Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
A B2B catalog is the assortment a wholesale account is allowed to order, paired with the prices they pay for it. Assign a catalog to a company and that company sees exactly those products at exactly those prices — nothing else in your store exists as far as their login is concerned.
That is a more powerful control than it first appears, because in wholesale the assortment question comes up constantly. Not everything you sell retail should be sold wholesale. Not every stockist should see everything you sell wholesale. And the distributor who buys in pallets should not be ordering the single-unit gift box you built for holiday consumer traffic.
Why assortment control matters more in wholesale
On the consumer side you show everyone everything, because a wider assortment raises the chance that a visitor finds something. Wholesale inverts that logic.
A buyer is not browsing. They are deciding what to allocate shelf space to, and every extra item on the line sheet is a decision they have to make. A boutique owner looking at forty items orders fewer SKUs, in smaller depth, than the same owner looking at twelve curated ones. Editing the assortment for them is a service, not a restriction.
There are also products that should never appear. Items with no wholesale margin. Bundles that only make sense at consumer prices. Seasonal sets you cannot restock. A limited run already committed to another account. Each one, left visible, produces the same conversation: a buyer asks for it, you explain why not, and the order gets smaller while the goodwill gets thinner.
The catalog structures that work
Three patterns cover most brands. Pick the simplest one that fits, because catalogs multiply faster than you expect.
One wholesale catalog. Every trade account sees the same assortment at the same prices. This is right for the first year or two, and for brands with a tight SKU count. It is also the easiest to maintain: one place to add a new product, one place to retire an old one.
Catalog by account type. Usually three: boutique, distributor, and a larger-format retail set. They differ in which pack configurations appear and often in which products are included at all — a distributor catalog might carry only full-case items, while the boutique catalog includes counter displays and smaller packs. Pricing differs across them too, which is the price list side of the same decision.
Catalog by season or programme. A core catalog that runs all year, plus a seasonal one assigned to accounts who committed to the seasonal programme. Useful for brands with a holiday or spring release, and cleaner than adding and removing products from a single list four times a year.
What does not work: one catalog per account. It feels accommodating and it makes your catalog unauditable. Within a year nobody can answer which accounts can order a given product, and adding a new SKU means editing thirty catalogs. If an account genuinely needs a unique assortment, that is a tier, and other accounts should be able to enter it on stated criteria.
What to leave out
Run through your product list once with these four filters and the decisions get easy.
No margin at wholesale. If halving the retail price leaves you at or below landed cost, the item cannot be sold wholesale as it stands. It either gets repackaged, repriced, or excluded. Excluding it is often the right answer — a hero product carrying your consumer business does not have to earn in both channels.
Cannot be restocked. Anything limited, one-off or supply-constrained. A buyer who sells through and cannot reorder does not think fondly of your brand; they think the shelf has a gap.
Wrong pack format. Fragile items you have never shipped in a case of twelve, or products whose consumer packaging does not survive a pallet. These are excluded until the packaging exists, not aspirationally listed.
Consumer-only constructions. Subscription items, personalised products, bundles assembled for a campaign. These break in a wholesale order in ways that are tedious to unpick.
Everything else goes in the core catalog, and you edit down from there.
How catalogs interact with price lists and quantity rules
These three features are usually configured together and it helps to keep their jobs separate in your head.
The catalog answers what can be ordered. The price list answers what it costs. Quantity rules answer how much has to be ordered at once. Mixing them up produces two familiar mistakes.
The first is expressing exclusivity through pricing — setting a product absurdly high for accounts who should not have it, instead of removing it from their catalog. Buyers see the price, ask about it, and you have a conversation you did not want.
The second is expressing a pack format through the catalog — creating a separate case-pack product so distributors get the right quantity. That splits inventory and duplicates your catalog maintenance. The pack format belongs in quantity rules, applied to the same product.
Keep one product record per physical thing you make. Vary who sees it, what they pay, and how many they must take.
Keeping catalogs current
The maintenance load is small but it does not forgive neglect, because a stale catalog shows up as a buyer ordering something you no longer make.
Set a rhythm tied to your product cycle rather than to the calendar. When a product launches, decide its wholesale status at the same time you decide its retail price — not three months later when a buyer asks. When a product is discontinued, remove it from every catalog the same day it stops being orderable, then let existing stock sell through on the retail side.
Photography and item numbers deserve a mention. Buyers order from item numbers, not from names, and they order from images that show the product alone against a plain background, not from lifestyle shots. A catalog that looks right on your consumer storefront can still be unusable on a line sheet, which is why the PDF version usually needs its own images.
Keep a single source of truth for the assortment — a spreadsheet with item number, case pack, wholesale price, suggested retail and status — and generate both the catalog and the line sheet from it. Brands that maintain the store and the PDF independently end up sending buyers prices that do not match the portal.
Catalogs are not a substitute for demand
An assortment strategy only matters once accounts exist to assign it to. This is the sequencing error that costs DTC brands the most time going into wholesale: weeks spent designing three tiers of catalog for a channel with four stockists in it.
Build one catalog, land accounts, and let the structure emerge from what buyers actually ask for. The distributor who wants full-case-only pricing will tell you, and then you build that catalog with real requirements rather than guesses.
If the bottleneck is finding those buyers in the first place, start from the product. Paste a product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of shops, distributors and chains that plausibly stock something like it, which tells you whether the assortment work is worth doing yet. The rest of the feature set it plugs into is mapped in Shopify B2B features.
Questions brands ask about B2B catalogs
Can one company have two catalogs? Typically a company is assigned one catalog at a time, which is why seasonal programmes are usually handled as a catalog swap rather than an addition. Check the behaviour before you design around it.
What happens to an order in progress when I change a catalog? Carts can go stale. If you remove a product mid-season, tell affected accounts rather than letting them discover it at checkout, and expect at least one order to need fixing.
Should my wholesale catalog match my line sheet exactly? Yes. Any divergence becomes an email from a buyer who found a price difference, and those emails cost more trust than the effort of keeping them in sync.
Do catalogs hide products from search engines? They control what a logged-in company sees. They are not a security boundary for the rest of your store, so check your product feeds and any page that renders a trade price to a logged-out visitor separately.
How many catalogs is too many? If you cannot name each one and say who it is for without looking, you have too many. Three is comfortable, five is manageable, one per account is a spreadsheet pretending to be a system. The same principle applies to payment terms: define tiers, not exceptions.