Shopify B2B is the set of wholesale features built into Shopify itself: you register business customers as companies with one or more locations, give those locations catalogs with their own prices, and let buyers order with payment terms, quantity rules and volume pricing. According to Shopify's help center, it runs on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, not on Starter or Retail, and you can sell to businesses from your existing store or from a separate one.
The plan decides how far you can take it. On Basic, Grow and Advanced you get companies, net terms, quantity rules and volume pricing, but only three active catalog assignments across your B2B markets. Shopify Plus removes that cap and lets you assign a catalog directly to a single company or location, which is what customer-specific pricing needs. This guide covers both, then the part most setup guides skip: the product data a wholesale catalog needs before it works.
Companies, locations and buyers: the Shopify B2B data model
Everything in Shopify B2B hangs off the company. Shopify's companies documentation describes a company as the parent organization and a company location as the business you actually sell to. A chain of three bike shops is one company with three locations.
Each location carries its own commercial setup:
- Tax ID and tax exemptions, so a VAT-registered buyer is not charged tax the way a consumer is
- Ship-to and billing addresses
- Payment terms, such as net 30
- Catalogs, which decide the products and prices the location sees
- Checkout settings, for example whether orders are submitted as drafts for your review
- Contacts: the people allowed to buy for that location, with ordering or admin permissions
Buyers sign in through Shopify's customer accounts with their email address and a six-digit code, no password. Two details trip up stores that already sell to consumers: B2B does not work with legacy customer accounts, and a buyer who is not linked to at least one company location is treated as an ordinary consumer, according to Shopify's sign-in documentation. A buyer who complains about seeing retail prices is usually missing that link.
Shopify B2B on Basic, Grow and Advanced versus Shopify Plus
Shopify publishes a feature-by-plan comparison for B2B. The table below keeps the rows that change how you set up pricing and payments; everything else in the comparison, from the quick order list to PO numbers and draft orders, is on every plan that has B2B.
Shopify B2B features by plan
| Companies, locations and location permissions | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active catalog assignments to B2B markets | 3 | 3 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Catalogs assigned directly to a company or location | No | No | No | Yes |
| Quantity rules (minimum, maximum, increment) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Volume pricing (quantity price breaks) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Net payment terms and payment reminders | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vaulted credit cards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deposits, partial payments, payment per fulfillment | No | No | No | Yes |
| Checkout to draft, PO numbers, easy reorders | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contextual storefront and checkout through Markets | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Source: Shopify, B2B features by plan, checked 3 November 2026. One counting detail matters on the smaller plans: assigning the same active catalog to two active B2B markets uses two of your three slots.
In practice, Basic to Advanced works when your business buyers fall into a few groups that each get the same prices, such as cafés, resellers and distributors. If you negotiate prices per account, or a key account needs its own catalog on one location, you need Plus.
One store for both or a separate wholesale store
Shopify calls these a blended store (B2B and consumers in one store) and a dedicated B2B store, and its store type guide warns that the choice is hard to change later.
- Blended store: one admin, one theme, shared inventory and one set of apps. Only signed-in B2B buyers see B2B prices and products, but the store itself cannot be gated, because consumers still need to order. Showing B2B buyers different theme content requires the Advanced plan or higher.
- Dedicated store: a separate store with its own theme, inventory and analytics, and you can gate it so only B2B customers reach the login page. The cost is a second store: apps set up and paid for twice, integrations reconfigured, settings maintained separately.
The product data question is different for each. In a blended store, one product record serves both audiences, so the product price is the consumer price and wholesale prices live in catalogs. In a dedicated store, the product price in that store can be the wholesale price, which makes a second, rule-based price per product more useful than catalog overrides.
How catalogs decide the price a business buyer sees
A catalog is a list of products and prices for a B2B market or, on Plus, for a specific company location. You create one under Markets > Catalogs, choose its currency and set prices in two ways, as described in Shopify's catalog guide:
- A percentage adjustment for the whole catalog, applied to the product's base price. Shopify's example: a 20% decrease on a $10 candle gives $8.
- Fixed prices per product or variant, which override the percentage for those items.
When more than one catalog gives a company location a price for the same product, Shopify shows the lowest one. Quantity rules and volume pricing are not part of that comparison; if two catalogs tie on price, the rules from the catalog created first apply. A store can hold up to 10,000 catalogs, and on Plus a location can have up to 25 catalogs assigned directly.
Worked example: a coffee roaster's café catalog
Take an illustrative roaster that sells a 1 kg bag of its house espresso blend for $34.00 in the online store. It builds a café catalog for its B2B market:
- Catalog adjustment: 35% decrease, so every product in the catalog drops to 65% of its base price. For the house blend that is $22.10.
- Fixed price on the house blend: $21.00, the negotiated café price. It overrides the 35% for this product.
- Quantity rules: increment 6 and minimum 6, because the beans ship in cases of six bags.
- Volume pricing: $20.00 from 24 bags and $19.00 from 48 bags. Both break quantities are above the minimum and multiples of the increment, which Shopify requires.
Then marketing adds a holiday promotion catalog with a 40% decrease to the same B2B market. For the house blend that gives $20.40, below the café's fixed $21.00, so every café now sees $20.40. The promotion undercut the price list without anyone touching it. The fix is to exclude contract-priced products from promotional catalogs, or to give them fixed prices there too.
Note the dependency on the base price. Shopify applies the percentage to the product's base price, so a percentage catalog follows that price, while a fixed price stays where you set it. Shopify's catalog guide does not say how a temporary sale is treated, so if an app or an integration writes a sale price into the product price field, check what your B2B buyers see during the sale.
Quantity rules and volume pricing at variant level
Both settings live inside a catalog, per variant. According to Shopify's quantity and volume pricing page, a quantity rule sets a minimum, a maximum and an increment, and volume pricing allows up to 10 price breaks per product. The rules apply to each variant separately: a buyer cannot combine 5 gray hats and 5 blue hats to reach a minimum of 10.
Two practical consequences. Once a variant has volume pricing, its price is fixed, so a later change to the catalog's percentage adjustment does not reach it. And Shopify notes that the theme should show the minimum on the product page; the quantity rule blocks the order, but it does not explain itself to the buyer.
How to choose minimums is covered in our minimum order quantity guide, and graduated versus all-units tiers in the tiered pricing guide. Shopify's help pages list one unit price per break but do not say whether a break reprices the whole line or only the units above it, so test a cart at a break quantity before you publish the price list.
Payment terms, draft checkout and reordering
Shopify's payment terms cover what most wholesale buyers expect:
- Net terms of 7, 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 days, counted from the day the order is placed
- Due on fulfillment, once every item in the order has shipped
- A fixed date, available on individual draft orders only, not as a location default
- Deposits, an upfront share with the rest due on terms, on Shopify Plus only
Terms are set per company location, per company or in bulk from the Companies page. When terms expire, the order is marked overdue but payment is not captured automatically, so someone still has to chase it. Buyers can pay early from their account, reorder a past order in one step and add PO numbers at checkout. With checkout to draft, an order arrives as a draft you review before it becomes a real order, which suits buyers whose freight or availability you confirm by hand.
The product data a wholesale catalog needs before launch
Shopify gives you the containers. Whether the catalog works depends on what goes in them. A wholesale buyer reads a product page differently from a consumer: they need the pack size, the order multiple and the net price per unit, and they compare those across suppliers. Our guide to wholesale vs retail covers the commercial side; this checklist is the data side.
Wholesale catalog data checklist for Shopify B2B
Catalogs can also be filled from a file. The catalog CSV in Shopify's guide has columns for Catalog Title, SKU, Handle, Option1 Name and Value, Fixed Price, Compare At, Published, Quantity Increment, Minimum Order Quantity, Maximum Order Quantity, and Quantity Break 1 to 10 with Price Break 1 to 10. Every one of those values comes from product data, which is why the catalog is only as clean as the records behind it.
Six steps from product records to a working B2B catalog
- Define the buyer groups and the price rule for each. Cafés at 35% off, distributors at cost plus a fixed margin, two key accounts on contract prices (Plus only). Our B2B pricing guide shows how discounts stack per order line.
- Fill the wholesale fields on every product. Pack size, minimum order quantity, increment, unit and barcode, checked for gaps before export.
- Decide what each catalog includes. Exclude consumer-only items, gift cards and samples; include B2B-only SKUs and publish them.
- Set fixed prices only where they are negotiated. Everything else follows the percentage, so a retail price change flows through without editing the catalog.
- Import quantity rules and price breaks by CSV rather than by hand, generated from the product fields.
- Test as a buyer. Sign in as a contact on each company location and check price, minimum and increment on three products, including one in a promotional catalog.
What the WISEPIM Shopify connection sends, and what stays in Shopify
A PIM sits upstream of this setup, so it helps to be exact about the boundary. WISEPIM's Shopify connection pushes the product record: title, description, vendor, product type, tags, SEO fields, options and variants, SKU, barcode, images and price, with an active sale price sent as the price and the regular price as compare-at. Attributes you enable for Shopify go out as product metafields, so pack size and minimum order quantity can reach the theme and appear on the product page. Our Shopify metafields guide shows how themes read them. One consequence for blended stores: during a sale set in WISEPIM, the sale price is the Shopify base price, so check what your percentage catalogs show, or give contract products fixed prices.
It does not create or edit Shopify B2B objects: no companies, locations, catalogs, payment terms, quantity rules or volume pricing. WISEPIM has customer groups and volume discounts of its own, but those tiers export only to Magento 2 and Lightspeed eCom, not to Shopify. Catalog prices and rules stay in Shopify, maintained there or imported through the catalog CSV.
Where WISEPIM does help with the price itself is channel pricing. Pricing rules transform the price at export without changing the stored price (percent markup, fixed amount, cost plus markup, cost plus margin or a fixed price, with rounding and a minimum margin safeguard), and a rule can target a single connected Shopify store. That fits the dedicated-store model: the consumer store gets the retail price, the wholesale store gets cost plus 30% from the same record. For a blended store, scope a rule to the CSV or Excel file export: the price column in that export then holds the net price per SKU (the stored retail price stays unchanged), ready to paste into the catalog CSV's Fixed Price column.
Quality Guard rules can block a product from export when a wholesale field such as pack size is empty, so a new SKU does not reach the B2B catalog without one. And if some resellers never log in to your store at all, Brand Portals publish a read-only, branded catalog with the products and columns you choose, optionally with pricing rules applied and a password, which they can browse, download or import.
