Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
Shopify B2B is a set of native features that let one Shopify store sell to wholesale accounts and retail shoppers at the same time, on the same theme, without a separate site or a third-party app. Instead of a customer record, a wholesale buyer belongs to a company; the company gets its own catalog, its own prices, its own payment terms and its own ordering rules, and everything else about the store stays as it is.
Those features are part of Shopify's higher, enterprise-level plan rather than the standard ones, which is the single fact that decides whether this article is a setup guide for you or a description of where you are heading. Either way, knowing how the pieces fit is what lets you judge the alternatives.
The core idea: companies, not customers
The change that makes everything else work is structural. Retail Shopify has customers. B2B adds a company object above them.
A company represents the business you sell to. Under it sit one or more locations — the shop itself, a second branch, a separate billing office — and each location carries its own address, tax settings, payment terms and assigned catalog. Under those sit the contacts, the actual people who log in and order, with permissions that say whether they can place orders or only draft them.
That hierarchy matters practically. A mini-chain with four shops can have one account with four locations, each ordering to its own address on the same terms, with a single invoice trail. The same structure lets you give one location different prices from another, which is how you handle a customer who is also a distributor in one region.
Buyers reach it through customer accounts: they log in with their email, and what they see is your normal storefront with their own catalog and prices applied. No separate password page, no duplicate product data.
Catalogs and price lists
A catalog is the combination of which products a company can see and what they pay for them. Assign a catalog to a company location and that location gets that view of your store.
Prices inside a catalog come from a price list, and there are two ways to build one. You can apply a proportional adjustment off your retail price across a whole collection — a straightforward way to express "half of retail on everything" — or you can set fixed per-product prices, which is what you want for products whose margin does not tolerate a blanket rule. Most brands use a broad adjustment as the base and override specific products.
Because a catalog also controls visibility, it solves two problems at once. You can hide the products you do not wholesale, such as bundles or limited runs, so buyers never ask for them. And you can build a second catalog at different prices for a distributor or an export account without any of it being visible to anyone else.
A practical warning: the more catalogs you create, the more maintenance you own. Two or three is manageable. A catalog per account becomes a job.
Ordering rules that protect your margin
Wholesale falls apart when a store orders three units of one thing. The native quantity rules exist to stop that.
For each product in a catalog you can set a minimum, a maximum and an increment. The increment is the important one, because it is how you enforce case packs: set it to six and the cart will only accept six, twelve, eighteen. Combined with a minimum, it makes case-pack ordering automatic rather than something you correct by email.
Alongside those, an order minimum on the company sets a floor for the whole order, expressed as a value or a quantity, so freight stays sensible. Decide this number from a real shipping quote rather than instinct — the way to work out what a case actually earns you after freight is in is wholesale profitable for small brands.
Payment terms and B2B checkout
Retail checkout takes money now. Wholesale often does not, and the native checkout handles both.
Each company location carries payment terms: due on receipt, due on fulfilment, or a net period such as thirty or sixty days. A buyer checking out on terms places the order without paying, and you get an invoice you can send and track against that order. You can also allow a deposit, so part of the value is collected up front and the balance falls due later, which is a reasonable middle position for a new account.
Stored payment methods work too, so a repeat account can be charged to a card or a bank mandate on file without you handling details. Tax exemption is set at the location level, which is how you handle a retailer's resale certificate without hand-editing orders.
The pattern most brands settle on: payment in advance for a company's first order, terms unlocked after two paid orders. That is a policy decision rather than a software one, and it belongs in the trade terms document described in independent brand wholesale.
What it does not do
Being clear about the gaps saves a disappointing month.
It is not a sales tool. There is no built-in prospecting, no pipeline, no outreach. Finding buyers is a separate exercise entirely, and the software only begins once a buyer wants to order.
Complex quoting and negotiation are limited. Drafting an order and sending it for approval is supported, but a back-and-forth quote process with versions and expiry dates is not what the native tooling is for. Brands with heavy quoting usually add an app or handle it by email.
Deep purchasing-system integrations — the kind larger distributors and chains sometimes require — are an integration project, not a setting.
And the storefront is still your storefront. Themes need some care so a logged-in buyer sees case packs and trade information rather than consumer copy about gift wrapping. Most of that is small theme work, but it is work.
Is it worth moving plans for?
The honest answer is that the features are excellent and the plan is a serious monthly commitment, so the decision is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm.
Compare the plan difference against what wholesale actually costs you today in app subscriptions and, more importantly, in hours. If you have a handful of accounts, an emailed order form and a draft order take fifteen minutes an order and the answer is clearly no. If you have thirty accounts, several price tiers, case packs you correct by hand, and buyers who order at night, the hours add up quickly and the native tooling starts paying for itself.
A sensible sequence for a growing brand: run wholesale manually until the process hurts, then move to a tagged or app-based setup on your current plan, then move to native B2B when the number of accounts or the complexity of pricing makes it cheaper than the alternative. The middle step, and how to run it well, is covered in Shopify wholesale.
Whatever the stage, the bottleneck is almost never the software. It is having enough of the right accounts to justify it. Pasting a product link into WholesalePilot gives a preview of the retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, which is the part the store platform cannot do for you.
Getting the setup right the first time
If you are configuring this, a short order of operations avoids most of the rework.
Decide your price architecture before you touch the admin: how many tiers exist, what each one is for, and which products are excluded from wholesale entirely. Build one catalog per tier, not per account. Set quantity increments to your case packs at the same time, so they are never wrong. Create companies with the locations that really exist, because splitting a company later is tedious. Set payment terms per location according to your policy rather than per conversation. Then test a full order as a buyer, on terms, including tax exemption, before you invite anyone.
Finally, watch your inventory. Retail and wholesale drawing on one pool is convenient until a large purchase order empties the shelf your own store was selling from. Either hold wholesale stock at its own location or keep a buffer you do not sell down.
Questions about Shopify's B2B features
Can one store really serve retail and wholesale at once? Yes. That is the point of the design: the same products, inventory and theme, with catalog, price and checkout behaviour changing for logged-in company contacts.
Do wholesale prices show to retail shoppers? No. Trade prices apply only to a contact logged into a company with that catalog assigned.
Can a single company have different prices per location? Yes, by assigning different catalogs to different locations, which also covers export or distributor pricing within one account.
What happens to existing wholesale customers set up with tags and discounts? They are migrated by creating companies and assigning catalogs. Plan it as a short project, and tell buyers their login experience is changing.
Does it handle quotes? Lightly. Orders can be drafted and sent for approval, but a full quoting workflow usually needs an app or an email process alongside.