Wholesale on Shopify used to mean one of two things: a second store, or an app stack pretending to be a pricing engine. Both are expensive in ways that show up later — a second store doubles the catalogue maintenance, and an app stack turns every platform change into a compatibility problem.
Shopify Plus makes B2B native. Understanding what that covers, and what it does not, is the difference between a clean implementation and one that quietly rebuilds the app stack anyway.
What native B2B gives you
Company profiles. A buying organisation is a first-class record with its own locations, contacts and permissions. That is the piece the app-stack approach never modelled properly — wholesale buyers are companies with several people, not customers with a discount tag.
Per-company price lists. Pricing is attached to the company rather than derived from a tag, so a buyer sees their prices without a workaround that leaks retail prices before login.
Payment terms. Net 30 and similar arrangements are supported as terms rather than as an invoice emailed outside the platform.
All of it inside the same store, on the same catalogue. One product record, one inventory number, two audiences.
What still needs deciding
Whether wholesale is visible at all. Some brands want a public wholesale landing page that converts applications; others want the entire B2B surface invisible until login. This is a merchandising decision with a technical consequence and it should be made before the build, not during.
How buyers order. Wholesale ordering behaviour is not retail behaviour — buyers order across a range in quantity, often from a list rather than a grid. A retail product page is a slow way to place a forty-line order, and the fix is usually a quick-order surface built for the job.
What happens to minimums and packs. Case quantities, minimum order values and pack sizes are business rules, and where they live matters for how reliably they hold.
The migration that usually comes with it
Most stores adopting native B2B are moving off something. That migration has a specific hazard: the existing customer-to-price mapping is usually held in tags, spreadsheets and an app's own database, and only part of it is documented.
Export the current state before touching anything. Which customers get which prices, which have terms, which have exceptions somebody agreed by email three years ago. The exceptions are the expensive part, and they are never in the app.
Is it worth Plus on its own?
If B2B is a real revenue line rather than an experiment, usually yes — but do the comparison honestly. Add up the current app subscriptions, the second store's maintenance if you run one, and the hours spent on manual order entry and invoicing.
That total is the number to compare against, not the Plus fee in isolation. For stores where wholesale is a meaningful share of revenue, it is rarely close.