You can sell wholesale from the store you already run, and for the first year you should. The mechanics are: tag approved buyers as a separate customer group, attach a price list that shows them their prices when they log in, enforce a minimum order and a case-pack quantity, and take payment either on the card at checkout or against an invoice with terms. Everything before that can be done with a PDF line sheet and a manually created order.
What follows is the order to build it in, what each piece is for, and the point at which a dedicated wholesale channel stops being overkill.
Stage one: no store changes at all
The first five to ten accounts do not need any software. A buyer emails an order, you create it manually in your admin as a draft order with the wholesale prices typed in, send the invoice, and ship.
This is not a workaround, it is the correct amount of machinery for the volume. Draft orders exist for exactly this: you build the order line by line, apply the price you want, add shipping, and send the buyer a link to pay or mark it as payment pending while you invoice separately.
Two things to get right even at this stage. Tag the customer record as wholesale, so that a year from now you can filter your order history by channel without archaeology. And keep the wholesale prices in one document rather than retyping them, because the first time you quote 17 dollars to one shop and 18 to another, you have created a problem that takes a year to unwind.
The rest of the manual setup, case packs, minimums, terms, invoices, is covered in starting a wholesale business from an ecommerce store.
Stage two: gated pricing on the store you have
Once you are retyping the same order every few weeks, move buyers onto the store.
The pattern is the same whichever tool you use. Approved buyers get an account. That account belongs to a group or carries a tag. The tag unlocks wholesale pricing and hides the consumer price. Everything else about the storefront stays as it is.
Three implementation details decide whether buyers actually use it.
Prices must be visible only after login, and consumer prices must not be. A buyer who logs in and still sees 34 dollars beside 17 will get confused, and a consumer who finds the 17 will ask why they cannot have it.
Quantities must default to the case pack. If your mug ships in fours, the wholesale product should add four at a time. Buyers ordering threes is a picking problem you created.
The minimum must be enforced at checkout with a clear message. Not "minimum 300 dollars" in small type on a page nobody reads; a line at the cart that says how much more is needed.
Newer Shopify accounts have business-to-business features built in: companies, locations, catalogs with their own price lists, and payment terms attached to a company rather than to a person. If those are available to you, they are cleaner than an app, because the concept matches reality. A shop is a company; the person emailing you is one of possibly several contacts; the terms belong to the shop.
If they are not available, an app that gates pricing by tag does the same job for a smaller range of cases. Either way, do not run two separate stores. Two stores means two inventory pools, two sets of product data and an oversell waiting to happen.
Inventory is the part that bites
This is the failure mode that hurts real money, and it has nothing to do with which app you chose.
Your online store sells ones, continuously. Wholesale sells forties, occasionally, and often against a purchase order confirmed weeks before the stock ships. If both draw on the same pool with no reservation, you will at some point sell the last case online on a Friday afternoon and discover on Monday that it was promised.
Options, in order of how much work they are.
Hold a buffer. Decide that the storefront never sells below, say, forty units of a hero product, and adjust the available quantity manually when a purchase order is confirmed. Crude, effective at low volume.
Use a second location. Create a wholesale location in your inventory settings and move committed stock to it, so the online channel cannot see it. This is the cleanest option for most brands and costs nothing.
Move to a system that understands committed stock, which is where brands end up once purchase orders are routine and production is scheduled against them. That is a bigger change and it belongs to the stage where running both channels properly becomes its own discipline.
Payment terms without losing control
The reason brands hesitate to put wholesale on their store is terms. A checkout wants a card; a buyer wants thirty days.
Three workable arrangements.
Card at checkout for the first order. The default for every new account and the one to state on your line sheet. No terms, no risk, no chasing.
Terms attached to the account after two paid orders. In a business-to-business setup this is a property of the company: net 30 buyers check out and the order is created with payment pending, then you invoice. Without that, the equivalent is the buyer emailing the order and you issuing an invoice manually, which is fine at low volume.
Deposit and balance for large or made-to-order runs. Half up front against production, half before shipping. Use this for any order big enough that you would have to buy materials specifically for it.
Whatever you choose, the terms belong in three places and must match in all of them: the line sheet, the account setup, and the invoice. Most disputes are not dishonesty, they are two documents saying different things.
What a wholesale buyer needs from the storefront
A trade buyer is not shopping. Design for speed.
They need the line sheet as a downloadable file, because they forward it to a business partner and annotate it. Keep a current PDF behind the login.
They need a reorder path that takes thirty seconds: a view of what they bought last time, with a button to order it again. This one feature does more for reorder rates than anything else on the page.
They need stock and lead time visible. Not exact counts, but whether a product is available now or in three weeks. A buyer planning a season will change their mix based on it.
They need item codes on screen, matching the codes on your line sheet and your cartons. Buyers write those codes onto their own purchase orders.
They do not need your brand story, your blog, a newsletter popup or a loyalty programme. Suppress all of it for logged-in trade accounts if you can.
When a wholesale storefront pays for itself
The honest trigger is annoyance measured in hours. If you are spending more than about half a day a month keying orders and answering "what was my price again," the setup work is worth it.
By account count, that tends to arrive somewhere between fifteen and thirty active stockists, and sooner if your range is wide or your buyers reorder often.
Two things to avoid. Do not build the portal before you have accounts; you will build for imagined buyers and rebuild it later. And do not treat the portal as a sales channel. Buyers do not browse and discover you. The portal makes reordering frictionless; finding stockists in the first place is outreach work, and the choices behind it belong in a DTC wholesale strategy.
If you have not yet worked out who those stockists would be, paste a product page into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of retailers and distributors that plausibly carry something like it, which is the list your portal will eventually serve.
Questions Shopify brands ask about wholesale setup
Should you use a separate domain for wholesale? Not at first. A gated section of your existing store keeps one inventory pool and one set of product data, which is worth more than a tidy URL.
How do you stop consumers finding wholesale prices? Require login for the trade catalog, keep the price list out of public pages and out of your sitemap, and never publish a wholesale price in plain text on the site.
What about sales tax on wholesale orders? In the United States, collect a resale certificate from each buyer and store it against the account before you ship. Tax settings on the account should reflect it, and the certificate is the document you need when asked.
Can you run trade and consumer checkouts side by side? Yes, and that is the point of customer groups. The same catalog, two price lists, one stock pool.
Does a portal replace the line sheet? No. Buyers still want a file they can read on a phone, forward and mark up. Keep both, and keep them identical.