On April 2, 2026, Shopify quietly changed who can sell wholesale on their platform. They moved native B2B features off the $2,300-a-month Plus tier and onto every paid plan. Basic, Grow, Advanced. All of them.

Most guides still talk about Shopify B2B like it's a Plus-only thing. That was true a month ago. It isn't now.

If you're searching "shopify b2b ecommerce" today, you're probably either a DTC brand thinking about adding wholesale, or a wholesale-first operator weighing your platform options. Either way, the answer changed. So did the math.

This is the practical guide for the rest of us. What's actually included on each plan after April 2026. How to set it up without burning a weekend. The walls you'll hit (and there are walls). When to upgrade. And the support layer almost every B2B guide skips entirely.

Hear what AI support calls sound like for your store. Just paste your Shopify URL and get sample calls in under 20 seconds, no email required. Listen to demo calls for my store.

What is Shopify B2B?

Shopify B2B is a suite of native features that lets you sell to other businesses through your Shopify store. Same admin, same products, same checkout. Different buyer experience.

The shift from DTC to B2B isn't really about the technology. It's about five things you can finally do that DTC doesn't need:

• Company profiles: a single account with multiple buyers and multiple shipping locations
• Custom catalogs: private price lists assigned to specific companies
• Volume pricing: tiered discounts (buy 10, buy 50, buy 100)
• Payment terms: Net 7, Net 30, Net 60, or custom terms instead of "pay now"
• Vaulted credit cards + ACH: store buyer cards on file, accept bank-to-bank transfers

You can run both DTC and B2B from the same store. Same inventory. Same products. Different buyers see different prices, payment options, and even content. Or you can run a B2B-only separate store if you want a cleaner split.

Why this matters in 2026: B2B buyers on Shopify reorder up to 4.1x more often than DTC buyers, according to Shopify's own data. The global B2B ecommerce market is sized at roughly $32 trillion in 2025 and growing at about 14.5% per year, per Mordor Intelligence. It's the bigger half of ecommerce by a wide margin.

Wholesale doesn't get the attention DTC gets. But the revenue is steadier and the lifetime value is usually higher.

What changed on April 2, 2026

Here's the short version of the announcement: Shopify took the features that used to be locked behind the $2,300/mo Plus tier and put them on every paid plan.

For the first time, a brand on the $39/mo Basic plan can run a real B2B operation. Not via a third-party app. Native.

A few things to note about that table.

The 3-catalog cap on non-Plus plans is real and you will hit it. Most real wholesale operations need a catalog per pricing tier (distributors, regional retailers, key accounts) and a seasonal price list. That's already 4-5.

The 0.18% Plus B2B transaction fee isn't a gotcha. Shopify Plus also gives you ~5x higher API limits, Shopify Flow, and a 36% lower total cost of ownership at scale per Shopify. If you're doing $5M+ in wholesale revenue, the math works in Plus's favor.

If you're under that, the April 2026 expansion is built for you.

The native Shopify B2B feature set

Quick walkthrough of what each feature actually does, where it lives in the admin, and the one practical pitfall you should know about going in.

Company profiles

A company is a parent account with multiple buyers and locations under it. You set company-level permissions (who can place orders, who can see invoices, who can approve), and assign catalogs and payment terms at the company level. Lives under Customers → Companies in your admin.

The pitfall: there's no native company-vs-individual toggle at registration. New B2B accounts get created from the admin or via Shopify Forms on the storefront. The "sign up as a company" flow you'd expect on other B2B platforms doesn't exist out of the box.

Custom catalogs

A catalog is a private price list. You can set fixed prices ("this customer pays $40 for the SKU that retails at $80") or percentage discounts ("20% off MSRP"). Catalogs are assigned to companies, and a company can have multiple catalogs depending on the product line.

The pitfall: 3-catalog cap on non-Plus. As one Reddit operator put it, "the moment a brand outgrows the allowed 3 pricing catalogs, they will have to decide to either shell out the $25k for the first year of Plus, or migrate."

Volume pricing + quantity rules

Tiered discounts based on quantity (10 at one price, 50 at a lower price, 100 at a lower price still), plus minimum and maximum quantities, plus case packs ("sold in cartons of 12").

The pitfall: the price-tier display table that shows buyers the volume breaks is gated to Plus. On non-Plus, the discounts apply silently in the cart. Buyers don't see the tier table on the product page unless you code it in via Liquid. Plan on 4-8 hours of theme work if you want to show buyers what they're saving.

Payment terms

Net 7, 30, 60, 90, or custom. Set per company. Plus adds partial payments (50/50, 30/70) and deposits.

The pitfall: payment terms move working-capital risk to you. Price your wholesale margins for it.

Vaulted credit cards + ACH

Store buyer credit cards on file for one-click reorders. Accept ACH bank transfers (US only).

Customer accounts portal

Self-serve buyer portal: order history, one-click reorders, returns, account management.

The pitfall: passwordless email-2FA on every single login. Buyers get an email link, click it, get redirected, then come back. Wholesale buyers absolutely complain about this. As one merchant put it, "the kind of friction that ends in 'just email me a Word doc.'"

Draft orders

Sales reps create a quote in the admin. The buyer gets an emailed invoice and pays online. Useful for negotiated orders or custom configurations. Note the 0.20% transaction fee on draft orders (this stings if you do a lot of them).

Quick-order forms + bulk ordering

Buyer types in SKUs (or pastes a list), quantities populate, single click to add to cart. The B2B-native version of "I know what I want, let me buy 47 things in 30 seconds."

Setting it up: a clean 9-step launch

Most "how to set up Shopify B2B" guides give you 20 steps and one of them is "define your strategy." That's not a step. Here's the actual sequence.

1. Confirm eligibility: you need a US or Canadian Shopify store on Basic or above, with the online store sales channel turned on.
2. Create your first company profile: Customers → Companies → Add company. Add the company, locations, and buyer contacts.
3. Build your first catalog: Products → Catalogs → New catalog. Set either fixed prices or percentage discounts. Assign it to the company you just created.
4. Set volume pricing rules: define your quantity breaks (e.g. 10 / 50 / 100). Decide if you'll show the tier table (theme work required on non-Plus).
5. Configure payment terms: per company. Net 30 is the default for most B2B operations. Net 60 for larger accounts. Vault credit cards by default and offer ACH for big orders.
6. Set quantity rules (if relevant): minimum order, maximum order, case packs.
7. Pick a B2B-capable theme: Dawn or Horizon if you're on Basic/Grow/Advanced. Trade if you're on Plus.
8. Set up the buyer-account email templates: welcome email when approved, password-reset, order confirmation. The default "your account is approved" email is too thin. Write a real one.
9. Test the buyer journey end-to-end: log in as the test company buyer. Check pricing. Place a draft order. Confirm payment terms surface at checkout. Reorder from the customer portal. Test the phone path (this last one is the step almost everyone skips, see below).

If you're going to skip a step, don't let it be step 9. Pricing displaying wrong on launch day is the most common B2B-on-Shopify rollout failure I've seen.

Ready to see what AI phone support looks like for your wholesale buyers? Start your free trial. Setup takes about three minutes.

When you outgrow native B2B

Most guides dodge this. They shouldn't.

The signs you've outgrown native:

• You've hit the 3-catalog ceiling: you have 3+ pricing tiers, multiple regions, or seasonal price lists.
• You need a Sales Rep Portal: your team places orders on buyers' behalf and the Shopify admin isn't built for them. There's no day-to-day sales-rep interface, no quoting engine, no order-on-behalf-of workflow that doesn't go through draft orders.
• You need partial payments or deposits: large POs that pay 50% up front, 50% on delivery, or 30% deposit terms.
• You need ERP or CRM sync at production scale: NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, Acumatica.
• You need true contextualized storefronts: different navigation, product mix, or content by audience.

Two paths out:

Path 1: Upgrade to Shopify Plus. Starts at $2,300/mo + a 0.18% B2B transaction fee. Right call if you're doing $5M+ in wholesale revenue. If you're stuck deciding which plan for B2B, this is where most operators wrestle with the math. You get unlimited catalogs, partial payments, deposits, Shopify Plus features like Flow automations, and the ~5x API limit bump.

Path 2: Layer on a B2B app on your current plan. SparkLayer, BSS Commerce, Wholesale Helper, Wholesale Gorilla. SparkLayer starts at $49/mo, ships unlimited B2B price lists, a Sales Rep Portal, and a quoting engine. It's the most popular "B2B features without paying Plus" path. App vendors will sell you on the $2,300-vs-$49 math, but the real reason most brands pick an app over Plus is the Sales Rep Portal, which Plus still doesn't ship natively.

There's a third path nobody talks about, which is doing nothing and staying lean. If you have 5-15 wholesale accounts, 1-2 catalogs, and a phone number, you may just not need any of this complexity. The April 2026 expansion is also for you.

B2B customer support: the layer most guides skip

Here's the thing every Shopify B2B guide misses: native B2B is a buyer portal, not a support layer.

The portal is great. Self-serve handles roughly 80% of B2B requests, per Shopify's own customer-service research. Buyers reorder, check status, file returns, manage their account, all without talking to anyone.

But the other 20% still calls. And in B2B, those calls matter more than they do in DTC. Why?

• Order values are 10x to 100x higher
• Buyer relationships are recurring, not one-shot
• A stuck PO blocks the buyer's own business
• Urgent reorders happen by phone (the buyer's customer is waiting)
• Substitutions need a human (or AI) decision: "you're out of SKU A, what do I take instead?"

This is where the post-launch math gets ugly. If you're a 5-person ops team taking 30 wholesale calls a week, that's roughly 15 hours of phone time. Triple your wholesale volume and you're at 90+ calls a week. That's a full-time hire just to answer the phone.

Most brands handle this badly. They either ignore phone (bad: high-value buyers feel ignored) or hire (expensive: phone is a poor place to spend payroll). The cleaner play is to put AI on the phone and let the humans handle the genuine escalations.

That's where Ringly fits.

Ringly.io: AI phone support for Shopify brands

Ringly is AI phone support for Shopify brands. Stop hiring a new agent every time call volume goes up. Instead of growing your support headcount every time your wholesale program scales, the AI takes the routine inbound calls so your team can focus on the work that actually moves revenue.

The AI answers inbound calls 24/7. It finds orders in your Shopify store, processes returns and exchanges, answers product questions from your knowledge base, and rescues abandoned carts via outbound follow-up. Across 50+ brands, the AI resolves 73% of calls autonomously at roughly $0.42 per resolved call. Calls that need a human escalate cleanly to Gorgias, Richpanel, Reamaze, or whatever helpdesk you already run.

For B2B specifically, the use cases that show up over and over again:

• PO status calls (the wholesale equivalent of WISMO calls)
• Reorder by phone: the AI pulls the buyer's order history and re-creates the last order in one call
• Out-of-stock substitution: the AI offers the approved alternate SKU from your catalog
• Payment-terms questions: "what's my Net 30 balance, when's my next invoice"
• Escalation to the assigned account manager for anything that needs a human

Plans: Grow $349/mo (1,000 minutes), Pro $799/mo (2,500 minutes), Enterprise custom. 14-day free trial on Pro. Live in under an hour. 65% resolution guarantee: if the AI resolves under 65% of your calls in 90 days, we refund the last 3 months.

Try Ringly.io free for 14 days and get a working AI phone line for your wholesale buyers by this afternoon.

If you want more context on the broader category, see AI phone agents for Shopify, Shopify voice agents, and ecommerce phone support.

B2B examples worth studying

The most useful B2B stores on Shopify aren't the biggest brands. They're the ones that did one thing really well.

• Brooklinen: moved a manual, time-consuming B2B process onto native Shopify B2B. Replaced the spreadsheet-and-email workflow most brands start with.
• AMR Hair & Beauty: 10 pricing tiers automatically applied by customer status. Result: a 77% rise in B2B AOV, per Shopify's case studies.
• Tony's Chocolonely: built "ChocoPortal" with tiered pricing, volume discounts, and unified inventory.
• The Somewhere Co.: ZIP-code exclusivity for retail partners. Result: 33% faster average order time.
• CeramicSpeed: sales-rep mobile app on unified product data. Result: 5% faster orders.
• Dermalogica Pro: gated educational hub with a learning library, product fact sheets, and pro-only tools.
• DECKED: custom dealer-locator app matching buyers to partners based on inventory.

What unites these: they didn't try to replicate their old wholesale process on Shopify. They reimagined the buyer experience around the platform's strengths. Self-serve, tiered pricing, content + commerce in the same place.

Common B2B pitfalls to avoid

• Treating "approved" like "onboarded": a one-line "your account is approved" email kills the first PO. The buyer was hot when they applied. By the time they figure out your portal solo, the moment's gone. Write a real welcome sequence with a video walkthrough and a direct line to a rep.
• Hiding pricing too aggressively: B2B buyers research before they buy. Gating every price behind a login lengthens the sales cycle and kills SEO. Show MSRP publicly. Lock the wholesale tiers.
• Building on the 3-catalog limit assuming you won't outgrow it: you will, sometimes by week 4. Plan for the upgrade path or pick the app stack from day one. Migrating later is more painful than choosing right at the start.
• Ignoring the phone channel: B2B buyers escalate by phone. Every B2B customer service for Shopify playbook flags this. The brands that ignore the phone in wholesale are the ones with the highest churn.
• Forgetting Net 30 cash flow: payment terms shift working-capital risk to you. Either price the margin for it, build aging reports, or use a Net 30 insurance product. Don't wing it.
• Letting sales reps live in the Shopify admin: it's not built for them. Either use an app's Sales Rep Portal, build a custom rep tool, or stop having sales reps place orders. Mixing rep workflows into the merchant admin is how data goes sideways.
• Skipping the test-buyer dry run: going live with broken volume pricing on launch day is depressingly common. Test as the buyer before you flip the switch.

B2B KPIs that actually matter

You don't need a 30-metric dashboard for wholesale. You need five.

• Reorder frequency: B2B baseline is ~4.1x DTC, per Shopify. If you're below 2x, your buyer experience is leaking buyers.
• AOV per catalog tier: catalog 1 vs catalog 3. If they're flat, your pricing tiers aren't doing the work they're supposed to.
• Time-to-first-PO (approval to first order): under 14 days is healthy. Under 7 days is excellent. Over 30 means your onboarding is broken.
• Quote-to-PO conversion: percentage of draft orders that turn into paid orders. Above 60% is good for negotiated B2B.
• Wholesale call deflection: percentage of inbound phone questions resolved without a human. This is where AI phone support shows up in the KPI tree, and it's the number most B2B operators don't measure yet.

If you want a broader read on phone-side metrics, see first call resolution for ecommerce and the Shopify call center playbook.

Frequently asked questions

What plan do I need to use Shopify B2B?

Any paid plan, as of April 2026. Basic ($39/mo) gives you the core: company profiles, up to 3 catalogs, volume discounts, payment terms, vaulted credit cards. Plus ($2,300+/mo) removes the catalog limit and adds partial payments and deposits.

Can I run B2B and DTC from the same Shopify store?

Yes. That's actually the default setup. One catalog, one inventory, two buyer experiences. You can also run B2B in its own dedicated store if you'd rather keep them split.

What's the difference between Shopify B2B and Shopify Plus B2B?

All paid plans get the core B2B features now. Plus adds unlimited catalogs, partial payments, deposits, direct catalog-to-location assignment, Shopify Flow automations, and roughly 5x higher API limits.

Do I need an app like SparkLayer if I'm on Plus?

Depends. Plus doesn't ship a dedicated Sales Rep Portal or a real quoting engine, so apps stay popular even on Plus for brands with sales teams that need a day-to-day interface. If you're self-serve B2B only, you probably don't.

How do payment terms work on Shopify B2B?

You set terms per company (Net 7, 30, 60, 90, or custom). The order ships now, the invoice comes due later. Plus adds partial payments and deposits for larger orders that need staged billing.

What about phone support for wholesale buyers?

Native Shopify B2B is a buyer portal, not a support layer. For inbound wholesale calls (PO status, urgent reorders, substitutions, escalations), most brands use a phone line that escalates to AI or a small ops team. Ringly.io is the AI option for Shopify brands and integrates with your helpdesk for the calls that need a human.

What's the catch with the 3-catalog limit?

You'll hit it. Most real wholesale operations need 4-5 catalogs at minimum: tier 1 distributors, tier 2 retailers, regional pricing, and at least one seasonal price list. Plan now or layer in an app.

Is Shopify B2B good for a brand under $500K wholesale revenue?

Yes, the April 2026 expansion was specifically aimed at this segment. Below $5M in wholesale revenue, you almost certainly don't need Plus, and the native features on Basic or Grow are enough to start.

The takeaway

April 2026 changed who can run wholesale on Shopify. If you're under $5M in wholesale revenue, the native features on Basic, Grow, or Advanced are probably enough to launch and scale a real B2B operation.

The platform isn't the hard part anymore. The hard part is buyer onboarding, picking your catalog tiers, deciding your payment-terms exposure, and building a support layer that doesn't fall over the first time call volume spikes.

Watch the walls (3-catalog cap, the email-2FA login friction, the no-sales-rep-portal gap). Pick your upgrade path before you slam into them.

And don't leave phone support for last. The brands that win at wholesale on Shopify don't just have a great portal. They have a great phone experience too. Try Ringly free for 14 days and see what that looks like for your store.

Article by Ruben Boonzaaijer. Co-founder of Ringly.io. We build AI phone support for Shopify brands so they can scale support without hiring a phone team.