Shopify can run a wholesale operation properly, and since April 2026 a good deal of the B2B toolkit is no longer reserved for Shopify Plus. What it can't do is decide how your trade business works. The stores that end up with a wholesale side creating more admin than revenue are the ones that switched on features before anyone wrote down how their trade customers buy, what they pay and when they pay it.
So start with the trade customer, then pick the setup. The configuration follows from three questions: how pricing is set for each account, how and when trade customers pay and whether they need to see a different store from your retail buyers. Answer those and the choice between standard Shopify, apps and Plus becomes fairly mechanical.
Map how your trade customers buy before you configure anything
Most established wholesale operations have grown by agreement rather than design. One stockist negotiated a better rate in 2019, a hospitality group gets free freight over a certain spend and a handful of long-standing accounts still email orders to the sales rep. None of that is written down in a form a platform can read, and every exception becomes a workaround once the store goes live.
Before any setup work, pull the last twelve months of wholesale orders and sort accounts into groups by how they are priced. Some businesses find they have three price structures with a few exceptions. Others find nearly every account is on its own terms, which is a very different build. The answer decides which Shopify setup fits.
Pricing structure
A flat trade discount across the range is the simplest case and works on any Shopify plan. Tiered pricing, where distributors get one rate and retailers another, needs separate price lists. Account-specific pricing, where each customer has negotiated rates on particular products, needs a platform that can assign prices to individual companies directly.
Ordering behaviour
Trade buyers order differently from retail ones. They reorder the same twenty lines every month, buy in case quantities and want to see stock levels before they commit. A wholesale portal that makes them browse like a retail customer, adding items one at a time from collection pages, sends them back to emailing your rep within a month.
Payment and credit
Retail customers pay at checkout. Trade customers expect to pay on account, on 20th-of-the-month or net 30 terms, and your finance team expects to manage their credit limits. How Shopify handles that, and how the invoice reaches your accounting system, is where most of the manual work in a badly configured wholesale setup lives.
What standard Shopify now handles natively
In April 2026 Shopify extended its native B2B features to the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans at no extra cost. Stores on those plans can now create company profiles for trade accounts, set payment terms, apply volume pricing and run up to three active B2B catalogues, assigned through Markets.
For a business with one or two trade price lists and buyers who pay on terms, that covers most of what was previously only possible on Plus or through a stack of apps. A distributor tier and a retailer tier, each with its own prices and minimum quantities, can now sit inside a standard plan. Trade buyers log in to company accounts, see their own pricing and place orders that are flagged for payment on terms instead of taken by card.
The limits decide whether you outgrow the setup, so get them precise. Non-Plus stores are capped at three active catalogues, and those catalogues are assigned through Markets rather than directly to a company or location. Unlimited catalogues for customer-specific pricing, direct assignment to individual companies, partial payments and deposits all remain Plus features. Our guide to Shopify plans covers the wider differences between tiers.
When Shopify Plus earns its cost for wholesale
Plus becomes the commercially sound choice when your pricing is set account by account. If you have forty trade customers on forty negotiated rate cards, three catalogues won't hold them, and trying to approximate the structure with discount codes produces errors your accounts team will spend hours finding.
Plus also matters when wholesale orders are large enough that deposits or partial payments are part of the process, when individual companies have multiple locations ordering on separate terms or when the trade side needs its own checkout fields for purchase order numbers and delivery instructions. Plus can also run a separate expansion store for wholesale under the same plan, which some businesses prefer when the trade catalogue, imagery and messaging bear little resemblance to retail. We set out the wider case in our Shopify Plus service overview, including when the volume of the retail side alone justifies it.
Where apps still fit
Before 2026, apps did most of the heavy lifting for wholesale on standard Shopify. Account-gating tools like Locksmith hid trade products behind a login, and wholesale pricing apps applied discounts based on customer tags. Those apps still work, and there are cases where they remain the right answer, particularly for very simple trade setups or for specific features the native tools don't cover.
Each one adds a subscription and code that loads on the storefront. A wholesale setup that relies on four apps to gate products, change prices, enforce minimums and generate invoices has four points where an update can change behaviour without warning. If native B2B now covers what those apps were doing, retiring them is worth doing on its own merits. Our piece on cleaning up a Shopify app stack covers how to remove them without breaking the store.
One storefront or two
Running retail and trade through one storefront keeps your product data in one place, one set of stock levels and one theme to maintain. Trade buyers log in and the store changes around them: prices, minimum quantities, payment options and sometimes the products they can see. For businesses where trade and retail buy broadly the same range, a single storefront is simpler to run.
A separate wholesale storefront makes sense when the trade experience needs to look and behave differently. A trade portal built for fast reordering, with a quick-order list, case quantities shown up front and no lifestyle imagery between the buyer and the order form, can be the better commercial decision when wholesale is a large share of revenue. The cost is a second storefront to keep in step with the first, which is manageable when the product data comes from one source.
What the trade buyer should see after login
Whichever structure you choose, design the logged-in experience around reordering. Give trade buyers order history with a one-click reorder, pricing shown inclusive of their terms, stock visibility before they commit and a clear statement of what freight will cost on an order of this size. Trade buyers measure a supplier's portal against the time it takes to email a rep, and the portal has to beat that.
Getting wholesale orders into accounting without rekeying
Payment terms create the integration problem that catches most businesses. A retail order arrives paid. A trade order arrives as an obligation to invoice, and that invoice needs to appear in Xero, MYOB or your ERP with the right customer, the right terms and the right GST treatment. If it doesn't, someone rekeys it.
Decide early which system owns the customer record and the credit limit. Many established wholesalers manage trade accounts in their ERP or accounting system and need Shopify to read from it, while others are happy to manage company profiles inside Shopify and push invoices out. Either works, as long as only one system is the source of truth. We cover how those connections get scoped in complex Shopify integrations with ERP and accounting systems.
Advintage is a useful reference here. Their move from Magento to Shopify carried more than 5,000 SKUs, wholesale pricing, complex discount and stock management and an ERP integration, with zero customer downtime. Skyrocket scoped and managed that integration with the ERP partner, so wholesale pricing and stock levels were correct from the first day on Shopify.
A sensible order of work
For a business adding or rebuilding a wholesale channel on Shopify, the sequence that avoids rework runs like this:
- Document every trade pricing structure, payment term and minimum order rule currently in use, including the exceptions.
- Group accounts into catalogues and count them. Three or fewer points to a standard plan; more than that, or pricing set account by account, points to Plus.
- Decide which system owns customers, pricing and credit, and scope the accounting or ERP connection before the storefront is designed.
- Design the trade experience around reordering, alongside the build, so the portal is shaped by how buyers order.
- Run real trade orders through the full process, from login to invoice in your accounting system, before inviting customers in.
If you'd like a second view on whether your trade setup fits a standard plan or needs Plus, get in touch and we'll work through your price structures with you.
Common questions
Can I run wholesale on Shopify without upgrading to Shopify Plus?
Yes, for many businesses. Since April 2026, Shopify's Basic, Grow and Advanced plans include company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and up to three active B2B catalogues at no extra cost. That covers a business with a small number of trade price tiers. You need Plus when pricing is negotiated per account, when you need more than three catalogues or when deposits and partial payments are part of how you sell.
How do I show different prices to wholesale and retail customers on Shopify?
Set up company profiles for your trade accounts and assign them to a B2B catalogue that holds the wholesale prices. When a trade buyer logs in, the store shows their catalogue prices and minimum quantities, while retail visitors see standard pricing. On non-Plus plans catalogues are assigned through Markets. On Plus they can be assigned directly to individual companies and their locations.
Can wholesale customers pay on account through Shopify?
They can, because payment terms are now available on standard plans as well as Plus, so trade buyers can place orders that are invoiced on terms such as net 30 instead of paid by card at checkout. The part to plan carefully is how those orders reach your accounting system as invoices with the right customer, terms and GST treatment, so nobody has to rekey them.
Should wholesale and retail be on the same Shopify store?
If trade and retail customers buy largely the same range, one storefront with logged-in trade pricing is simpler to run and keeps stock and product data in one place. A separate wholesale storefront suits businesses where trade buyers need a different experience, such as a fast reorder portal without retail imagery. Plus can run a separate expansion store for this under the same plan.
Do I still need a wholesale app now Shopify has native B2B?
Fewer businesses need one. Native B2B features now handle company accounts, trade catalogues, volume pricing and payment terms on standard plans. Apps still have a place for specific needs the native tools don't cover, or for very simple setups. Where native features now do what an app was doing, removing the app saves a subscription and reduces the code loading on your storefront.
