What is Shopify B2B and how does it work?

The short answer to what Shopify B2B is: a set of capabilities inside Shopify Plus that lets you sell wholesale from the same store. Things that used to need a separate wholesale store or an app — customer-specific pricing, payment on terms, minimum order rules — are now part of the platform itself. This piece covers what works out of the box, what doesn't, and where the limits start — the second part matters more, because that is where projects get stuck.

What is Shopify B2B: companies and locations

The basic building block of B2B is the company record. In retail a customer is a person; in B2B the customer is a company with several users under it. The purchasing manager and the warehouse lead see the same company's orders and get the same prices. Each company also has one or more locations. A location is more than a shipping address: the payment term, tax exemption and assigned catalog are all defined at location level. That means the Istanbul and Rotterdam branches of the same chain can trade on different prices and terms.

Catalogs and price lists

The catalog is B2B's pricing engine. A catalog defines two things at once: which products are visible, and what they cost. That is a useful detail — making sure a dealer never sees certain products doesn't need custom development, it is a catalog matter.

• Percentage discount: a catalog-wide reduction off retail price
• Fixed price: a set amount for specific products, independent of the list price
• Volume pricing: unit price that drops at quantity thresholds
• Quantity rules: minimum order quantity, selling in multiples, maximum quantity

Payment terms: net terms versus card

Payment is where B2B diverges most clearly from retail. In Shopify B2B you can assign a payment term to a company: due on receipt, net 14, net 30, end of month. When an order is placed on terms no payment is taken; the order is created and the invoice is paid when due. Card payment is also available, and the two can coexist. Starting a new dealer on prepayment and granting terms after a certain volume and payment history is a common model, and the platform supports it.

How do B2B customers log in?

There is a design decision here: B2B customers log in with a one-time code sent by email, not a password. That removes forgotten-password traffic, but it also means a visitor sees retail prices before logging in. If you want prices hidden entirely, that takes extra work on the storefront.

What Shopify B2B does not solve out of the box

• Complex approval chains: there is no multi-step flow like "the buyer prepares the cart, the department head approves, anything over 5,000 goes to the finance director". Beyond simple single-level setups this needs custom development.
• Credit limit enforcement against a live ERP balance: you can record a limit on a company, but it knows nothing about the real outstanding balance in your accounting. Genuine enforcement requires reading the balance from the ERP at order time.
• Quote and negotiation: there is no flow where a customer requests a quote, a salesperson counters, and revisions are discussed. Draft orders are used instead, but they keep no negotiation history.
• Contract price validity dates: logic like "this price holds until 31 March" is not handled automatically by catalogs; price updates are managed outside.
• Complex freight and delivery rules: pallet-based shipping, scheduled partial deliveries and customer-specific freight thresholds usually need an extra layer.

Shopify B2B solves the storefront side of wholesale. Your ERP still owns the commercial rules.

When do you need a custom layer or an ERP connection?

The practical threshold is this. If prices, limits and terms apply to few enough customers and products to be maintained by hand, Shopify B2B on its own is enough — with 40 dealers and four price lists, managing it in the admin is perfectly reasonable. You need an ERP connection once customer-specific prices run to hundreds of lines, once the credit limit is a rule that genuinely has to be enforced, or once keying orders into accounting by hand slows the operation down. If you run Exact Online, price lists map onto catalogs, the debtor account onto the company, the payment term onto the location, and the order onto a sales order.

Approval chains and quoting, by contrast, need custom development on the storefront. Whether that is worth building depends on how many hours of manual work that flow currently generates. If the answer is "two hours a month", don't build it.

Three questions to ask before you start

• Where do prices live: in Shopify or in the ERP? Hold them in both places and they will conflict.
• Is the credit limit actually enforced, or does the sales team watch it by eye?
• When dealers order, do they browse the storefront or work through a list? The answer shapes the design: for a wholesale buyer, pasting a SKU list into the cart is worth far more than a beautiful category page.