TL;DR / Key Takeaways

Most brands running wholesale in 2026 are managing it the hard way: a separate Shopify store, a third-party app bolted onto their DTC setup, or — worse — a spreadsheet and a string of emails. Shopify B2B wholesale just got dramatically simpler, and most brand owners haven't caught up yet.

The April 2026 Shopify B2B Announcement Every Brand Owner Needs to See

On April 2, 2026, Shopify announced that native B2B features are now available on every plan — not just Shopify Plus. Until this month, accessing Shopify's built-in wholesale tools required a Plus subscription starting at $2,300/month. That effectively locked out the majority of growing brands.

Now, whether you're on Basic, Grow, or Advanced Shopify, you can create a dedicated wholesale channel, manage B2B customers separately from retail buyers, and set custom account-level pricing — all inside your existing store, with no new subscription required.

The timing matters. B2B ecommerce is trending sharply toward what Shopify calls "rep-free buying experiences" — wholesale buyers who want the same self-service, DTC-quality ordering experience they have as consumers. Brands that build that infrastructure now establish the reorder habit before competitors even know the feature exists.

What Shopify B2B Actually Includes (Portals, Price Lists, Net Terms Explained)

Here's what's available natively with Shopify B2B wholesale on all plans:

B2B customer portal. Wholesale buyers log in to a password-protected storefront experience. Same products as your DTC store, but with B2B-specific pricing, checkout rules, and account management. Buyers can browse your catalog, place orders, and track open invoices — without calling a sales rep or waiting on email responses.

Price lists. Create multiple price lists and assign them to specific companies or buyer groups. A national distributor might get 40% off retail. A regional boutique gets 25%. Both see a clean, customized catalog reflecting exactly the deal you've negotiated — and nothing else.

Company accounts and locations. Shopify's B2B model is built around "companies" rather than individual buyers. A company record can have multiple locations — regional warehouses, store branches, buying offices — each with its own contact, shipping address, and payment terms. When a multi-location retail chain reorders from different locations, everything routes back to one parent account.

Net payment terms. Set Net 15, Net 30, or Net 60 terms on a per-company basis directly in Shopify. The platform tracks outstanding invoices and supports payment via bank transfer, check, or card against those terms. For straightforward wholesale operations, this replaces the need for a separate invoicing tool entirely.

Quantity rules and order minimums. Enforce minimum order quantities and case pack sizes at the product or variant level. A buyer placing a wholesale order sees the minimums that apply to their account. Your DTC shoppers see none of it.

Draft orders and manual invoicing. For deals that start with a phone call or an email negotiation, you can still create draft orders and send payment links — now with B2B pricing applied automatically when you select the buyer's company account.

The result: merchants using Shopify's native B2B tools report up to 20% higher reorder frequency compared to managing wholesale through manual processes or disconnected tools. When buyers can self-serve on their own timeline — checking inventory, placing and tracking orders, reviewing invoice history — the friction that kills repeat purchasing disappears.

Shopify B2B vs. Third-Party Wholesale Apps: When to Use Each

Before this update, most Shopify brands used apps like Wholesale Club, Bold Custom Pricing, or Locksmith to simulate B2B functionality. Those tools still have a place. Native B2B changes the default decision — but doesn't eliminate the use case for third-party apps.

Choose native Shopify B2B if:

Add or keep a third-party app if:

For most brands building or scaling a Shopify B2B wholesale channel, native B2B handles 80–90% of requirements. You can always layer specialized apps on top as complexity grows — but starting with native keeps your stack clean and your costs low.

Setting Up Your B2B Portal Step by Step (Without a Developer)

This walkthrough applies to all Shopify plans post-April 2026. No developer needed for the foundational setup.

Step 1: Enable new customer accounts. Go to Settings → Customer accounts in your Shopify admin. Activate "New customer accounts" — this is required for the B2B portal login experience. Classic Shopify accounts don't support the B2B portal. If your store has been live for a while, this is worth doing now regardless; the new accounts system is significantly more flexible.

Step 2: Create your first company. Navigate to Customers → Companies → Create Company. Add the company name, a primary contact with their email address, and their billing and shipping information. Assign payment terms here — Net 30 takes about ten seconds to configure.

Step 3: Build a price list. Go to Products → Price Lists → Create Price List. Apply a percentage discount across your catalog (e.g., 40% off) or set fixed prices product by product for accounts that have negotiated specific line-item pricing. Assign this price list to the company you created. Done.

Step 4: Configure quantity rules. Inside individual products, Shopify now exposes a B2B settings panel where you can set minimum order quantities and purchase increments per variant. A wholesale buyer ordering your apparel line might see: minimum 12 units, sold in multiples of 6. Your DTC buyers never see these rules.

Step 5: Share the portal link. Shopify generates a login URL for your B2B portal. Send it to your wholesale buyer. They create an account tied to their company record, and from that point forward, every login shows them their specific pricing, terms, and order history.

Most brands can run through these five steps and have a working wholesale portal in under a day. That's not a stretch — it's genuinely that straightforward for standard setups.

B2B Checkout Customization: Compliance Rules, Quantity Minimums, Payment Terms

Once your portal is live, most brands need a few additional guardrails to match real-world wholesale agreements.

Conditional payment terms logic. Shopify's native net terms handle standard cases cleanly. When you need conditional rules — Net 30 only for orders over $500, otherwise card required — you'll need Shopify Functions or an app. Shopify Functions are lightweight JavaScript hooks that execute at checkout and are increasingly accessible to developers comfortable with the Shopify platform.

Compliance documentation fields. If your wholesale buyers need to provide resale certificates, business license numbers, or tax-exempt documentation before ordering, Shopify doesn't have a native field for this. The practical solution is a metafield-based account form at registration, or an app like B2B Login & Lock that adds structured intake fields. This is a common first customization point and a worthwhile one — catching compliance issues before the first order is far cleaner than chasing them after.

Wholesale-specific shipping profiles. Wholesale buyers typically have negotiated freight rates rather than standard shipping calculator pricing. Create B2B-only shipping profiles in Shopify and assign them by customer tag or company record. This keeps retail and wholesale shipping rates cleanly separated — DTC buyers never see freight options, wholesale buyers never see retail flat-rate shipping.

Draft orders for complex buys. For large seasonal purchases that start with a conversation — a regional retailer placing a spring buy, a distributor confirming a truckload order — draft orders let your team assemble the order, apply B2B pricing automatically, and send a payment link. The buyer pays on their timeline; the order drops into your fulfillment queue like any other Shopify order.

5 Industries Getting the Most ROI from Shopify Wholesale Right Now

Shopify B2B wholesale isn't equally valuable across every category. These five are generating the clearest results:

Apparel and accessories. Multi-door retail distribution — placing product across boutiques, regional chains, and specialty retailers — is a natural fit. Seasonal lookbooks delivered via portal, price lists by account tier, minimum order quantities enforced automatically by style.

Food and beverage. CPG brands selling to specialty grocery, restaurants, and corporate offices benefit from standing order functionality, net terms, and automated reorder reminders via Klaviyo flows connected to the B2B customer record. The portal turns a rep-driven relationship into a self-service one without eliminating the relationship.

Health and beauty. Salon and spa wholesale is a large, structurally underserved market online. B2B portals let beauty brands separate their professional product line (licensed practitioners only, case minimums, professional pricing) from their DTC consumer catalog — a distinction that's difficult to enforce cleanly without native B2B tools.

Home goods and furnishings. Interior designers, commercial buyers, and hospitality procurement teams order in volume and expect to buy on account. A self-service portal where they can browse, order, and track independently reduces the sales and ops overhead dramatically for what are often high-AOV orders.

Supplements and specialty nutrition. Gym chains, health food retailers, and corporate wellness programs are consistent wholesale buyers. Shopify B2B handles the pricing, invoicing, and account management layer while your existing Shopify fulfillment stack handles pick, pack, and ship exactly as it does for DTC orders.

Common Shopify B2B Setup Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Skipping the customer accounts migration. The B2B portal requires Shopify's new customer account system. Many stores — especially those live before 2024 — are still on classic accounts. If you don't migrate first, buyers will encounter broken or degraded login experiences. The migration is non-destructive and typically takes under an hour.

One-size-fits-all pricing. The temptation is to create a single "wholesale" price list with a flat discount and apply it to every B2B buyer. Resist it. A regional boutique and a national distributor have fundamentally different economics — and different negotiating leverage. Start with your most important wholesale relationship and build a price list that reflects the actual deal. Add tiers as you grow.

Forgetting tax-exempt configuration. B2B buyers in the U.S. are frequently tax-exempt. If you don't set tax-exempt status on their company record in Shopify, the platform charges them sales tax at checkout. That creates refund requests, erodes trust, and creates accounting headaches. Configure it during onboarding, not after the first invoice dispute.

No minimum order threshold. Without an enforced minimum, small orders slip through that aren't economically worth fulfilling. A $45 wholesale order with Net 30 terms costs more to process than it generates. Use Shopify Functions to enforce a minimum order value at checkout for B2B buyers.

B2B portal pages indexed by Google. If your B2B portal URLs get crawled and indexed, you risk exposing wholesale pricing publicly or creating duplicate content issues. Shopify enforces a login gate on portal pages by default — confirm this is active, and verify that any B2B-specific landing pages are noindexed if they're accessible before login.

How Atlas Builds B2B Ecommerce Experiences on Shopify

Native Shopify B2B wholesale handles the core use case well. When brands need more — custom portal UX, ERP integration, complex conditional pricing logic, or a branded wholesale ordering experience that matches their DTC quality — that's where our Shopify development team builds on top of what Shopify provides natively.

We've built B2B experiences for brands managing hundreds of active wholesale accounts, brands with national retailer relationships that require EDI-compliant order formatting, and brands launching their first wholesale channel with no prior infrastructure. The goal is always the same: make ordering so frictionless for buyers that reordering becomes a habit rather than a task.

A few things we see consistently in B2B builds that benefit from custom work:

If you're building a Shopify B2B wholesale channel for the first time or need to make an existing one perform, the right starting point is understanding what you can accomplish natively versus where custom development pays for itself. Our ecommerce team scopes both honestly.

B2B ecommerce is moving in one direction: buyers want to reorder the way they shop as consumers — self-service, on-demand, no phone tag. The brands building that experience now own the repeat order relationship. Shopify just removed the most significant barrier to doing it.

The April 2026 B2B expansion is one of the most practically useful Shopify updates in years. The brands that act on it first — building clean wholesale portals before the category gets crowded — get the SEO, the relationships, and the reorder momentum. If your wholesale channel is still running on spreadsheets and email chains, this is a good week to change that.

Want to build a Shopify B2B portal that actually scales? Talk to our team — we'll show you exactly what's achievable on your current plan and where it makes sense to go further.