Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
BigCommerce handles wholesale natively through three primitives: customer groups, price lists, and per-group category and product visibility. A trade buyer is assigned to a group, the group points at a price list, and the storefront shows that buyer trade pricing on the same product pages everyone else sees. No second store, no duplicated SKUs.
That is the short version, and it is the main practical difference from platforms where wholesale arrives as an app. On BigCommerce the pricing layer is part of the commerce core, which means it survives theme changes and applies consistently at checkout rather than being injected into a cart at the last moment.
The three pieces you configure
Customer groups are the access layer. A group is a bucket of customers with shared rules: which categories they can see, which they cannot, whether they get a flat discount, and which price list applies to them. Most brands end up with three groups — retail, wholesale, and one for a key account that negotiated something different.
Price lists are the pricing layer. A price list holds a specific price for a specific SKU, and it can express that price as a fixed amount, as an amount off, or as a bulk rule that changes with quantity. Fixed amounts are almost always the right choice for wholesale, for reasons worth understanding before you build the list — the same reasoning applies across platforms and is laid out in structuring B2B price lists.
Visibility rules decide what each group sees. This is how you hide a retail-only assortment from trade buyers, or hide the case-pack items from consumers. It works at the category level, which is cleaner than tagging individual products but means your category structure has to be designed with both audiences in mind from the start.
Layer those three together and a boutique owner logs in, sees only the assortment you sell wholesale, at the price you set for their group, with the minimums you attached.
What to build before you touch the settings
The configuration takes an afternoon. The decisions take longer, and doing them in the wrong order means rebuilding.
Decide your wholesale price first, and decide it from your landed cost rather than by halving retail out of habit. A common structure: a twenty-two dollar retail candle, eleven dollars wholesale, four dollars landed cost including jar, wax, label and the box it ships in. That leaves seven dollars of gross margin per unit at wholesale against eighteen at retail — before you consider that the wholesale order arrives as ninety-six units on one shipping label rather than ninety-six separate consumer parcels with ninety-six card fees.
Decide your case pack second. A case of four or six changes everything downstream: your minimums, your shipping cartons, your price list granularity. It is a packaging decision that masquerades as a settings decision, and quantity rules and case packs walks through how to pick one.
Decide your opening minimum third. Opening order minimums exist to keep tiny accounts from consuming the same service cost as good ones. Reorder minimums are usually lower than opening minimums, because the point of the opening minimum is to make the shop commit to a real presence on the shelf.
Then build the groups.
Configuring it without breaking the consumer store
Four things reliably go wrong, and all four are avoidable.
Tax treatment. Wholesale customers with a resale certificate should not be charged sales tax. Set the group's tax behaviour explicitly rather than assuming the default is right, and keep the certificates somewhere you can produce them. This is not a nicety — a buyer charged tax on a resale order will write to you about it before they finish the checkout.
Shipping. Your consumer shipping rules are tuned for one parcel to one door, often with a threshold above which shipping is included. Applied to a 2,000-dollar wholesale order, that threshold gives away freight you cannot afford. Wholesale groups need their own shipping treatment: a flat rate, a freight quote, or shipping billed after the fact.
Promotions. Sitewide consumer promotions can stack on top of wholesale pricing if you do not exclude the wholesale groups. A seasonal sale that accidentally applies to trade accounts is expensive and awkward to unwind, because the buyer has already received the confirmation.
Search and feeds. Product feeds and on-site search pull from the catalog, not from what a given group can see. Check that trade-only items are excluded from your shopping feeds, and check the logged-out view of any page that carries a trade price.
Where BigCommerce differs from the alternatives
Worth knowing if you are choosing a platform or considering a move, and worth stating carefully because platform feature sets change.
On BigCommerce the customer group and price list model is in the platform on standard plans, which is unusual. Brands frequently cite that as the reason they stayed. The heavier B2B capabilities — company accounts with multiple buyers, quote requests, purchase-order payment methods, sales rep ordering on behalf of a buyer — come through an additional B2B layer rather than the base storefront.
On Shopify the equivalent company-based model is bundled with the top plan, and everything below it is either a workaround or an app. The feature inventory is in Shopify B2B features, and the workaround options in running B2B without Plus.
On WooCommerce, wholesale is a plugin decision: customer roles plus a pricing plugin, which is flexible and cheap and puts the maintenance burden on you. On Wix and Squarespace the native commerce layer is thinner, and brands there generally run wholesale through a separate ordering portal or by invoice.
None of this should drive a replatform on its own. Moving stores costs you traffic, apps, and a month you could have spent selling. Wholesale plumbing is a weaker reason to migrate than almost anything else.
The first ten accounts
Configuration is not the hard part of wholesale, and a fully built trade storefront with no buyers logged into it earns nothing. The sequence that works: get a handful of stockists by hand, learn what they actually ask for, then configure the store to match.
What you learn in those first conversations changes the build. Buyers will tell you their expected margin, whether your case pack is wrong for their shelf, whether they need a counter display, and how they want to pay. Configuring a price list before hearing any of that means guessing.
If the harder question is where to find those buyers, start from the product rather than from a directory. Paste a product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of shops, distributors and chains that plausibly stock something like it, which is enough to tell whether there is a real channel here before you invest in the setup.
Keeping the channel clean as it grows
Two habits prevent most of the mess that shows up at thirty accounts.
Keep one price list per tier, not one per account. The moment you start creating a bespoke price list for each buyer, your catalog becomes unauditable and nobody can answer what a given SKU costs. Negotiated terms belong in a tier that other similar accounts can also enter, with clear criteria for entry.
Write the terms down and attach them to every order confirmation. Lead time, minimums, damage handling, payment due dates. Buyers do not remember what you told them in a market aisle in March, and a link to your terms on the confirmation ends most disputes before they start. The structures worth offering are in B2B payment terms.
Questions brands ask about BigCommerce wholesale
Can one store serve both retail and trade? Yes, and that is the intended design. One catalog, one inventory pool, different pricing and visibility by group. A second store is only worth it when the assortments barely overlap.
How do I stop consumers seeing trade prices? Trade prices are tied to the group, so a logged-out visitor sees retail. The failure mode is not the platform, it is feeds, cached pages and apps that read raw price fields. Test in a private window and check your feeds.
Can I require a minimum order? Yes, through order-level minimums on the group and quantity rules on the products themselves. Enforce both: a minimum order value alone lets a buyer order one of everything.
How do I handle net terms? The base storefront expects payment at checkout. Terms usually mean either an invoice sent outside the checkout, an offline payment method enabled for the trade group, or the additional B2B layer with purchase orders. The cash-flow side of that decision matters more than the mechanics, and it is covered in offering net terms.
Should I show wholesale pricing publicly on a line sheet page? No. Keep the pricing behind a login or inside a PDF you send. A public wholesale price list gets used as a negotiating lever by every buyer who finds it, including the ones already paying you more.