Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
Searches for Plus B2B pricing mean one of two things, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other. One is what the plan costs a brand each month. The other is how prices are set for trade buyers once the B2B tools are switched on. This covers both, because a brand about to upgrade needs to model the second before it can judge the first.
The short version: the plan is a fixed monthly floor with a variable element that grows with volume, quoted rather than listed, and the B2B pricing inside it is built from fixed price lists attached to company accounts, not from percentage discounts applied at checkout.
What the plan actually costs, in shape rather than numbers
Any figure printed here goes stale, so treat the shape instead, because the shape is what your model needs.
The top plan is sold as a monthly platform fee with a minimum commitment, usually on an annual contract, and with a variable component that rises once your volume passes a threshold. There are also the costs that do not appear on that invoice: payment processing, which does not disappear; apps, which sometimes get cheaper because the plan replaces two or three of them; and implementation, which for most brands is a few weeks of somebody's attention rather than an agency project.
What matters for a decision is the delta, not the total. Take your current plan cost, add the apps the upgrade would let you cancel, and compare that number to the quoted commitment. For a brand paying for a wholesale pricing app, an ordering portal and a terms tool, the gap is smaller than the headline suggests. For a brand paying for none of those, the gap is the whole number.
The break-even arithmetic that decides it
Model it in gross margin dollars, not revenue, and use one year.
Say the upgrade costs you an extra two thousand dollars a month over what you pay now, after cancelling apps. That is twenty-four thousand a year of gross margin the wholesale channel has to produce just to stand still.
Now price your average case. A case of six candles at twelve dollars wholesale is seventy-two dollars, with cost of goods at forty-two, so thirty dollars of gross margin per case before freight. Twenty-four thousand dollars divided by thirty is eight hundred cases a year. At four orders a year per stockist and three cases an order, that is roughly sixty-seven active accounts.
That number is the test. If the upgrade is meant to pay for itself out of wholesale alone, you need something in that range, and most brands considering the move have a tenth of it.
Which is why the honest case for upgrading is almost never that it pays for itself out of new wholesale margin. It is either that the channel is already large enough that the hours and errors are costing more than the plan, or that the consumer side of the business needed the plan anyway and B2B arrives as a bonus. The feature-level version of that judgement is in is the upgrade worth it.
How pricing works once B2B is on
The second meaning of the query is the more useful one, because it changes how you think about wholesale prices generally.
Native B2B prices live in price lists attached to catalogs, and catalogs are attached to companies. A price list can hold a fixed price per product, which is the right way, or an adjustment off retail, which is the tempting way. The fixed price is right because your wholesale price should be derived from your cost and your channel economics, not from whatever your consumer price happens to be this week.
Set it as a number and a consumer promotion cannot reach it. Set it as an adjustment and every retail price change moves your trade price silently, which is the single most common way a wholesale margin quietly disappears. The structure for building those lists, including how many tiers to run, is in how to structure wholesale tiers, and the arithmetic for arriving at the number in the first place is in wholesale price versus retail price.
Volume breaks, currencies and the tiers you probably do not need
Price lists support quantity breaks, so a buyer taking four cases can pay less per unit than a buyer taking one. Useful, and easy to overuse. A break that is too generous teaches accounts to consolidate orders in a way that hurts your cash flow and gives away margin to the shops that were going to buy anyway.
Multiple currencies are handled per catalog, which matters if you sell across borders. Set the foreign price deliberately rather than letting a conversion do it, because a rate that drifts will eat a thin wholesale margin faster than anything else on this page.
As for tiers, most brands need one wholesale price and, later, a second for distributors who buy in pallet quantities and resell to shops. Three or four tiers on a brand with twelve accounts is a filing system pretending to be a strategy.
What the upgrade does not buy you
It does not buy buyers. That is not a throwaway line; it is the most common disappointment in this whole decision. A brand that upgrades because trade orders are painful gets relief. A brand that upgrades hoping the channel will start working gets a better-organised silence.
It also does not solve pricing discipline. A company account with a clean price list still leaks margin if you agree to one-off deals over email and never write them back into the list. And it does not collect your invoices, which is a separate operational habit covered in running net terms day to day.
If the problem is that you do not know which shops would stock the product, the tool for that is not a plan. Paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that carry comparable products, then decide whether the channel is large enough to justify anything.
A simple decision rule
Stay on your current plan if trade is under a fifth of revenue, accounts number under twenty, and no stockist has more than one buyer. Hand-run it and keep the money. The workarounds are laid out in wholesale without the upgrade.
Upgrade when order entry is eating a day a month, when several accounts are on terms you are tracking in your own notes, or when you have chains with multiple locations that break a single-customer model.
Upgrade earlier than that only if the consumer side of the business independently needs the plan. In that case B2B is not a cost centre at all, and the question becomes how quickly you can get the price lists right.
Questions brands ask about Plus B2B pricing
Is the plan cost published? It is quoted rather than listed, and it varies with volume and contract length, so build your model on the quote you are given rather than on a number from an article.
Does B2B cost extra on top of the plan? The trade tooling is part of the plan rather than a separate line. The costs that do get added are apps you keep and payment processing.
Can you run consumer and trade on one store? Yes, and that is the point of the company model. Trade buyers see their catalog and prices after logging in, consumers see the normal store.
Should wholesale prices be a share off retail? No. Hold them as fixed numbers so consumer promotions cannot reach them, which is the case made in why a price beats a discount.
How long does the migration take? The plan change is quick. Getting companies, catalogs and price lists right is the real work, and it is worth doing with your ten most important accounts first rather than all at once.