Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
The old Wholesale Channel was a second, password-protected storefront on its own subdomain, sold as an add-on to the top Shopify plan. Shopify B2B is the replacement, and it works the other way around: wholesale lives inside your main store, and what a buyer sees is decided by who they are logged in as rather than by which URL they visited.
That single change — from a separate site to a separate identity — is the thing to understand. Everything else, from how price lists behave to why your stock counts stop lying, falls out of it.
The two models in one paragraph each
The Wholesale Channel gave you a parallel shop. It had its own theme, its own product list, its own URL, and its own customer accounts. You invited a boutique, they logged into that site, and they saw wholesale prices there. Your consumer store carried on separately, with its own copy of every product.
Shopify B2B gives you one store and one product catalogue. A buyer belongs to a company, the company is attached to a catalog and a price list, and when that buyer logs into your normal store they see wholesale prices on the same product pages your consumer customers see at retail. Nobody else sees them. The feature set behind that is walked through in Shopify B2B.
One storefront with two audiences, instead of two storefronts with one product each.
What actually changes for your day-to-day
Products stop being duplicated. On the old channel you effectively maintained two catalogues, and every new scent, photo or description had to be added twice. Under the company model there is one product record, and the price attached to it depends on who is asking.
Stock stops lying. Two storefronts meant either a shared stock pool you could oversell or a split pool you had to guess at. With one catalogue, the twelve cases in your spare room are twelve cases, whether the next order is a boutique buying six or a customer buying one.
The theme is one theme. No second design to keep in step, no trade site that still shows last winter's hero image. The trade experience is your store, with the prices swapped and the trade-only pages hidden from consumers.
The login is the gate. Access control moved from a password on a URL to an account attached to a company. That is stricter and easier to audit: you can see exactly which buyers at which shops can place an order, and turn one off without changing a shared password.
Terms became structured. Payment terms are a field on the company rather than a note you keep in a spreadsheet, which makes chasing invoices less improvisational. What to actually put in that field is the subject of Shopify B2B payment terms.
How pricing differs between the two
The old channel leaned on percentage-off price lists applied to your retail prices. That is convenient until it is not: a retail sale, a rounded price change, or a currency conversion quietly drags the wholesale price with it.
The company model supports fixed prices per product per price list, and fixed prices are what you want. Your candle is twelve dollars wholesale because twelve dollars is the number on your line sheet, not because it happens to be half of twenty-four this week. When you run a summer sale and drop the retail candle to nineteen, the wholesale price does not move.
Work an example. Retail twenty-four dollars, wholesale twelve, case of six, landed cost five dollars twenty. A case invoices at seventy-two and costs you thirty-one dollars twenty, leaving forty dollars eighty. Under a rule that takes half off retail, a four-day sale at nineteen dollars retail would quietly invoice that case at fifty-seven dollars, turning forty dollars eighty of contribution into twenty-five dollars eighty. Nobody notices until the month closes.
The structuring advice — how many tiers, where volume breaks go, why rounding matters — is in Shopify B2B price lists.
What you lose in the move
Honesty first: the separate storefront had two genuine advantages, and neither is fully replaced.
You lose a trade-only front page. On the old channel, the first thing a buyer saw was built for a buyer: case packs, a downloadable line sheet, a bestseller row ordered by sell-through. Under the company model the buyer lands on a consumer homepage with consumer photography and a newsletter popup. You can build trade-only pages and show them to logged-in companies, but it is work you have to do rather than a site you were given.
You also lose a hard wall between the two audiences. A separate URL made it impossible for a consumer to see wholesale pricing by accident. Now the wall is your configuration: catalogs, customer accounts, and any page or section you have gated. Misconfigure it and a retail shopper sees a trade price. Test it with a logged-out browser before you tell anyone the portal is live.
Which one are you actually on?
Three quick checks.
If your wholesale customers log in at a subdomain that is not your main store, and the trade site has its own theme editor, you are on a legacy setup regardless of what the sidebar calls it.
If your trade buyers log into your main store and see different prices on the same product pages, you are on the company model.
If your wholesale is a spreadsheet, a PDF line sheet and draft orders you build by hand, you are on neither, and that is a perfectly reasonable place to be for the first ten accounts. Draft orders cost nothing extra and make the invoicing explicit, and a tagged trade group with an app covers most of the rest.
Is the newer model worth the plan it sits on?
Native B2B lives on the top plan, so the real comparison is not between two features, it is between a plan cost and the admin time a manual process eats.
Do it in cases. If the difference between plans plus any apps comes to a few hundred dollars a month, and your contribution is forty dollars eighty a case, you need roughly seven to ten cases a month of genuinely new volume — or the equivalent in hours you stop spending on manual order entry — before the upgrade pays for itself.
A brand with six accounts ordering twice a year does not clear that bar. A brand with twenty-five accounts, two of which reorder monthly and all of which want their own price list and terms, clears it easily and is probably already losing more than that to mistakes. The fuller version of the comparison sits in Shopify Plus B2B.
What to do if you are still running the old channel
Do not panic-migrate, and do not wait for something to break either. Work through it in a defined order: list every active account and what they pay, decide which of those prices survive as fixed numbers, rebuild the accounts as companies with buyers attached, redirect the old trade URLs, and only then tell your stockists the login has moved.
The one step brands skip is the last one. A boutique that tries the old address, gets an error, and hears nothing will not chase you — they will just reorder from someone else. Send the new login with a one-line explanation and a first order that is easy to place.
The step-by-step version of that migration, including what breaks and in what order to move, is in the Shopify wholesale channel deprecation.
A migration is also a good moment to notice how short the account list is. If yours is, paste your store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, then work that list while the new portal is still fresh in your head. If part of what you are weighing is whether to keep a second storefront at all, a separate wholesale store on Shopify makes the case for and against.
Questions brands ask about the change
Does the company model work on a standard Shopify plan? Not natively. Standard plans can run wholesale with tagged customers, draft orders or an app, which covers a lot of ground before the upgrade is forced.
Can one shop have several buyers? Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to move. A store with an owner and a manager can have two logins on one company, with one shared price list and one set of terms.
Will trade prices show up in search results? They should not, because they render only for a logged-in buyer attached to a company. Verify it yourself in a private window rather than trusting the setting.
Do I need a separate line sheet if the portal shows prices? Yes. Buyers plan their orders away from the screen, and a PDF with case packs and prices still does work the portal cannot do during a buying appointment.