What is Shopify B2B?
Shopify B2B is the built-in set of wholesale features that comes with Shopify Plus. Where a standard Shopify store is designed to sell to consumers, B2B lets you sell to business customers with their own prices, payment terms and purchasing flows. The question we get asked most often is whether Shopify can be used for B2B. The answer is yes, and on Shopify Plus it is not a workaround or a chain of apps, but part of the platform itself.
Shopify is neither purely B2C nor purely B2B. It is a platform that can handle both, and that is exactly its strength. A brand can run its regular consumer store and its wholesale store on the same Shopify Plus platform, with one product catalog, one inventory and one back office. For brands that sell both directly to consumers and to retailers, this removes duplicate work and duplicate systems.
Shopify Plus B2B versus Shopify B2B apps
A common point of confusion, including in discussions on the Shopify B2B subreddit, is the difference between Shopify Plus and B2B. They are not competitors. B2B is a feature package that unlocks once you are on the Shopify Plus plan. In other words, you cannot choose B2B without Plus, and you do not need a separate license to get the native wholesale features.
If you run on a standard Shopify plan and want to do Shopify B2B without Plus, you are left with apps that simulate wholesale features, for example customer-specific price lists or access-restricted catalogs. That can work for a small retailer base, but it quickly becomes fragile as the number of rules and customers grows. The best B2B solution for Shopify therefore depends on your scale: small needs can be handled with an app, while a serious wholesale business belongs on Shopify Plus B2B with the native features at the foundation.
The most important Shopify B2B features
The core of Shopify B2B is that your business customers are organized into companies with multiple buyers, each with their own permissions. You can assign customer-specific catalogs and price lists, so one retailer sees their own net prices while another sees different ones. This is where Shopify B2B pricing really differs from a standard store: prices, volume discounts and minimum orders are managed per company or per catalog.
On top of that come payment terms such as net 30, invoice payment and pre-approved payment methods, as well as the ability to save purchase orders as drafts. Your B2B customers log in to a dedicated portal where they only see what is relevant to them. If the flow needs further automation, or if data needs to be exchanged with an ERP or PIM system, we use the Shopify B2B API to connect the platform with the rest of your business infrastructure.
Theme, design and user experience for B2B
A wholesale store has different demands on the user experience than a consumer store. Buyers often order many SKUs at once, reorder fixed assortments and want a quick overview rather than inspiration. A good Shopify B2B theme supports fast ordering interfaces, bulk add to cart and visible net prices after login.
We rarely recommend a standard theme unchanged for B2B. In practice we adapt the theme so it matches the actual purchasing patterns, while the brand still looks sharp. If you want to see how we work with conversion and structure, you can read more about our approach to Shopify design and about how we make customizations at the theme level.
How Mercive would build your Shopify B2B store
We start by mapping out how your wholesale business actually works: which customer segments you have, how prices are set, which payment terms your retailers expect, and how orders flow into your ERP today. This determines how much can be solved natively on Shopify Plus B2B, and where there is a need for integration or custom development.
In most cases we put B2B and B2C on the same Shopify Plus platform, so you avoid two systems and double maintenance. We have done this for brands that combine B2C, B2B and retail in one solution.
How Mercive can help
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