Shopify B2B and Wholesale: Building the Buyer Experience Now That Native B2B Runs on Every Plan

On April 2, 2026, Shopify B2B stopped being a Shopify Plus feature. The merchant changelog entry posted that day says merchants on Basic, Grow and Advanced “can start selling wholesale using native B2B features, available in their admin,” listing “up to 3 active B2B catalogs (assigned via Markets), company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing, ACH payments (U.S. only), and vaulted credit cards.” Shopify’s newsroom announcement the same day added that those features arrived “at no extra cost.”

That changes who the wholesale conversation is for. As of Shopify’s published pricing observed on August 31, 2026, the cheapest route to a native wholesale channel is the Basic plan at $29 a month paid yearly, or $39 month to month, with three market-scoped catalogs and new Shopify Markets enabled. The same page still puts Plus at “Starts at $2,300 USD/mo.”

Our post on when to migrate your B2B operations to Shopify Plus answers the tier question: when Plus earns its price for a wholesale operation. This one answers the build question underneath it. What the wholesale channel is actually made of, which pieces you get on which plan, and where the native feature set stops and an app starts.

Every figure below links to the Shopify page it came from. App capabilities and prices are vendor claims, labeled as vendor claims, observed on August 31, 2026, and they move, so re-pull anything going into a business case. Plan pricing is as of August 2026 and Shopify changes it without notice.

The newsroom post frames the change in one sentence: “Today, Shopify is extending its foundational B2B features to merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, at no extra cost.” It lists what crossed over as “company profiles for wholesale buyers, up to three custom catalogs with tailored pricing, volume discounts and quantity rules, vaulted credit cards, and payment terms.”

It’s equally clear about what didn’t cross. The same newsroom post says “Plus merchants still get unlimited catalogs for customer-specific pricing, direct catalog assignment to companies and locations, partial payments, and deposits,” and adds that “The path between plans is seamless, no replatforming required.”

Does Shopify B2B cost extra? No. The B2B considerations page states “No additional fees” under Pricing, and B2B is included on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The same page notes that variable platform fees apply differently to B2B orders than to D2C orders, and that some capabilities remain exclusive to Advanced or Plus, so the plan you pick still decides what you can build.

One prerequisite comes with the expansion and it’s easy to miss during scoping. The plan features doc says that “To use B2B catalog features on the Basic, Grow, or Advanced plans, your store must be using new Shopify Markets.” If you’re on the older Markets setup, that migration is step zero, not a nice-to-have.

Here’s the matrix as Shopify publishes it on the B2B plan features page, which frames it this way: “Most B2B features are available on all plans, including companies, catalogs, net payment terms, self-serve ordering, and Shopify Flow automations.”

Two Shopify pages will send you to the wrong tier, in two different ways. The Winter ’26 Edition page flatly contradicts the current documentation: it labels ACH payments for B2B “Exclusive to Plus. US only.” The plan features doc lists Automated Clearing House as available on all four plans, which matches the April changelog listing “ACH payments (U.S. only)” among the features that came to Basic, Grow and Advanced.

The second failure is an omission rather than a contradiction. Shopify’s own enterprise blog roundup of that same edition walks through dynamic payment terms, deposits, order-review rules and payment requests per fulfillment in full merchant-facing detail without stating a plan gate on any of them. Nothing on that page is false. It just reads as generally available, and three of those four are Plus-only, so a merchant scoping from it has no way to know what’s out of reach on Basic.

Trust the plan features doc. It’s the page Shopify maintains as documentation, while edition pages are launch artifacts frozen at their publication date. The Winter ’26 page was written before the April 2026 expansion and still describes the gating that existed in December 2025. Check any gating claim against the plan features table before it goes in a quote or a scope of work.

The pattern shows up in the changelog too. Shopify’s Trade theme announcement from May 9, 2024 describes Trade as coming pre-built with “quantity rules and volume pricing, which are exclusive to Plus.” Both features now sit on all four plans in the current table. The changelog is a dated record of what was true that day, not a live spec.

The data model is the first design decision and everything else hangs off it. Shopify’s B2B developer documentation defines three objects: Company, CompanyLocation, and CompanyContact, described as “A person that acts on behalf of the company.” The companies help page calls a company the “parent organization for one or more company locations.”

The line that decides your architecture is in the developer docs: “catalogs can be assigned only to a company location.” Pricing binds to the ship-to, not the parent account. If your ERP holds a negotiated price agreement at the account level and the buyer orders for four warehouses, you’re mapping one agreement onto four Shopify records, and that mapping is where wholesale pricing usually breaks.

The documented ceilings are generous enough that most merchants won’t hit them, but they’re worth designing against. The companies page publishes unlimited companies, a maximum of 10,000 locations per company, 10,000 customers per company, 50 customers per location, and 25 catalogs per company location.

Buyer permissions come in two levels and they’re deliberately simple. The same page defines “Ordering only” as a contact who “can make purchases for the company location and review the list of orders that they have placed,” and “Location admin” as one who “can make purchases for the company location and review the list of orders that all customers have placed for that location.” A buyer who has access to more than one location gets prompted to choose which location they’re purchasing for at login.

On the intake side, the B2B features overview documents a company account request form that “lets your customers submit a request form on your online store to access B2B purchasing,” customizable invitation emails for new buyers, and the ability to “Migrate existing customer order history to a company and a company location.” That last one matters if you’ve been taking wholesale orders through your D2C store: the history moves with the customer instead of starting over.

Your team gets scoped access too. Sales staff permissions let you “assign each staff a set of permissions that restrict their access to only the company records that have been assigned to them,” and companies and company locations both support metafields for custom data.

A catalog does two jobs at once: it decides which products a buyer can see, and what they pay. The catalog creation docs give you three pricing mechanisms. A catalog-wide percentage adjustment, a price increase or decrease applied to everything in the catalog. Fixed prices set per product or per variant, which override the percentage adjustment. And volume pricing, up to 10 quantity breaks per variant.

Shopify’s own worked example on that page: “if a customer orders 25 shirts (Quantity Break 1 value), then they pay 5.00 USD for each shirt (Price Break 1 value).” Quantity rules sit alongside the breaks, setting a minimum, a maximum and an increment, and to activate them both the minimum order quantity and the increment have to be set to 1 or greater.

Now the distinction that decides whether you can build what you sold. On Basic, Grow and Advanced, the markets catalog documentation says catalogs are assigned to B2B markets. On Plus, you get “unlimited catalogs and also assign them directly to specific company locations.” Three market-scoped catalogs give you three price tiers. That isn’t per-account pricing, and if you’ve promised a buyer a rate nobody else gets, three tiers won’t hold it.

When multiple catalogs apply to the same buyer, the tie-break is documented rather than arbitrary. The markets catalog page says the buyer sees “the lowest price for that item,” with volume pricing excepted, and quantity rules come from the lowest-priced catalog. Shopify’s developer guidance on building for B2B says the same thing: “If a customer is logged into a B2B customer account that’s eligible for multiple catalogs that contain the same product, then they receive the lowest listed price within those catalogs.”

Store-level headroom is not the constraint. The catalog creation page publishes a maximum of 10,000 catalogs per store and 25 per company location, so the three-catalog limit on non-Plus plans is a plan gate, not a platform one.

Discounts are now on by default, which wasn’t true a few months ago. The June 23, 2026 changelog records that “Previously, stores had to contact Shopify Support to activate discounts for B2B. Now, discounts for B2B are activated automatically.” Market-scoped discounts landed earlier, on May 7, 2026, letting you run promotions targeted at specific regions, retail locations or B2B setups.

Terms are the part of wholesale that D2C teams underestimate, because nothing in a D2C stack has to hold an unpaid balance. The payment terms documentation defines four types: no payment terms, where “Payment is due immediately. This is the default setting”; net terms of 7, 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 days from order placement; due on fulfillment, where “Payment is due after all items in the order are fulfilled”; and a fixed date, available on draft orders only. The features overview also lists due on receipt.

ACH is on every plan, US only, and it did not ship with the Winter ’26 Edition despite being announced there. The changelog entry is dated October 23, 2025: “U.S. merchants can now accept ACH direct debit bank payments through Shopify Payments for B2B orders.” Vaulted credit cards are also on all plans, saved at the company location level and usable at checkout or from the admin.

Deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfillment are Plus. The plan features doc states it directly: “Deposit requirements, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment are available only on the Shopify Plus plan.” Dynamic payment terms and deposit rules are Plus as well, built through the Payment Customization Function API using the paymentTermsSet operation, and order-review rules use orderReviewAdd, which shipped on October 1, 2025 with the note that “This operation is only available for B2B purchases on stores with the Plus plan.”

Then the operational catch. The payment terms page documents that payments aren’t automatically captured when terms expire, and manual charging is required. Shopify narrowed that gap on June 17, 2026, announcing on the Spring ’26 Edition page that you can “Automatically charge vaulted payment methods for B2B customers using a Shopify Flow action triggered by fulfillment, due dates, or invoicing.” That’s an automation you build, not a default you inherit, so budget the Flow work into the launch rather than after it. Payment reminders on the due date also run through Flow.

Wholesale buyers reorder. Almost everything Shopify gives you on the storefront side is built around making that reorder take thirty seconds instead of a phone call, which is the same retention logic that drives a good ecommerce loyalty program, applied to accounts instead of consumers.

The account layer is a hard prerequisite. Legacy customer accounts are incompatible with B2B, so the new customer accounts have to be live before anything else works. The features overview describes easy reorders as letting buyers duplicate a past order so that “all items are automatically added to cart,” alongside self-serve returns submitted directly from customer accounts, PO numbers added by the buyer at checkout or by staff in the admin, and quick order lists that add multiple variants of a product to the cart in one click from the product page.

For accounts that need a human in the loop, the draft-order path does the work a quoting tool would. You can require B2B orders from a given company location to be placed as drafts so you can “review and make changes to orders before they’re confirmed, and negotiate with your customer when needed.” Draft orders support a price lock, which holds the quoted price even if you change the product price later, and an inventory reservation, which stops other customers buying the units you’ve promised. One-time shipping addresses let a buyer ship somewhere without saving that address to the company location.

Identity is extensible if your buyers live in a corporate directory. Shopify documents support for third-party identity providers via “your own OAuth2.0 and OpenId Connect compliant identity providers,” and the Spring ’26 Edition added profile field and custom tag sync from Auth0, Ping Identity and Azure ID, along with buyers staying signed in for a full year. If you’re rebuilding a wholesale portal that predates any of this, our post on getting more out of a B2B website covers the experience side that no platform feature fixes for you.

You have two supported theme routes and neither requires custom development to get the basics. The Trade theme is available on all plans and is designed for a dedicated B2B store, including hiding product prices from visitors who aren’t logged in. On December 10, 2025, Shopify made every Horizon theme B2B-compatible, so wholesale merchants can “display volume pricing tiers, enforce quantity rules, and offer quick order lists directly in any Horizon theme without custom development or third-party apps.” If you’re already on Horizon, B2B features appear automatically once you enable them.

Contextualizing the storefront and checkout by market or company location is where Basic and Grow run out. The plan features doc puts contextual checkout and contextual storefront on Advanced and Plus only. Shopify added editor-level control on March 16, 2026, letting you customize checkout and customer account pages for specific markets and company locations directly in the editor. Headless is supported too: Shopify documents building a purpose-built B2B storefront on Hydrogen or the foundational APIs.

Tax status is set per company and can be overridden per location. The tax exemptions page gives three settings: collect tax, don’t collect tax, and collect tax unless exemptions apply, with the applicable exemptions chosen from a dropdown. For Shopify Tax users in the UK and EU, the Tax ID field becomes a VAT number field and Shopify Tax validates it.

What Shopify doesn’t publish on that page is a complete list of supported exemption certificate types or supported countries beyond UK and EU VAT. Treat US resale certificate handling as something to confirm with your tax provider during scoping rather than something the platform documents as solved.

Before April 2026 this was a two-way decision: Plus, or a wholesale app bolted onto a smaller plan. It’s now three-way, and the middle option changed price without changing its label.

Route one is native at no extra cost. You get companies, locations, permissions, net terms, ACH, vaulted cards, quantity rules, volume pricing, quick order lists, PO numbers and easy reorders, with three market-scoped catalogs. Route two adds an app on top of Basic, Grow or Advanced, typically to buy per-customer pricing without the Plus jump. Route three is Plus at $2,300 a month or more for unlimited catalogs, direct assignment to companies and locations, deposits and partial payments.

Can you run a wholesale channel on Basic without an app? Yes, if your pricing genuinely fits three tiers, your buyers self-serve, and you don’t need deposits. That stops describing your operation the moment a single account has a negotiated rate that no other account gets, because market-scoped catalogs have nowhere to store it.

Shopify maintains a curated B2B app guide that groups 49 apps under seven jobs, from buyer self-serve to financial workflows, and the Winter ’26 Edition page points at it directly. Everything below is vendor pricing and vendor capability claims, observed on the vendors’ own App Store listings on August 31, 2026.

SparkLayer B2B & Wholesale shows a 4.9 rating across 361 reviews. Its pricing page lists a free Basic tier capped at 5 orders per month, Starter at $49 a month for up to 50 orders and one sales agent, Growth at $149 for up to 100 orders, Pro at $299 for up to 150 orders with five sales agents included, and Enterprise starting at $499, with $39 a month for each agent beyond a plan’s allowance. The vendor also states that an order counts toward the cap “even if you subsequently cancel or refund it,” which is the kind of clause that turns a $149 plan into a $299 one during a return-heavy quarter.

BSS B2B Wholesale Pricing shows 4.9 across 1,109 reviews with a free tier, Essential at $29 a month, Advanced at $49 and Platinum at $99. Wholesale Gorilla shows 4.7 across 305 reviews, from $34.95 a month for Lite, $69.95 for Advanced and $149.95 for Premium. Ratings and review counts on all three move weekly.

SparkLayer published its own read on the April change on April 3, 2026, and it’s a vendor assessing a platform it competes with, so weigh it accordingly. It credits non-Plus B2B with company accounts and role-based permissions, up to three catalogs via markets with no company-specific price lists, quantity rules and price breaks, net terms and ACH, draft-order-to-invoice workflows, easy reorders, PO numbers, quick order lists and the Trade theme. It lists quoting and negotiation, self-service registration with approval, built-in invoicing, CSV bulk upload, shopping lists and a sales-rep portal as gaps. That gap list happens to match what Shopify’s own documentation covers and doesn’t cover, which is why it’s usable despite the source.

Run the arithmetic on your own account count before you jump tiers. An app at $49 a month is $588 a year. Plus starts at $2,300 a month, which multiplies out to about $27,600 before any negotiated annual terms, so per-customer pricing alone doesn’t justify the tier. Deposits, partial payments and unlimited direct-assigned catalogs are what do.

Shopify publishes an incompatibility list, and it’s the first page to read before you promise anything to a buyer. The considerations page heads a section with “The following features aren’t compatible with B2B:” and lists, in its own words:

Local delivery and pickup are available for B2B draft orders created in the admin, so the constraint is on the buyer-facing checkout rather than the whole workflow. The developer docs put the subscription limit more broadly: “B2B doesn’t support purchase options, such as subscriptions, pre-orders, and try before you buy.” A recurring wholesale replenishment program is not a Shopify subscription; it’s a Flow automation or an app.

A second list on the same page covers features that exist but arrive switched off: “the store or organization owner must contact Shopify Support to make the request” for pickup in store, line item scripts, abandoned checkouts and gift cards at checkout. Pickup in store was announced as a Winter ’26 B2B feature and is still on that list. Budget a support ticket and a wait into the launch plan for any of the four.

Two hard ceilings shape order entry. The considerations page caps a B2B order at 500 line items and a draft order at 200. A distributor pasting a 300-line replenishment PO into a draft order will hit the second one.

Store type is the decision you can least afford to get wrong. Shopify’s store type page says “You need to make this decision carefully, as it’s not easy to change at a later time.” A dedicated store means a separate admin, separate online store, separate inventory, and its own B2B theme and branding. A blended store means one admin and shared inventory, with B2B segmented through companies and catalogs. Changing your mind later means rebuilding companies, catalogs and customizations.

Shopify’s Spring ’26 Edition, released June 17, 2026, is built end to end around selling inside AI chats: its meta description reads “Sell face to face, online, in social channels, and AI chats with 150+ updates to Shopify.” B2B is explicitly excluded from that surface, because agentic storefronts sit on the incompatibility list.

Plan accordingly. If you’re building a wholesale channel and a consumer channel on one store, the agentic layer covers the consumer side only, and your B2B buyers reach you through the portal and the admin. We covered how that layer works and what it changes for merchants in our post on agentic commerce on Shopify.

Several capabilities that wholesale buyers ask for by name don’t appear anywhere in Shopify’s B2B feature documentation, and Shopify points at apps for them rather than a roadmap. The Winter ’26 Edition page says it plainly: “Offer quote requests, custom buyer roles, shopping lists, and more using 11 apps compatible with B2B.” The gaps that show up most in scoping are quote and RFQ workflows, per-account credit limits, CSV or SKU-pad bulk order upload, a sales-rep ordering portal, PDF invoice delivery to the buyer, saved shopping lists, and self-serve registration with an approval queue.

Read those as absences from the documentation rather than as prohibitions. Native draft orders cover part of the quoting job, quick order lists cover part of the bulk-entry job, and sales staff permissions cover part of the rep job. Each one gets you partway to what the app-buying merchant is imagining, and the remainder is where the app budget goes.

The feature surface is also settled right now. Grepping the shopify.dev developer changelog on August 31, 2026 for B2B, wholesale, company location, price list and payment terms across its May 21 to August 28 window returns nothing, and the merchant changelog has no B2B post after June 23, 2026. You’re scoping against a stable target, which is the best condition available for a build like this. Shopify’s editions index describes the release cadence as “Everything new across Shopify. Every six months,” so the next likely beat is an edition, not a surprise.

The general mechanics of a Shopify to ERP connection, system of record per field, replace-versus-merge semantics, API version pins and webhook delivery, are covered in our post on Shopify ERP integration. Four touchpoints are specific to B2B and they’re the ones that break wholesale pricing when they’re mapped wrong.

Company records come first. Company, CompanyLocation and CompanyContact map to the ERP’s account, ship-to and contact hierarchy, and because catalogs bind to the location, the ERP’s ship-to record is the join key rather than its parent account. Get that backwards and every buyer at a multi-site account sees the wrong price.

Price lists come second. A Shopify catalog price list, with its fixed prices, percentage adjustment and up to 10 quantity breaks, is the platform’s representation of the ERP’s negotiated price agreement. On Basic, Grow and Advanced you have three market-scoped catalogs to write into, so an ERP holding per-customer price agreements has nowhere to put them without Plus or an app. That constraint belongs in the integration design, not in the discovery call after go-live.

Terms and payment status come third, and they create an ownership question. Shopify’s external integrations page names companies and customers, orders and order updates, inventory, products, and payment terms and payment status as syncable, along with historical orders, fulfillments, catalogs, price lists, PO numbers, refunds, cancellations and payouts. Because Shopify terms don’t auto-capture and Flow can send reminders, your ERP’s dunning process and your Shopify Flow are two systems doing the same job. Pick one owner before you build both.

Invoices, POs and EDI come fourth. PO numbers ride on orders and draft orders, invoices send from drafts, and the Winter ’26 Edition added EDI purchase orders from Crstl and SPS Commerce syncing “directly with your admin as draft orders.” That last detail has an operational consequence: EDI POs land in the same draft-order queue as your checkout-to-draft review orders, so an EDI merchant running order review is putting two workflows through one queue.

Shopify names direct integrations with Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, NetSuite, Fulfil, QuickBooks Online, Syndigo and Akeneo, and the Spring ’26 Edition added B2B orders, PO numbers and company details syncing to QuickBooks. Verify app compatibility before you commit to anything without a prebuilt connector: the external integrations page warns that “Some integrations in the Shopify App Store aren’t fully compatible with Shopify B2B, specifically companies and catalogs,” because some providers haven’t implemented the required B2B APIs or Customer Accounts features.

The Plus Wholesale Channel is gone and has been for two years. Shopify’s community announcement, posted February 14, 2024, states that “The Plus Wholesale Channel will be discontinued on June 28th, 2024,” attributes the decision to third-party cookies being required for account authentication, and tells merchants to “transition your wholesale data to B2B on Shopify as soon as possible.” Shopify’s dedicated wholesale-migration documentation is no longer published; the old URL now resolves to the generic B2B overview.

Three older setups are still live in the wild and each has a different answer. A separate expansion store used as a wholesale storefront is still a supported pattern, now called a dedicated store, and it needs no change beyond enabling native B2B in it. Legacy customer accounts are a blocker and have to be migrated to new customer accounts before B2B works at all. And a wholesale app carrying company accounts, volume pricing and net terms on a non-Plus plan is now worth re-costing, because Shopify gives all three away as of April 2026 and the app may only be earning its fee on one remaining feature.

If wholesale and retail both run through your business, the store-type decision interacts with your in-person channel as well. Our post on Shopify POS and unified commerce covers what a shared inventory and customer record buys you, and a dedicated B2B store deliberately gives that up in exchange for separation.

Dependencies decide the order, not preference. Store type comes first, because it’s the hardest to reverse. New customer accounts and new Shopify Markets come next, because B2B catalogs on non-Plus plans require Markets and B2B requires the new accounts. Then companies, locations and contacts, because catalogs attach to locations. Then catalogs and price lists, then payment terms, then theme, then integrations.

Do the gap analysis before the theme work rather than after. Write down every capability your sales team promised buyers, mark each one native, Plus-only or app, and price the app column. A quoting workflow, a credit limit and a CSV upload are three separate apps in most stacks, and finding that out late is what turns a wholesale launch into a re-scope.

One item worth putting in the scope of work explicitly: the Flow automation for charging vaulted cards when terms come due. It’s not a default, and it’s the difference between net 30 that collects itself and a finance team chasing balances by hand.

Plus is no longer the entry ticket to wholesale, so the case for it has to be made on specifics. Four of them hold up. Unlimited catalogs with direct assignment to companies and locations, which is the only native way to hold genuine per-account pricing. Deposit requirements on companies and on draft orders. Partial payments, for buyers who split a balance across methods or reconcile underpayments. And payment requests per fulfillment, for multi-shipment orders where you invoice as you ship.

Add dynamic payment terms and order-review rules built on Shopify Functions, both Plus-only, and contextual checkout and storefront, which start at Advanced. If none of those describe your operation, Shopify B2B on Basic, Grow or Advanced is the correct build and the money belongs in the buyer experience instead. If two or more of them are non-negotiable for your largest accounts, our post on the right time to migrate B2B operations to Shopify Plus walks the tier decision in detail.

You built a wholesale business worth ordering from. The platform question is smaller than it was in March, and what’s left is the buyer experience. If you want a second set of eyes on whether your Shopify B2B setup is costing you reorders, or whether Shopify Plus B2B is a tier you actually need, that’s what our B2B ecommerce agency engagements start with: a free Growth Audit and a plan recommendation in writing, before any scope. No assumptions. No selling you work you don’t need.