Shopify B2B arrived properly with Shopify Plus and changed the sensible answer to "how do I sell wholesale on Shopify". The old answers — a second hidden storefront, a tangle of customer tags and discount codes, a third-party wholesale app bolted on — are no longer the default. But the native feature set has a distinct shape, and knowing where it ends saves a lot of money.
The model: companies, not customers
In a retail store, a customer is a person. In B2B, the thing you trade with is a business, and Shopify models that directly. A company owns one or more locations, has contacts attached who log in and order, carries an assigned catalog with its own pricing, and has its own payment terms.
When a contact logs in, the storefront reorganizes around the company they belong to: their catalog, their prices, their terms. One store serves both retail and wholesale, with one inventory pool and one checkout. That is a genuine improvement over maintaining two storefronts.
What Shopify B2B handles natively
- Company accounts with multiple locations and multiple buyer contacts
- Customer-specific catalogs and price lists, as a percentage off retail or fixed per-product pricing
- Quantity rules — minimums, increments, case quantities
- Payment terms, including net terms per location
- A B2B-aware checkout that respects the company context
- Draft orders for sales-assisted selling
That is a solid commercial core. If your wholesale operation is small and your accounts are stable, it may be all you need.
Where it stops
The gaps are concentrated in one place: getting a customer into the system. Natively, companies are created by hand in the Shopify admin. Someone reads an email, creates the company, adds the location, adds the contacts, picks the catalog, sets the terms, and writes back. Fine for ten accounts a year; a bottleneck at ten a week.
The specific gaps most merchants hit:
- No storefront application form. There is no native way for a prospective wholesale buyer to apply from your site.
- No approval workflow. Reviewing and approving an application is an admin task, not a process with states and rules.
- Limited buyer self-service. Adding a colleague or a delivery location generally means emailing your account rep.
- Coarse access control. Keeping pricing private while staying findable in search takes deliberate configuration.
- Manual data handling. Migrating an existing wholesale book, or keeping company records standardized, needs bulk tooling.
Closing the gaps
Two routes: custom development, or an app. Custom gives you exactly the flow you want and the maintenance that comes with it. An app covers the standard path immediately.
The app we most often assess here is Onboard B2B, a native Shopify Plus app from Helium. Its documented feature set covers a custom wholesale application built with a form builder, collecting the exact company information you need and syncing it to Shopify as Company metafields; company account approval that gates access to your wholesale storefront and checkout, with approval presets setting catalogs, payment terms and tax settings for different company groups; a self-management portal where Location Admins manage locations and invite buyers and approvers; access control via a Storefront Lock covering products, collections and pages or a Checkout Lock preventing unauthorized checkouts; and unlimited CSV bulk import of existing companies and contacts.
We are a development partner rather than the publisher. Often the right answer is an app for the standard path plus custom work for the parts specific to your business.
Planning a build
- Model the commercial reality first. Which businesses buy from you, how their branches and buyers are organized, what each pays, what terms they are on. This drives your company, location, contact and catalog structure, and it is expensive to change later.
- Decide the access posture. What is public, what is behind a login, what requires approval. This has direct SEO consequences.
- Design the onboarding path. Application, review, approval, account creation, first order.
- Build the storefront. Wholesale templates, reorder flows, bulk entry, the account area.
- Integrate. ERP, 3PL, accounting, CRM — whatever holds inventory and invoices.
- Migrate. Map existing customer data to the company model, then bulk import.
- Test with real buyers before launch, not after.
The mistake that costs most
Flattening the data model on day one. One company, one location, one contact, because that is how the spreadsheet looked. Then a customer opens a second site, or a buyer leaves, or one branch needs different terms, and there is nowhere to put the information. Restructuring afterwards means touching catalogs, terms and orders on a live account.
Model it properly at the start even if today's data looks simple. Detail in company accounts.
Where to go next
For the build sequence, see how to build a Shopify B2B wholesale store. For the onboarding flow specifically, B2B customer onboarding explained. For services, Shopify B2B development.