Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
If you are searching for the Shopify wholesale channel, the short answer is that the separate, password-protected wholesale storefront that brands on the top plan used for years has been superseded by B2B features that live on your main store. Wholesale is no longer a second site you send buyers to; it is a different experience of the same storefront, applied to buyers who log in as a company.
That is a genuine improvement for most brands, and it does change a few habits. This is what the old setup was, what the current one does differently, and how to move a legacy trade site across without losing accounts along the way.
What the old channel was
The original wholesale channel was a distinct storefront attached to your account. It had its own URL, its own stripped-back theme that you could not really redesign, and a single shared password or an invite you sent to approved retailers. Inside, buyers saw trade prices, placed orders, and you invoiced them.
It solved the core problem of its time neatly: trade prices were completely invisible to consumers, because they lived on a different site. Inventory was shared with the main store, so you were not running two catalogues by hand.
Its limitations were the ones brands complained about for years. The theme was fixed, so the trade experience could not match your brand. Buyers disliked the shared-password model because it felt like a back door rather than an account. Checkout behaviour was limited, so terms and deposits were awkward. And because it was a separate surface, anything you improved on your main store — a new product template, better photography, a size guide — did not appear there.
What replaced it
The current approach keeps one storefront and changes what a logged-in buyer sees. The building blocks are companies, catalogs and terms.
A wholesale customer is represented as a company, with one or more locations and named contacts who log in with their own email. Each location is assigned a catalog, which controls both which products that buyer can see and what they pay, via a price list built proportionally off retail or as fixed per-product prices. Quantity rules enforce case packs by setting an ordering increment. Payment terms sit on the location, so an account can check out on a net period, or with a deposit, without paying in full at the moment of order.
The practical effect is that your trade buyers now use your real store, on your real theme, with their own login. Improvements to the storefront reach them automatically. What it looks like in detail is set out in Shopify B2B.
One word about the word "channel." In Shopify's vocabulary today, sales channels are the places your products appear — the online store, point of sale, marketplaces. Wholesale is no longer one of those. It is a mode of the online store, which is why searching for a channel to install turns up nothing to install.
What this changes in practice
Four habits change when you move from a separate trade site to B2B on the main store.
Access control moves from a password to an account. You stop sending a shared password and start creating a company and inviting contacts. This is better — access can be revoked per person, and you can see who ordered — and it means approving retailers becomes a small administrative routine rather than forwarding a link.
Your theme has to work for two audiences. A logged-in buyer sees the same product page as a shopper, so it needs to show case pack and trade-relevant information when a company is logged in, and consumer messaging otherwise. This is modest theme work but it is real work, and it is the step brands underestimate.
Pricing lives in catalogs, not in a separate site's price fields. That centralises maintenance, and it means a price change has to be made deliberately per catalog rather than once in a trade storefront.
Trade prices are protected by login rather than by separation. The protection is solid, but it deserves a test: log out, view the products, and confirm no trade price is visible anywhere, including in search results on your own site.
Migrating a legacy trade storefront
If you still run a separate wholesale site, whether it was the original channel or a second store you built yourself, the move is a short project rather than a big one. The order matters.
- Export your accounts. Every stockist, contact name, email, shipping and billing address, tax status and the price level they are on. This list is the migration.
- Decide the catalog architecture. Usually two or three catalogs — boutique, distributor, export — not one per account. Map each existing account to one of them, and take the opportunity to retire prices you negotiated once and never revisited.
- Build the catalogs and price lists, then set quantity increments to your real case packs while you are in there.
- Create the companies, with the locations that genuinely exist. A mini-chain with three shops should be one company with three locations, not three companies.
- Fix the theme so a logged-in buyer sees what they need: case pack, unit price, minimum order, lead time.
- Test a full order as a buyer — on terms, with tax exemption, at a case-pack quantity — before anyone else sees it.
- Tell your accounts before you switch, with a short message: the old link will stop working on a date, here is your new login, here is who to email if anything looks wrong. Send it twice.
- Keep the old site reachable for a few weeks if you can, redirecting to the new login, because buyers have the old URL bookmarked.
The risk in this migration is not technical. It is a stockist who tries to place a reorder, finds a dead link, and quietly orders from someone else. Over-communicate the switch.
If you are not on the plan that includes B2B
Plenty of brands searching for the wholesale channel are on a standard plan and would not have had access to the original either. The honest answer is that you do not need it yet.
Wholesale for a small number of accounts runs perfectly on draft orders and invoices, and the next step up — a trade area of your existing store gated by customer tags, with an app applying trade prices and enforcing case packs — covers most of what the old channel did. Both are described, with the point at which each stops working, in Shopify wholesale.
What is no longer worth doing is the thing the old channel's absence used to push brands towards: building a second, password-protected Shopify store purely for trade. It duplicates products, inventory and subscriptions, and it gives buyers a login experience that already felt dated when it was the standard. Platforms that solve this with customer groups on a single storefront take the same one-store view; the comparison is in BigCommerce B2B.
The question the channel never answered
Whichever setup you land on, it begins at the moment a retailer already wants to buy from you. None of it produces that retailer.
That is the real constraint for most brands adding wholesale, and it is why a beautifully configured trade area often sits empty for months. Pasting a product link into WholesalePilot gives a preview of the retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, which is the input none of these platforms can generate.
Build the ordering experience in proportion to the accounts you have. Ten stockists ordering by email is a working wholesale business, and the configuration can follow the demand rather than anticipate it.
Questions about the Shopify wholesale channel
Can you still create a separate wholesale storefront? You can build a second store yourself, but there is no longer a dedicated wholesale channel to add, and a second store means duplicated products and inventory.
Did prices and accounts carry over automatically? No. Moving from a separate trade site means recreating accounts as companies and rebuilding prices as catalogs, which is why an export of your account list is step one.
Do buyers need a new login? Yes. Company contacts log in with their own email rather than a shared password, so every stockist needs an invitation before the switch.
Is the trade experience still separate from retail? It is separated by login rather than by site. Logged-out visitors see your consumer store; a logged-in company contact sees their catalog and prices.
What happens to old bookmarks and links? They break unless you redirect them. Plan a redirect and a direct message to every active account before the cutover.