A B2B ecommerce agencythat won't sell you Shopify Plus you don't need
On April 2, 2026, Shopify B2B stopped being a Plus feature. Company profiles, three catalogs, payment terms, volume pricing, ACH and vaulted credit cards came to Basic, Grow and Advanced at no extra cost. The cheapest route to a native wholesale channel is now Basic at $29 a month paid yearly, or $39 month to month. Shopify Plus still starts at $2,300 a month. Most brands being quoted for Plus to run wholesale don't need it, and we'll show you why before we show you a scope.
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Your Wholesale Channel Still Runs On Email
Somewhere in your business, a rep has a spreadsheet open and is retyping an order that arrived as a PDF. A buyer is emailing to ask what they paid last time. Your linesheet is a file with a version number in the name. None of that is a technology problem yet. It is a capacity problem, and it quietly caps how many accounts you can carry.
Then it becomes a visibility problem. A distributor with a thinner catalog and a worse product has a portal where your buyer can log in at eleven at night, see their own pricing, and reorder in thirty seconds. They are not better than you. Their buying experience just beat you to the punch, and buyers reorder where reordering is easy.
Not the biggest build. Not the easiest sale. The one your accounts actually require.
For years, the answer to "we want to sell wholesale on Shopify" was one word: Plus. Agencies quoted it. Merchants budgeted for it. Nobody had much reason to push back, because native B2B genuinely was Plus-only.
That ended on April 2, 2026. Shopify extended company profiles, up to three B2B catalogs, net payment terms, volume pricing, quantity rules, ACH and vaulted credit cards to the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans at no additional cost. A native wholesale channel now starts at $29 a month on Basic paid yearly. Shopify Plus still starts at $2,300 a month.
The pitch has not caught up. Plus is still the reflexive recommendation, because it is an easier sale and a bigger build. That is a bad trade for you and eventually a bad trade for us. A brand that overpays for a tier it never uses does not trust the next recommendation, and the next recommendation is usually the one that matters.
So we answer the plan question first, in writing, before scope. Four capabilities genuinely require Plus. If your accounts need them, we will say so and build them. If they do not, we will build your wholesale channel on the plan you already pay for and put the difference into the buyer experience, which is the part that actually moves reorders.
What You Should Get From A B2B Ecommerce Agency
The Tier Decision, Answered First
Before scope, before design, before a number. We map what your accounts actually need against what each Shopify plan carries, and we tell you where the line falls even when the answer is cheap.
Companies, Locations And Catalogs, Mapped Once
Shopify binds a catalog to a company location, not to the parent company. Map that wrong and every buyer at a multi-site account sees the wrong price.
A Reorder That Takes Thirty Seconds
Your buyer's fourth order this quarter should not require a conversation. We build the B2B ecommerce portal they log into, on a theme that works on a phone in a stockroom.
Net Terms That Do Not Turn Into Chasing
Shopify documents it plainly: payments are not captured automatically when terms expire, and manual charging is required unless someone builds the automation.
Shopify And Your ERP, Agreed On One Truth
Your negotiated pricing lives in the ERP. It has to land in Shopify without drifting, and both systems have to stop arguing about who owns collections.
Numbers You Can Defend In A Board Meeting
Every engagement reports on what a wholesale channel is supposed to move, not on deliverables shipped.
Find Out If You Need Shopify Plus Before You Buy It
A free Growth Audit is a no-obligation look at your wholesale setup: which plan fits your accounts, where your buyers give up and pick up the phone, and what it would take to fix. Not a sales call. Not a quote request.
Where Native Shopify B2B Stops And The Build Starts
Requests For Quote And Negotiated Orders
A quoting workflow is not among the native features Shopify documents for B2B. Draft orders cover a real part of the job, and we scope the rest before your sales team promises it to a buyer.
Credit Limits Per Account
There is no native credit-limit field in Shopify B2B. If your terms depend on one, that is an app or custom logic, and it has to agree with what your ERP already believes about that account.
SKU Pads, CSV Uploads And 300-Line POs
Quick order lists handle bulk add from a product page. File upload and SKU-paste order entry are not documented native features, and Shopify caps a B2B order at 500 line items and a draft order at 200.
Ordering On Behalf Of An Account
Shopify gives you sales staff permissions scoped to assigned company records, plus draft orders in the admin. A rep-facing ordering portal is app territory, and the good ones charge per seat.
Invoices, Linesheets And Approval Queues
Invoices send from draft orders natively. PDF invoice delivery to the buyer, linesheet generation and self-serve registration with an approval queue are not among the native features, and Shopify points to apps for them.
Most Brands Quoted For Shopify Plus B2B Do Not Need It
Plus is a great answer to four questions. If nobody has asked you those four questions, you are buying a tier instead of a capability.
Shopify’s own plan features documentation is specific about the line, and it is shorter than the sales conversation implies. Four capabilities sit on Plus and nowhere else. Everything else in the core B2B set, companies, locations, permissions, net terms, ACH, vaulted cards, quantity rules, volume pricing, quick order lists, PO numbers and easy reorders, runs on Basic, Grow and Advanced.
So the question is not whether Plus is good. It is whether your accounts do any of four specific things. Do your largest buyers pay a deposit before you produce? Do they split a balance across payment methods? Do you invoice per shipment on multi-shipment orders? Does a single account hold a negotiated rate that no market-level tier can carry? If yes, Plus is the correct build and we will say so. If no, you are funding capability you will never open.
- +Unlimited catalogs, assigned directly to a company or company location
- +Deposit requirements, on companies and on draft orders
- +Partial payments across methods, and underpayment reconciliation
- +A separate payment request for each shipment of a multi-shipment order
The Four Capabilities That Actually Require Shopify Plus
Shopify’s plan features page is the document to trust, because it is the one Shopify maintains. It puts unlimited catalogs with direct assignment to companies and company locations, deposit requirements, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment on Plus. Nothing else in the core B2B feature set is gated that way.
Two more belong in the same conversation without being on that list. Dynamic payment terms and order-review rules are built with Shopify Functions and are Plus-only. Contextual checkout and contextual storefront, which tailor the experience by market or company location, start on Advanced. That is the honest map.
If two or more of those are non-negotiable for your largest accounts, Plus earns its price and we will build it properly. Our post on the right time to migrate B2B operations to Shopify Plus walks that decision in detail. If none of them describe your operation, the money belongs somewhere your buyers will feel it.
Three Catalogs Is Three Price Tiers, Not Per-Account Pricing
This is the constraint that decides most Shopify B2B builds, and it disappears inside a plan comparison chart. On Basic, Grow and Advanced you get up to three active B2B catalogs, and they are assigned to B2B markets rather than to individual companies. Three market-scoped catalogs give you three price tiers. That is not the same thing as per-account pricing.
Three tiers is plenty if your pricing is banded by volume or region. It stops describing your business the moment one account holds a rate nobody else gets, because a market-scoped catalog has nowhere to store it. At that point you have two honest options: an app that adds per-customer pricing on the plan you are already on, or Plus. We price both and hand you the arithmetic instead of the conclusion.
One prerequisite ships with the non-Plus route and it gets missed in scoping. Shopify requires new Shopify Markets before B2B catalog features work on Basic, Grow or Advanced. If you are on the older Markets setup, that migration is step zero, not a nice-to-have. The full plan matrix, feature by feature, is in our guide to Shopify B2B and wholesale.
What Your B2B Ecommerce Portal Should Feel Like On The Fourth Reorder
Picture the actual person. A purchasing manager at 4:40 on a Thursday, on a phone, standing in a stockroom, placing the fourth order they have placed with you this quarter. They know what they want. They know what they pay. Every second between that and a confirmed order is friction you chose to keep.
The good version takes thirty seconds. They log in, land on their own pricing, duplicate last month’s order, adjust two lines, drop in a PO number, and check out on the card their company already has on file. No email. No rep. No waiting on a PDF. Nobody retypes anything.
Most of that is configuration, not custom development. Quick order lists, easy reorders, vaulted cards saved at the company location level, PO numbers and one-time shipping addresses are all native. The Trade theme ships wholesale-ready on every plan, and every Horizon theme has supported volume pricing, quantity rules and quick order lists since December 10, 2025. Where a build does need custom work, that is custom Shopify theme development, and the same discipline we bring to ecommerce checkout optimization applies to a wholesale cart. Buyers abandon for the same reasons consumers do. They just do it more expensively.
One Store Or Two: The Decision You Cannot Cheaply Undo
Shopify makes you pick a store type, and its own documentation warns that the choice is not easy to change later. A dedicated store means a separate admin, a separate online store, separate inventory, and its own B2B theme and branding. A blended store means one admin and shared inventory, with wholesale segmented through companies and catalogs.
Neither is right in the abstract. Blended wins when your catalog and inventory are shared and you want one operational surface. Dedicated wins when wholesale needs different branding, different staff access, or a storefront gated to logged-in buyers only. Reversing it later means rebuilding companies, catalogs and customizations, so it belongs in week one of the engagement, not week nine. If a replatform is in play at the same time, that is Shopify migration services running alongside the B2B build, not after it.
One thing to plan around if you blend: agentic storefronts are on Shopify’s list of features that are not compatible with B2B. AI-assisted buying covers the consumer side of that store, and your wholesale buyers reach you through the portal and the admin.
Where A B2B Ecommerce Agency Earns Its Keep
You Have Never Sold Wholesale Online
Accounts are ordering by email and phone and you are ready to give them somewhere to log in. The platform decision is smaller than you have been told, and the sequencing matters more.
You Are Paying An App For What Shopify Now Gives Away
If a wholesale app has been carrying your company accounts, volume pricing and net terms on a non-Plus plan, April 2026 changed what that subscription is worth.
You Have A Shopify Plus Quote On Your Desk
Someone scoped your wholesale build on Plus. Maybe they are right. We will read the proposal against your actual accounts and tell you which line items your operation requires.
You Have Outgrown Three Catalogs
Your pricing stopped fitting into tiers. A key account negotiated something nobody else gets, and there is nowhere in a market-scoped catalog to put it.
You Are Sitting On An Old Wholesale Setup
The Plus Wholesale Channel was discontinued on June 28, 2024. If your wholesale still runs on a bolted-on storefront, a separate expansion store, or legacy customer accounts, the path forward is a real project with a real order of operations.
Bring Us The Quote
If another agency has scoped your wholesale build on Shopify Plus, bring the proposal to a free Growth Audit. We will tell you which line items your accounts genuinely require and which ones are the tier talking. No obligation, and no pitch if the answer is that they got it right.
What Changes When Your Wholesale Channel Actually Works
How A Shopify B2B Engagement Runs
It starts with a free Growth Audit. We look at your accounts, your pricing agreements, your current wholesale workflow and your Shopify setup, and show you exactly where a buyer gives up and picks up the phone. No assumptions. No selling you work you do not need.
Before scope, not after. You get a plan recommendation with the reasoning attached: which capabilities your accounts require, which plan carries them, and what an app costs measured against what Plus costs over a year. If Basic is the right answer, that is what the document says.
Companies, locations, contacts and catalogs, mapped against how you actually sell and against how your ERP already stores it. Catalogs bind to a company location, so the ERP ship-to record is the join key, not its parent account. This is where wholesale pricing breaks, and it breaks quietly.
Theme, portal, quick order lists, reorders, payment terms, ACH and vaulted cards, PO numbers, self-serve returns. Then the automations that keep it running, including the Shopify Flow action that charges vaulted cards when terms come due, because Shopify does not capture them for you.
ERP, PIM, accounting and EDI, using prebuilt connectors where Shopify publishes them and custom API work where it does not. One system owns each field. Both systems stop arguing about who chases the invoice.
We report on self-serve order share, reorder rate, revenue by channel, and where buyers still drop off. You will always have the numbers to defend the investment, and the next decision gets made on evidence instead of instinct.
You Built A Wholesale Business Worth Ordering From
Your buyers already want to order from you. They are doing it by email because email is the option you gave them. Every quarter that stays true, a distributor with a worse product and a better portal takes another account that should have been yours. Not on quality. Not on service. Not on price.
The platform question got smaller in April. What is left is judgment: which plan, which architecture, and what the channel feels like to the person placing their fourth order this quarter. That is the work, and it is what a B2B ecommerce agency should be judged on. You can see how we work on Shopify on our page about BLKDG as a Shopify Partner.
You built something worth finding. We make sure it gets found, and we make sure it is effortless to buy from once it is.
Shopify B2B Questions We Get Before Every Engagement
Almost certainly not. Since April 2, 2026, native Shopify B2B runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus at no additional cost. Four capabilities are Plus-only: unlimited catalogs assigned directly to companies and company locations, deposit requirements, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment. Dynamic payment terms and order-review rules built on Shopify Functions are also Plus-only, and contextual checkout and storefront start on Advanced. If none of those describe your accounts, Basic at $29 a month paid yearly runs a real wholesale channel. Plus starts at $2,300 a month, so the difference is worth ten minutes of honest analysis.
We scope it after the audit, because the range is genuinely wide. Turning on native B2B in an existing, healthy Shopify store, building companies and catalogs and configuring the buyer experience, is a matter of weeks. A dedicated wholesale store with an ERP integration, EDI, and hundreds of accounts migrated off a legacy setup is a matter of months. What we will not do is quote you a timeline before we have seen your pricing agreements, because those decide the shape of everything else.
Nothing you do not choose. A blended store keeps one admin, one catalog and shared inventory, with wholesale segmented through companies and catalogs, so your D2C experience carries on untouched. A dedicated store gives wholesale its own admin, storefront and branding. Shopify also lets you migrate existing customers and their order history into a company and company location, so a D2C buyer who has quietly been ordering wholesale volumes does not start from zero. One prerequisite applies either way: B2B requires the new customer accounts, so legacy accounts have to be migrated first.
Yes, and it is usually the part of the project with the most risk in it. Shopify names direct integrations for Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, NetSuite, Fulfil, QuickBooks Online, Syndigo and Akeneo. EDI purchase orders from Crstl and SPS Commerce sync in as draft orders. Where no connector exists, we build against the B2B APIs. The mechanics of a clean sync, which system owns which field, replace-versus-merge behavior, API version pinning and webhook delivery, are covered in our post on Shopify ERP integration. Worth knowing up front: Shopify warns that some App Store integrations are not fully compatible with B2B companies and catalogs, so we verify compatibility before anything gets committed.
The Plus Wholesale Channel was discontinued on June 28, 2024, so anything built on it is already gone. What is still live in the wild is separate expansion stores used as wholesale storefronts, wholesale apps carrying company accounts and pricing, and legacy customer accounts that block B2B entirely. Each has a different path, and each involves moving account and pricing data without buyers noticing. If a full replatform is in scope at the same time, we run it as Shopify migration services alongside the B2B build.
Re-cost it before you decide. If your app has been providing company accounts, volume pricing, quantity rules and net terms on Basic, Grow or Advanced, Shopify now provides all four natively at no extra cost. The app may still be earning its fee on per-customer pricing, quoting, credit limits, CSV order upload or a sales-rep portal, none of which are native. We audit it feature by feature, put the annual number in writing, and only then recommend keeping or cutting it.
Nothing, and there is no obligation attached to it. It is a clear look at why your wholesale channel is not converting the accounts you already have, which Shopify plan your operation actually requires, and what it would take to close the gap. Not a sales call. Not a quote request. If the honest answer is that your current setup is fine, we will tell you that instead.