Shopify B2B vs wholesale pricing: which one you actually need
These two words get used as synonyms and they are not the same thing. Picking the wrong one means either paying for machinery you will never use, or building a workaround for a feature you already have.
The thing most articles on this still get wrong: Shopify’s native B2B has not required Plus since 2 April 2026. If you are on Basic, Grow or Advanced, company accounts, catalogs, quantity price breaks and net payment terms are already in your admin at no extra cost. A great deal of advice written before that date — and some written after it — still tells you to upgrade. You probably do not need to.
The distinction in one paragraph
Wholesale is a commercial arrangement: selling in quantity at a lower per-unit price. B2B is a set of Shopify features for selling to companies — named businesses with signed-in buyers, their own catalog, their own payment terms.
Wholesale is usually B2B, but not always, and that gap is where people choose wrong. A buyer who takes twelve units because twelve is cheaper is buying wholesale. If they never create an account, never get approved, and check out like anyone else, none of Shopify’s B2B machinery applies to them — and none of it would help.
What changed in April 2026
For roughly four years, native B2B was a Shopify Plus feature. On 2 April 2026 Shopify released the core of it to the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans at no additional cost. This is the single most useful fact on this page and the one most likely to be out of date in whatever else you are reading.
| Feature | Basic / Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies and locations | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quantity price breaks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quantity rules (min / max / increment) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Net payment terms, ACH, vaulted cards | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Active B2B catalogs | Up to 3 | Up to 3 | Unlimited |
| Catalog assigned directly to a company | No — via Markets | No — via Markets | Yes |
| Contextual checkout and storefront | No | Yes | Yes |
| Deposits, partial payments, pay per fulfillment | No | No | Yes |
The practical reading: the three-catalog cap is what separates the plans for most merchants, not the features. Three catalogs is plenty for “standard trade”, “key accounts” and “distributors”. It is nowhere near enough if you have negotiated a different price list with each of forty stockists.
What switching on B2B costs you
This is the part the feature tables leave out, and it matters more than the plan question for a store that also sells retail.
- Accelerated checkouts are incompatible. Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and the rest do not work for B2B orders. For a trade buyer on net terms that is irrelevant. It is worth knowing before you assume B2B is free of side effects.
- So are subscriptions, local delivery and pickup points. If any of those carry real revenue for you, check the overlap before committing.
- Orders cap at 500 line items. Generous, until a distributor orders one of everything.
- Volume pricing fixes the price. Once a product has volume pricing in a catalog, a catalog-wide percentage adjustment stops applying to it. The two do not layer.
- Price breaks are per variant. Buyers cannot combine different variants to reach a threshold. Six smalls and six larges are two lots of six, not a twelve.
The question that actually decides it
Not your plan, not your order sizes. It is this: do your buyers sign in?
B2B pricing is attached to a company account. Shopify is explicit that it targets those buyers without affecting your D2C customers — which is exactly what you want if your trade prices should be private, and exactly wrong if the whole point is that every shopper sees the offer.
| If this is you | Use |
|---|---|
| Named accounts, approval before they can buy, invoices and net terms, prices retail shoppers must not see | Native B2B. It is already on your plan. An app is the wrong answer here. |
| Anyone can buy, and you want buying more to be visibly cheaper to every visitor | Storefront quantity breaks. No login, no approval, no account. |
| Both, in one store | Both. They do different jobs and do not replace each other. |
| A handful of trade customers you invoice by hand, and no appetite for setup | Draft orders. Unglamorous, on every plan, and fine at low volume. |
Where quantity breaks fit instead
A storefront quantity break is a public offer. The tier table renders on the product page, the discount applies at checkout, and the shopper does not need an account to get it. That makes it a merchandising tool — it exists to move a hesitant buyer from two units to three — where B2B pricing is an account management tool.
The confusion is understandable, because both end up as “cheaper per unit when you buy more”. They are aimed at different people and they fail in different ways. A B2B price list shown to the public is a pricing leak. A public quantity break offered to a contracted stockist is money left on the table.
One practical difference worth knowing if your catalogue is size- or colour-heavy: Shopify’s B2B volume pricing counts per variant, so a mixed-size case never reaches the break. Some storefront apps, ours included, can sum quantities across the variants of one product instead. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your buyers order one size at a time.
Running both in one store
This is the common end state and it is supported. Two things to get right:
- Put your B2B buyers in a B2B market. Below Plus, catalogs attach through Markets rather than directly to a company, so the market is what makes discount targeting work.
- Decide what the public offer is, deliberately. If retail shoppers see a break at 6 units and your trade price starts at 12, check the two do not cross. A retail customer buying 10 should not beat your stockist’s contracted rate.
Worth testing the overlap properly before you launch it — how discount stacking works covers which of these combine and which silently do not, and why a discount isn’t applying is the diagnostic order when one of them does not show up.
What quantity-break apps do not do
Said plainly, because it is the thing most likely to waste your time. A storefront quantity-break app — including ours — prices by quantity, not by who is buying. There is no customer group, no approval queue, no account-specific price list, no net terms, no hidden catalog.
If you need any of those, you need native B2B, and since April 2026 you almost certainly already have it. Install an app for the wrong job and you will uninstall it the same afternoon.
Quick sanity check before you change anything. Open your Shopify admin and look under Customers for Companies. If it is there, native B2B is available to you right now, on the plan you are already paying for.
Keep reading
Wholesale pricing on Shopify goes deeper on how far public quantity breaks get you toward trade pricing and the one thing they cannot do. Quantity breaks vs bundles vs discount codes covers which mechanism suits which catalogue, and how to create quantity breaks on Shopify walks through every route including the ones that need no app.