Shopify B2B and wholesale

Wholesale is usually the oldest part of a Shopify setup. It was built as a second store, a password-protected collection or a pricing app, back when that was the only way, and it has been patched ever since. The consumer store gets redesigned every few years. The trade site gets a banner.

Your stockists notice. They order the same forty lines every month through a site built for someone browsing one product at a time. A variant picker that misbehaves after an update, a price that shows retail for a second before the app rewrites it, an order keyed into the stock system by hand on the other side. None of it is dramatic, and all of it costs you reorders.

What has changed

Shopify B2B grew up. On Plus, trade customers get company accounts with several buyers and locations, a catalogue and price list per company, payment terms, minimums and quantity rules, and a checkout that respects all of it. It can run on the same store as your consumer catalogue, or on a dedicated wholesale store under the same contract.

Off Plus, a well-chosen B2B app does much of the same job: quick-order forms, tiered and customer-specific pricing, minimums and case quantities, on any Shopify plan. Which app is worth it depends on the brand, so I recommend one case by case.

B2B setups differ far more than consumer ones, so the right tool depends on who your trade customers are and how they buy.

The decisions that shape a B2B build

Blended or separate. One store where the price and catalogue change on login, or a dedicated wholesale store with its own branding and a catalogue the public never sees. Blended is simpler to run. Separate suits a wholesale operation that behaves like a different business.

Native or an app. Native B2B if you're on Plus, or should be. A dedicated B2B app if you're not, or if your ordering needs a grid of sizes and case quantities that native B2B handles less gracefully. Sometimes both, with an app's ordering screens on top of native company accounts.

Pricing. A price list per customer, tiers by volume, a discount off retail, or all three. How prices are kept up to date matters as much as how they display: if they live in your stock system, Shopify should read them from there.

Terms and payment. Card at checkout, payment on invoice, net 30 for established accounts and card for new ones, credit limits, deposits on large orders. Each is possible, and each needs deciding before it's built.

The stock system. Wholesale lives and dies on the sync with whatever holds your stock and orders: Unleashed, Brightpearl, Cin7, NetSuite, or a spreadsheet someone emails on Mondays. Orders should flow out of Shopify without rekeying, and stock should flow back in before a stockist orders something you don't have. Integrations covers how that's built.

Start by writing it down

Most B2B projects go wrong before the build starts, because the requirements were never written down. Everyone knows how wholesale works, and everyone knows something slightly different.

The Shopify Plus audit has a B2B and Markets section in every report. When wholesale is the reason you got in touch, it becomes the main event, read-only throughout, and it covers:

Who buys. Your trade customers by type: independent shops, chains, cafés and hospitality, distributors. How many buyers and locations each has, and whether head office orders for the branches.

How they're priced. Every price list, tier and special arrangement in use, including the ones that only exist in someone's head or an app setting from 2019.

How they order and pay. What a typical order looks like, how often it repeats, minimums and case sizes, and which terms each account is on.

What the current setup costs. The second store, the apps holding it together, the manual work in between, and what has broken recently and why.

Where the data lives. The stock system, the sync, what changes on the way and who finds out when it stops.

The report ends with your B2B requirements in one place, and a recommendation on blended or separate, native or app, with the reasoning. It's yours to act on with me, with another developer or with your own team.

Moving off an old wholesale store

Replacing a trade site is mostly a migration problem. Customer accounts, company details, price lists and order history all move across, and stockists keep ordering throughout. Done well, the first most of them hear of it is an email inviting them to log in to something better.

So the new setup runs alongside the old one until it's proven, accounts are invited in batches starting with the friendliest, and the old store is retired only once the orders have moved. The migration checklist covers the same ground for a full replatform.

Who it's for

Brands selling to trade alongside consumers, with wholesale on an old second store or an app stack that has outlived its welcome. Brands on Plus paying for B2B and not using it. Brands not on Plus, weighing whether B2B is the reason to move up or whether an app will do. If you're not sure which of those you are, the audit will tell you.