Shopify B2B Portal: What It Is and How to Build One

A Shopify B2B portal is the signed-in account your wholesale buyers use after they log in as a contact of a company. They see the catalog and prices assigned to them, check out on their payment terms with a PO number, then track and pay orders from their account. It is built from Shopify's native B2B features, available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans, so you configure it rather than install it.

Most conversations about a B2B buyer portal on Shopify start with app recommendations. That is the wrong starting point. Before you evaluate any app, you need to understand what Shopify's native B2B layer actually provides as a self-serve buyer experience, where that native layer ends, and what operational infrastructure has to sit behind the portal for it to work correctly at any real volume.

A portal that shows buyers the wrong prices because catalog sync is broken, or that accepts net terms orders that never reach your ERP's AR module, is not a functional buyer portal. It is a source of disputes, manual corrections, and buyer friction. This guide covers what a B2B buyer portal is on Shopify, how to set one up, and what the back-office layer behind it has to look like for the portal experience to hold.

What Is a Shopify B2B Portal?

A B2B buyer portal on Shopify is the logged-in account experience your wholesale buyers access after authenticating as company account holders. It is not a separate piece of software or a standalone application bolted onto your Shopify store. It is the Shopify storefront itself, filtered and configured according to the company account the buyer has logged in to.

When a wholesale buyer logs in to their company account, the storefront presents their assigned pricing catalog (not your retail prices), their available payment methods (including any net terms assigned to their account), a purchase order number field at checkout, and any product catalog restrictions specific to their account. That entire configured experience is what practitioners mean when they refer to the B2B buyer portal.

This distinction matters because it changes how you think about building one. You are not deploying a portal application. You are configuring Shopify's native B2B layer to deliver the right experience to the right buyer on login, then deciding what extensions that native layer needs to meet your specific buyer program's requirements.

According to Shopify's B2B documentation, the native feature set covers company accounts, location management, customer-specific pricing catalogs, net payment terms, and purchase order number capture at checkout, all managed from within a single Shopify admin without a separate portal application.

We break down that full account-driven buyer experience in how a private order portal on Shopify Plus is actually structured.

What Shopify's Native B2B Portal Covers

As of April 2026, Shopify's core B2B buyer portal capabilities are available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans. Shopify B2B isn't available on the Starter or Retail plans, and Shopify states that B2B features are included at no extra cost on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans. The features that define the self-serve buyer experience are:

Company accounts and buyer authentication. Each wholesale buyer organization is set up as a company in your Shopify admin. The company can have multiple contacts, and each contact gets one of two permissions for a location: Ordering only, which places orders and sees the contact's own order history, or Location admin, which also sees every order placed for that location and can edit its billing and shipping addresses. A buyer signs in with their email and a one-time code (no password is required), and from that point the entire storefront experience responds to their account configuration.

Multi-location support. A company can have multiple ship-to locations, each with its own pricing, payment terms, checkout settings, and contacts. A national wholesale account with regional distribution centers can be managed as one company with location-level configuration, rather than as separate accounts. Each location's buyers see only their location's settings at checkout. This structure fits verticals like building and construction supply, where job-based pricing and branch inventory decide what the portal has to get right on day one.

Customer-specific pricing catalogs. A catalog sets what a buyer segment pays: a percentage adjustment across its products, fixed prices for specific products or variants (fixed prices override the adjustment), and volume pricing that adds price breaks at set quantities. Catalogs reach buyers through B2B markets on every plan. On Basic, Grow, and Advanced you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets; on Shopify Plus catalogs are unlimited and can also be assigned directly to a company or company location. Buyers in their portal session see only their catalog pricing, never your retail price list. Catalogs can also restrict which products are visible and purchasable by a given buyer segment.

Net payment terms at checkout. Buyers with payment terms assigned to their company location complete checkout without paying upfront. The due date shows on the order in their account, and your collection workflow follows afterward. Net 7, Net 15, Net 30, Net 45, Net 60, Net 90, and due on fulfillment are all supported natively.

Purchase order number capture. Buyers can add their internal purchase order number at checkout, and your team can also add one to an order or draft order from the Shopify admin. The number carries through to the order record and to any downstream system receiving the order.

Self-serve order history, payments, and reorders. Signed-in buyers can view their order history and track orders: Ordering only contacts see their own orders, and Location admins see every order placed for the location. A buyer can open an order with payment terms, see its due date, and pay it with Pay now. Location admins can also reorder by duplicating a past order, which adds every item to the cart, and submit return requests. For wholesale buyers running regular replenishment cycles, this is the functional core of the portal experience.

What only Shopify Plus adds. Shopify lists these B2B features as Plus-only: unlimited B2B market catalogs, direct company catalogs (catalogs assigned directly to a company or company location), deposit requirements for companies and for draft orders, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment. Contextual checkout and storefront through Shopify Markets need the Advanced or Plus plan.

For the full breakdown of what the April 2026 B2B expansion included across plan tiers, the Shopify B2B on Basic, Grow, and Advanced guide covers every feature and the specific Plus-only capabilities that remain on a higher tier.

How to Set Up a B2B Buyer Portal on Shopify

Setting up the portal is a configuration process in your Shopify admin, not a development project for the standard use case. The sequence matters because each step builds on the previous one. For every admin screen in order, follow our step-by-step guide to setting up B2B on Shopify.

Step 1: Define your company structure. Before you create anything in Shopify, map your buyer program. Which buyers are single-location accounts? Which are multi-location? Which buyer segments share pricing tiers and which need individual pricing? Which products are available to all wholesale buyers versus specific segments only? Your answers determine how you structure companies, locations, and catalogs. Getting this wrong at the start creates significant rework.

Step 2: Create companies and contacts. In the Shopify admin, go to Customers > Companies and create a company record for each buyer organization. Add the company's ship-to locations. Add buyer contacts under each company and assign each one a permission (Location admin or Ordering only). Assign each contact to the location or locations they purchase for. For existing buyer programs with large account lists, Shopify's help center points to Matrixify, a third-party app, for importing companies and company locations in bulk instead of creating them one by one. That bulk path helps teams moving off a dated WooCommerce store, where account and pricing data had been scattered across plugins.

Step 3: Build and assign pricing catalogs. Create a pricing catalog for each buyer tier in your wholesale program. Set each catalog's pricing: a percentage adjustment, fixed prices for specific products or variants, and volume pricing. Set any product restrictions within the catalog if certain SKUs are not available to that buyer segment. Assign the catalog to a B2B market, or on Shopify Plus directly to a company or company location. On Basic, Grow, and Advanced you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets; on Shopify Plus, you can create "an unlimited number of B2B market catalogs."

Step 4: Configure your storefront for the B2B experience. Checkout already carries the B2B fields: buyers check out on their assigned payment terms and can add a PO number. Your theme handles the storefront side. Buyers who order for more than one company location need a location picker, and a dedicated B2B store often hides prices and add-to-cart buttons from visitors who are not signed in. Shopify's Trade theme is built for B2B stores. If your current theme does not handle these, this is the step that typically requires a developer.

Step 5: Test from the buyer side. Before going live, log in as a test company account buyer for each major account type and complete a full purchase cycle: browse catalog, view pricing, add to cart, enter a PO number, and complete checkout with net terms. Verify that the pricing, product visibility, and payment terms reflect what you configured for that account. Also test the order history view and the reorder flow. The most common configuration errors, wrong catalog assignment, incorrect pricing method, or missing term length, surface immediately in a buyer-side test session.

For a more detailed walkthrough of how the company account and location architecture is organized for wholesale operations, the Shopify for suppliers guide covers the full account structure in depth.

What Buyer Programs Add to the Native Portal

The native Shopify B2B portal handles self-serve ordering well. For additional functionality in customer sign-in and accounts, Shopify's help center points merchants to third-party apps on the Shopify App Store. These are the workflows wholesale buyer programs most often add, and where each one comes from.

Request for quote (RFQ) workflows. Some wholesale buyers do not place orders from a catalog. They submit a quote request with quantities and specifications, wait for a priced response, and approve the quote before it becomes an order. Shopify's native quoting runs through draft orders: to quote a negotiated price that differs from the company's catalog pricing, your team sets a custom price on the line item, can lock the draft's prices to hold the quoted price, and sends an invoice. Checkout to draft adds the buyer side: you can require a company location's orders to be submitted as drafts, so the buyer clicks Submit for approval and your team reviews and adjusts the order, then creates it or sends an invoice. If buyers need to configure and price quotes themselves, Uncap Quotes turns your catalog into account-specific quotes that buyers configure, price, and check out themselves, and approved quotes turn straight into Shopify orders.

Approval inside the buyer's company. Enterprise buyers often require internal approval before an order is submitted. A purchasing manager at a distributor might need to approve any order above a certain value before it goes to the supplier. The approval step Shopify documents sits on your side, through the same submit-as-draft setting, and B2B contact permissions are set per company location: Ordering only or Location admin. For budgets, approvals, and limits per user inside the buyer's company, Uncap Portal adds spend controls.

Credit limit enforcement at checkout. If you enforce a credit limit policy at checkout, one route is a cart and checkout validation built with Shopify Functions, inside either a public App Store app (stores on any plan can use these) or a custom app (only Shopify Plus stores can use custom apps that contain Shopify Function APIs). Another is a manual review step, such as submitting that location's orders as drafts.

Account statements and ERP invoices. From their customer account, a B2B buyer can view order history, access saved payment methods and make payments, and pay an order on terms before it is due. A wholesale buyer's accounts payable team often also wants open balances, an aging summary, and the invoices your ERP issues. Those live in your ERP and reach the buyer through an integration or a portal layer. In Uncap Portal, buyers can pay on terms, view invoices, and settle balances from the portal.

Catalog-wide quick order forms. Shopify includes a quick order list that lets buyers add multiple variants of one product to the cart in one click from its product page. Buyers placing 50-line reorders across many products often want a spreadsheet-style form where they enter SKU and quantity for the whole order at once. Where buyers want that form, it comes from your theme, an app, or custom work.

Uncap Portal covers the buyer side of several of these workflows. It works with Shopify B2B and your ERP and gives trade accounts a self-serve home on Shopify: catalogs, pricing, reorders, invoices, and users, with NET terms, invoices, and payments in the portal and spend controls (budgets, approvals, and limits per user).

For Shopify B2B apps built for these workflows, Uncap's guide to B2B ordering portal apps covers the apps built specifically for wholesale self-service ordering on Shopify.

The Back-Office Layer the Portal Depends On

This is the section most B2B portal guides skip. The buyer-facing portal experience depends entirely on the accuracy of the data behind it. If the data behind the portal is wrong or out of sync, the portal experience is broken regardless of how well it is configured.

Catalog pricing must sync from your ERP. If your ERP holds your canonical pricing for each wholesale account, those prices need to flow into the corresponding Shopify pricing catalog accurately and continuously. A price change in your ERP that does not reach the Shopify catalog means buyers see and order at the old price. At any meaningful order volume, catalog sync errors create invoice disputes that cost more to resolve than the integration would have cost to build correctly.

Net terms orders must reach your ERP's AR module. A buyer placing an order on Net 30 through the Shopify portal creates an order in Shopify with a payment due date. That order record needs to create a corresponding accounts receivable entry in your ERP with the correct amount, the correct buyer, and the correct due date. Without an integration that makes that happen automatically, your finance team manually creates the AR entry for every net terms order, and any order that falls through the gap becomes an uncollected receivable that your AR aging does not show.

Inventory must reflect reality. Your portal shows buyers what is available. If your Shopify inventory is not synced from your warehouse management system or ERP, buyers are ordering against quantities that do not reflect actual stock. Oversells on the portal create fulfillment failures and the buyer relationship damage that follows.

Product catalog updates must reach the right layer. When you add a new SKU, discontinue a product, or change a product's availability for a specific buyer segment, that change needs to reach the correct Shopify catalog, not just your retail product list. If new products are added to Shopify but not assigned to the relevant wholesale catalog, your portal buyers cannot see or order them, which means the portal is functionally incomplete from their perspective without any visible error on your side.

For manufacturers and distributors running NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or another ERP alongside Shopify, Uncap Connect is the real-time data layer between Shopify, your ERP, and the warehouse floor. Inventory, orders, customers, and pricing move the moment they change, not in an overnight batch, and your ERP stays the system of record.

Building the Right B2B Buyer Portal for Your Buyer Program

The native Shopify B2B portal is the right starting point for most wholesale operations. It handles the buyer ordering experience correctly, it is embedded in the Shopify admin without requiring a separate platform to manage, and as of April 2026 it is available on the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans without a Shopify Plus contract.

The questions that determine what you need to build on top of it are specific to your buyer program. Do your buyers require quote workflows before they can submit an order? Do you have a credit limit policy that needs to be enforced at checkout? Do your buyers' AP teams need invoice access from within the portal? Does your wholesale pricing originate in an ERP that needs to stay in sync with your Shopify catalogs? Each yes changes the scope of what the portal implementation needs to include.

Getting those requirements mapped before you start the configuration is the difference between a portal that buyers actually use and one that requires your sales or ops team to manually correct what the portal should have done automatically. As a Shopify Platinum Partner with 380+ storefronts launched on Shopify, including for manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, Uncap has designed buyer portal architectures across a wide range of buyer program structures, ERP environments, and operational models. If you are building a B2B buyer portal on Shopify and want an honest read on what your specific program requires, talk to our experts before you commit to the build.