresses and catalogue access attach to the company rather than to whichever individual happened to place the order. When a buyer leaves the retailer, the account survives.
• Catalogues with their own prices. Control both what a given buyer can see and what they pay, with percentage-based or explicitly set prices, rather than applying a blanket discount code to your retail catalogue.
• Volume pricing and quantity rules. Price breaks at quantity, plus minimums, maximums and increments, so a buyer cannot order 7 units of something sold in cases of 12. This alone removes a recurring category of order-fixing emails.
• Net payment terms. Net 7, 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90, or due on fulfilment or receipt, with vaulted cards and automated payment reminders. Wholesale runs on terms, and this is the feature that lets you stop tracking them in a spreadsheet.
• Self-serve ordering and reordering. Buyers log in, see their prices, reorder from history, add purchase order numbers and request returns themselves. The point of the whole exercise is that routine reorders stop passing through your inbox.
• Draft orders and invoices. For the orders that genuinely need a human, raise a draft order and send an invoice from it, with the company's prices already applied.

What is still reserved for Plus

Worth knowing before you scope, so nothing lands as a surprise mid-build.

• Number of catalogues. Plus allows unlimited catalogues; other plans allow up to three active ones. Three is enough for a tiered structure such as distributor, stockist and key account. It is not enough to give thirty retailers individually negotiated price books.
• Assigning a catalogue directly to a specific company location. A Plus capability, and the one that matters if you have retailers whose branches buy on different terms.
• Partial payments and customer-specific deposits. Relevant if your model involves taking a deposit against a large order.
• Storefront contextualisation for showing different content to different customer segments is available on Advanced and Plus.

The practical read: if your wholesale is a handful of price tiers, a standard plan does the job. If every account has its own negotiated price book, you will run into the catalogue limit, and that is a genuine reason to look at Plus.

Whether to run wholesale on your D2C store or a separate one

The default should be the same store, and you should need a specific reason to split.

One store means one product catalogue, one inventory pool and one set of content to maintain. Inventory is the strongest argument: two stores means two sources of truth for stock, and reconciling them is an ongoing operational cost that grows with your catalogue. B2B buyers see their prices when logged in and retail prices otherwise, which is the behaviour most brands want anyway.

Reasons to split are narrower than people assume: a wholesale brand identity genuinely distinct from your consumer one, a catalogue with almost no overlap, or a market and tax structure that needs separation. Expansion stores are a Plus feature, so on a standard plan splitting means a second subscription and a second store to maintain.

Migrating off the customer-tag workaround

The work is mostly data hygiene, and the order matters.

• Map your accounts to companies before touching Shopify. Every wholesale customer, which company they belong to, which locations that company has, who is authorised to buy, what terms they are on and what they actually pay. Most brands discover during this step that two salespeople have been quoting different prices to the same retailer.
• Design your catalogue tiers deliberately. With three catalogues on a standard plan, decide the tiers now rather than creating them ad hoc. Distributor, stockist, key account covers most brands.
• Set quantity rules from how you actually ship. Case sizes, pallet quantities, minimum order values. This is where most of the manual order correction goes away.
• Move terms out of the spreadsheet. Set each company's payment terms in Shopify and let it track them. Automate the reminders.
• Retire the old path completely. Delete the discount codes, unpublish the hidden collection, remove the tag logic from the theme. A half-migrated wholesale setup where some buyers use the new system and some still email you is worse than either.
• Onboard buyers deliberately. Send invitations, and walk your top accounts through their first self-serve order personally. Wholesale buyers are creatures of habit, and a login they never use is a feature you paid for and did not get.

Where you will still need help

Native B2B covers ordering, pricing and terms. It is not an ERP.

• Deep ERP and accounting sync. If stock, invoices and credit limits live in another system, that integration is still an integration.
• Multi-step approval chains. Buyer raises, manager approves, finance releases. Sophisticated approval workflows generally need an app or custom build.
• Credit limits and risk rules. Terms are supported. Enforcing a credit ceiling per account usually is not, natively.
• Sales rep tooling. Reps ordering on behalf of accounts, with commissions and territories, goes beyond what is included.
• The buyer experience itself. A B2B buyer placing a 60-line reorder needs fast bulk entry and a usable order history, not your consumer product page with different prices. This is the part brands underinvest in, and it is the part that decides whether buyers actually adopt self-serve.

Common mistakes

• Assuming B2B still requires Plus. Stale advice, including in older guides of our own. Check the current plan comparison before designing around a constraint that no longer exists.
• Turning it on without designing the tiers. Three catalogues on a standard plan is a real limit, and discovering it after you have promised eleven retailers bespoke pricing is avoidable.
• Building a second store by reflex. Two inventory sources of truth is a permanent operational cost. Split only for a reason you can state.
• Leaving the old workaround running alongside. Two ways to order wholesale means neither is trusted.
• Ignoring the reorder experience. If a 60-line reorder is slower than emailing you, buyers will email you, and the project has failed on adoption rather than on features.

FAQ