B2B is no longer a reason to be on Shopify Plus

On 2 April 2026 Shopify made key parts of its B2B feature set available on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, at no additional cost. For anyone who has spent years telling a wholesale client that the answer is a Plus upgrade, the answer changed.

What moved down

The parts that matter for a first wholesale channel are now on the standard plans:

• Company profiles — buyers belong to a company with locations, contacts and their own permissions, rather than being ordinary customers with a tag.
• Payment terms — net terms on an order instead of payment at checkout.
• Volume pricing — quantity breaks applied at the catalog level.
• Up to three active B2B catalogs, assigned through Markets.
• Vaulted credit cards, and ACH for United States merchants.

That set is enough to run a real wholesale operation: a distributor logs in, sees their prices, orders on terms, and does it without a spreadsheet and an email thread.

What stayed on Plus

The line Shopify drew is about scale and granularity rather than capability:

• Unlimited catalogs, which is what customer-specific pricing actually requires once you have more than three price levels.
• Assigning a catalog directly to a company or a company location. On the standard plans a catalog is assigned through a Market, which is a coarser instrument.
• Partial payments and deposits.

Read those three together and the constraint becomes clear. Three catalogs assigned by Market covers tiered pricing — a distributor tier, a retail tier, a partner tier. It does not cover negotiated pricing, where each account has its own sheet. If your contracts are individual, you are still on the Plus side of the line.

What this changes in practice

The pitch for a wholesale build used to include a plan migration, which meant the conversation started with a number that had nothing to do with the work. That number is gone for most projects, and the sequencing changes with it: a store can now start wholesale on its current plan, run it for a season, and move to Plus when the catalog count — not the ambition — says so.

It also raises the value of getting the data model right early. Three catalogs is not a limit you feel on day one; it is a limit you hit when the third region asks for its own price list. Deciding early whether pricing is tiered or negotiated determines whether the store outgrows the plan in a year, and that decision is a modelling decision, not a plan decision.

One caution: none of this makes the storefront side automatic. B2B buyers still need a theme that shows net prices without confusing retail customers, a login that lands them in the right context, and quantity rules that behave on a phone. That work is the same as it was before the announcement.

What to check before promising a date

Three questions decide whether a wholesale channel on a standard plan is a few weeks of work or a quarter.

How many price levels are there, honestly? Ask for the actual price list rather than a description of it. Merchants routinely describe a handful of tiers and then produce a spreadsheet with more, because the accounts that negotiated their own terms years ago never got counted as tiers.

Does the theme have a second audience? A storefront serving retail and wholesale from the same templates has to decide, per template, what a logged-in company contact sees: prices with or without tax, minimum quantities, availability by location, and whether the retail promotional band should appear at all. Each of those is a small decision and there are more of them than anyone expects.

Where do the orders go afterwards? Wholesale orders usually leave Shopify for an ERP or an accounting system, and payment terms mean an order can be fulfilled before it is paid. If the downstream system assumes payment on order, that assumption is the integration work, and it is not smaller because the plan is cheaper.

If you are weighing a wholesale channel, Shopify development covers the storefront side and Shopify Plus covers the point where the catalog limit stops being theoretical.