If you've researched selling wholesale on Shopify in the last couple of years, you've probably absorbed a rule that is no longer true: B2B requires Shopify Plus. It was accurate for a long time, it's repeated across most of the articles currently ranking for this question, and several of those articles were written in 2022 and 2023 — when it was correct.
On April 2, 2026, Shopify shipped what it called "B2B for all," extending its foundational B2B capabilities beyond Plus to the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans. Shopify's framing was that B2B had consistently been one of the most requested capabilities from non-Plus merchants, and that the foundation is now available on every plan.
That single change reshapes the buying decision for small and mid-sized brands. A wholesale channel that used to imply a $2,300/month platform commitment can now start on a plan you may already be paying for. But "available on all plans" is not the same as "identical on all plans," and the differences matter more in production than they do in a demo. This guide maps the real split, plan by plan, and gives you a way to decide which side you're on.
What actually changed in April 2026
Before the change, the B2B object model in Shopify — companies, company locations, catalogs, price lists, payment terms — was gated behind Plus. Merchants on Basic, Grow, or Advanced who wanted a wholesale channel had two options: pay for Plus, or replicate wholesale behaviour with third-party apps and customer tags.
After the change, the same native B2B object model is available across Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. You get company profiles with multiple buyers, catalogs with customer-specific pricing, net payment terms, purchase order numbers, self-serve buyer ordering, quick order lists, draft orders, and Shopify Flow automations without a Plus subscription. Shopify also confirmed the upgrade path is seamless — moving from a standard plan to Plus doesn't require replatforming.
A lot of the content ranking for "Shopify B2B vs Plus" predates April 2026 and will tell you B2B is Plus-only. Some of it is confidently wrong in a way that's expensive: it can push a brand toward a $2,300/month plan it doesn't need, or toward a third-party wholesale app stack to replicate features Shopify now ships natively. Check the publication date on anything you read about Shopify B2B — including this article.
The native vs Plus-only matrix
Here's the split as Shopify currently documents it. "All plans" means Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus.
Two footnotes worth knowing. First, to use B2B catalog features on Basic, Grow, or Advanced, your store needs to be on new Shopify Markets. Second, a handful of features — including discount codes and abandoned checkout emails for B2B — are off by default and need Shopify Support to switch on.
The three-catalog limit is the real ceiling
If you take one operational detail from this article, make it this one. On Basic, Grow, and Advanced you get three active B2B market catalogs, and that limit applies across all your markets combined — not three per market. Assigning three catalogs to a single B2B market consumes the entire allowance; you have to remove or draft an existing assignment before adding one elsewhere.
Three catalogs sounds generous until you map it against how wholesale pricing actually works. A distributor running Gold, Silver, Bronze, Distributor, and Retail pricing needs five configurations. Three catalogs cover three of them. That's the moment the native path points at Plus.
There's a second, subtler constraint. On non-Plus plans, catalogs are assigned through Shopify Markets rather than directly to a company or company location. Plus adds direct assignment, which is what enables genuine customer-level pricing. If your pricing is tier-based — buckets that multiple accounts share — Markets-based assignment works fine. If every account has its own negotiated price book, you'll feel the difference quickly.
Count your distinct pricing tiers. Three or fewer, shared across accounts? Standard plans handle it. More than three, or genuinely per-customer pricing? You're looking at Plus, a third-party app, or custom development.
What genuinely still requires Plus
Stripping away the marketing, the Plus-only list for B2B is short and specific:
- Unlimited B2B catalogs — the ceiling that most growing wholesale operations hit first.
- Direct catalog assignment to companies and locations — true customer-level pricing rather than market-level buckets.
- Deposits, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment — essential if you take money in stages on large or made-to-order shipments.
- Checkout extensibility via Shopify Functions — custom checkout logic, validation, and B2B-specific rules at the final step.
- A dedicated B2B storefront with its own domain, separate from your DTC experience.
- Vaulted card storage for buyer accounts.
Note what isn't on that list: company accounts, net terms, PO numbers, self-serve ordering, quick order lists, and Flow automation. B2B automation in particular is not gated behind Plus — Flow is included on all paid plans, so you can route orders by value, notify the right rep, tag by company tier, or flag accounts approaching a credit limit without upgrading.
The cost question, plainly
That gap is why the decision deserves genuine analysis rather than a default. The jump from a standard plan to Plus is roughly sixty times the platform cost. Sometimes it's clearly worth it. Often, for a brand with three pricing tiers and forty wholesale accounts, it isn't — and a targeted app or a piece of custom development closes the specific gap for a fraction of the difference.
What neither tier gives you natively
This is the part most comparison articles skip, and it's where wholesale operations actually get stuck. Several functions that matter to real B2B businesses sit outside Shopify's native feature set at every plan level, including Plus:
There's no native storefront quoting engine. Draft orders cover simple staff-assisted deals, but request-a-quote, pricing negotiation, revision history, and approval tracking need an app or custom development.
If your buyers operate under internal purchasing policies requiring manager sign-off above a threshold, that approval chain isn't native at any tier.
Reps ordering on behalf of buyers, switching between accounts, with their own dashboards and commission visibility — not part of the native stack.
Larger buyers often require EDI or punchout catalog integration into their procurement systems. That's middleware or custom integration territory.
Flow can flag an account approaching its limit, but genuine enforcement — blocking orders that breach a credit ceiling — needs custom logic.
Price books that activate and expire on schedule, common in contract-driven wholesale, aren't natively modelled.
None of these are dealbreakers, and each has a well-trodden fix — an app, a Shopify Function, an admin UI extension, or a middleware integration. The mistake is discovering them after the platform decision rather than pricing them in up front. On Plus, checkout extensibility and Functions close several of these; each Function, though, is a discrete development effort rather than a setting you toggle.
The opposite error is just as costly: over-customizing too early. Let native features handle the simple parts, and reserve custom work for a real workflow gap — not for recreating something Shopify already does. We'd rather scope a small, targeted build than sell you a wholesale platform you don't need yet.
How to decide which side you're on
Work through these in order. The first "no" usually tells you where you land.
- Do you have real companies as customers, with their own buyers and addresses? If your wholesale is a handful of accounts you invoice manually, native B2B may be more structure than you need today.
- Do buyers want to self-serve? If they email orders to a rep who keys them in, the portal isn't the bottleneck — your process is. If they want to log in, browse their catalog, and order themselves, B2B on Shopify fits.
- Can your pricing be expressed in three catalogs or fewer? This is the single most decisive question. Yes: standard plans. No: Plus, an app, or custom work.
- Do you need deposits, partial payments, or custom checkout logic? Any yes here points at Plus.
- Do you need quoting, rep ordering, approvals, or EDI? Those need building regardless of plan — factor them into the budget on either path.
Native B2B is genuinely enough if…
- Three or fewer shared pricing tiers
- Tier-based pricing, not per-customer negotiation
- Standard net terms and PO checkout
- Buyers order self-serve from their catalog
- No deposits or staged payments
- DTC and wholesale on one storefront is fine
Plus earns its price if…
- More than three pricing tiers, or growing fast
- Genuinely per-company negotiated pricing
- Deposits or partial payments on large orders
- Custom checkout rules and validation
- A separate B2B storefront and domain
- Wholesale is a major share of revenue
Running B2B and DTC together
One of the strongest arguments for doing wholesale on Shopify — at any plan — is that it isn't a separate system. Company accounts and catalogs keep wholesale buyers inside their own pricing and product lane, while retail customers see the consumer experience, all from one admin with unified inventory and reporting. Shopify's own framing for the April change was one unified admin as a single source of truth for every side of a business.
That matters operationally more than it sounds. The alternative most growing brands live with — a DTC store plus a wholesale channel run through spreadsheets, emailed POs, and manual invoicing — is what actually caps growth. Every order needing a phone call or an email is a hard ceiling on how many accounts you can serve.
Because the upgrade path between plans doesn't require replatforming, there's a low-risk sequence available to most brands: launch native B2B on your current plan, learn what your buyers actually need, then upgrade to Plus when a specific limit — usually the catalog ceiling — starts costing you money. That's a materially better position than committing to $2,300/month based on a feature list you haven't tested against real buyer behaviour.
Migrating wholesale onto Shopify B2B
A large share of the brands asking this question aren't choosing between Shopify plans in the abstract — they're trying to get off something worse. Usually that's one of three situations, and each moves onto native B2B differently.
From spreadsheets and emailed POs
The most common starting point, and the one where native B2B delivers the biggest immediate return. The work here is less technical than organisational: you're turning informal pricing agreements into structured catalogs, and habits into buyer permissions. Budget most of the project time for data cleanup — deduplicating account records, deciding which negotiated prices are real tiers versus one-off favours, and agreeing internally who owns pricing going forward. The build itself is usually the quick part.
From a stack of wholesale apps
Brands that added a wholesale app to a standard plan before April 2026 are now in an interesting position: some of what they're paying for is native. It's worth auditing, because app-based wholesale typically stores pricing in customer tags and metafields rather than Shopify's company objects, so the migration is a genuine data remodel rather than a toggle. The upside is a simpler stack, fewer checkout edge cases, and reporting that isn't fragmented across systems.
From a legacy B2B platform
The heaviest path, and the one where the gaps section above matters most. Legacy platforms often carry workflows — contract pricing with effective dates, punchout, hard credit limits, multi-step approvals — that Shopify doesn't model natively at any tier. The failure mode is assuming feature parity and discovering the gaps mid-build. Map those workflows explicitly during scoping, decide for each whether it's rebuilt, replaced with a Function, handled by middleware, or genuinely dropped, and price it before you commit.
Whichever path you're on, don't launch the storefront before your team has agreed on who owns pricing, when ERP sync happens, and how draft orders and payment terms are governed. Those are business decisions, not development tasks, and unresolved they surface as production problems in week three rather than design questions in week one.
Where to go from here
If you're mapping this against your own operation, the honest first step is auditing your pricing structure — count your tiers, check whether they're shared or per-account, and list the workflows (quotes, approvals, rep ordering) your team runs manually today. That audit determines the plan, not the other way around.
We do this work as part of our Shopify B2B and wholesale development — setting up company accounts, catalogs, terms, and the custom layer where native stops, plus advising honestly on whether you need Plus at all. If the answer is yes, our Shopify Plus development covers checkout extensibility, Functions, and the multi-store side. And for brands whose wholesale keeps evolving, a dedicated developer on retainer handles the ongoing catalog, pricing, and integration work as accounts change.
Founder-led Shopify development for small-to-mid brands. We build native B2B, the custom layer above it, and tell you plainly when you don't need to upgrade.