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 to do it, 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 are ordering the same forty lines every month through an interface built for someone browsing one product at a time. A variant picker that misbehaves after a platform update, a price that shows retail for a second before the app rewrites it, an order that has to be 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 are first-class: 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 can do 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 changes with the brand, so it is a recommendation made case by case rather than a default.

Neither is always the right answer, which is the point. B2B setups differ more than consumer ones do, and the best 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 are on Plus, or should be. A dedicated B2B app if you are not, or if your ordering needs a matrix of sizes and case quantities that native B2B handles less gracefully. Sometimes both, with an app's ordering screens sitting 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 maintained matters as much as how they display: if they live in your stock system, Shopify should read them from there rather than being kept up to date by hand.

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. Each needs deciding before it is built.

The stock system. Wholesale lives and dies on the sync with whatever holds 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 do not have. The integrations page covers how that is built.

Start with a B2B audit

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. For a brand where wholesale is the reason for the call, it becomes the main event. Ten working days, read-only, covering:

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

How they are priced. Every price list, tier and special arrangement currently in use, including the ones that only exist in someone's head or in 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 is transformed on the way and who finds out when it stops.

The report ends with your B2B requirements written down in one place, a recommendation on blended or separate and native or app-based with the reasoning, and a ballpark and timeline for the build. It is yours to act on with us, 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 the stockists keep ordering throughout. Done well, the first most of them hear about it is an email inviting them to log in to something better.

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

Who it is 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 who are 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 are not sure which of those you are, the audit will tell you.