How to Set up B2B on Shopify: Step-by-Step Guide (2026)

Setting up B2B on Shopify is now available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans. Since April 2026, the native B2B toolkit (company accounts, pricing catalogs, net payment terms, self-serve ordering) is no longer exclusive to Shopify Plus. You can set it up today on Basic, Grow, or Advanced without a Plus contract or a third-party wholesale app.

This guide walks through every step in the order that avoids the setup problems that catch most merchants off guard, starting with the prerequisite that blocks B2B from working at all if missed.

Before You Start: Two Decisions That Affect Your Entire Setup

Before you touch a single admin setting, two decisions determine your setup path. Getting these wrong means redoing configuration from scratch.

Decision 1: Blended storefront or dedicated B2B store?

A blended store uses a single Shopify store for both retail and wholesale. B2B buyers log in and see their assigned pricing and catalog. Retail visitors see the public store. This is the standard approach for most operations and works on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans.

A dedicated B2B store is a separate Shopify store used only for B2B customers, with its own Shopify admin, online store, B2B theme and branding, and inventory. Shopify's help center says it "requires you to create a net-new Shopify store or adapt an existing expansion store," and any apps or integrations you want to use must be set up and paid for again. Shopify's store-type guide does not list a plan requirement for it. If you are adding wholesale to the store you already run, you are setting up a blended store. Whether one store or two suits your channels is covered in running B2B and DTC from one Shopify store.

For the vast majority of Shopify B2B setups, a blended store is the right choice and the path this guide follows.

Decision 2: Is your plan eligible?

The Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans now include native B2B features. If you have an active paid subscription, you are ready to proceed. Free trial stores can explore the admin areas but cannot activate a buyer experience for live customers until a plan is active. For a full breakdown of which capabilities each plan tier includes, the Shopify B2B on Basic, Grow, and Advanced guide covers the complete plan comparison.

The Prerequisite: Activate Customer Accounts First

Before creating companies, catalogs, or anything else, B2B requires Shopify's customer accounts, not legacy customer accounts, to be active. Shopify says "B2B customers must sign in to your store before they can access B2B-specific information, such as products and pricing, or place B2B orders."

Shopify says "To use Shopify B2B, you must activate customer accounts." Its blended store checklist adds that if you use legacy customer accounts, "you can continue to use them for D2C customers and activate customer accounts just for B2B customers." With customer accounts, buyers "enter their email address and receive a one-time 6-digit verification code," and no password is required.

How to enable it: Go to Settings in your Shopify admin, then select Customer accounts. In the "Choose which version of customer accounts to link to" section, select Customer accounts. Save.

Once this is active, B2B buyers can receive login invitations, access their company-specific pricing when logged in, and use the self-serve ordering tools. Without it, none of the B2B buyer-facing features work, even if your companies and catalogs are fully configured.

For the official requirements and prerequisites before starting B2B setup, Shopify's requirements and considerations documentation covers the full list of what needs to be in place before going live.

Step 1: Create Your Company Accounts

With customer accounts active, your first configuration step is creating the company records that represent your wholesale buyers.

Go to Customers > Companies in your Shopify admin. Click Add company. Give the company a name, use the buyer's actual business name for clarity in your admin.

Add company locations. Shopify says "When you create a company, one company location is automatically created for that company." Each location can have its own tax ID, tax exemptions, shipping address, billing address, pricing, and payment terms. On Basic, Grow, and Advanced, a location's pricing comes from the catalogs assigned to its B2B market; assigning a catalog directly to a company location is available only on Shopify Plus. A company with multiple offices or ship-to addresses gets a separate location for each. Shopify says "A company can have a maximum of 10,000 company locations."

Add contacts. A contact is an individual buyer who can log in under this company. Add the buyer's email and name, and assign a role. The two core roles are Location admin, which allows the buyer to manage their location settings and invite other contacts, and Ordering only, which limits the buyer to placing and viewing orders. Choose based on how much control you want each buyer to have.

Set default payment terms (optional at this stage). You can set payment terms for all locations in a company now, or for each company location later. Shopify lists net 7, net 15, net 30, net 45, net 60, and net 90, plus due on fulfillment, and a fixed date that can be set on individual draft orders. With no payment terms, the default, payment is due immediately.

Once you save the company, Shopify can send a login invitation directly to each contact from the company record. The buyer receives an email with a link to set up their access to the buyer portal.

If you have multiple wholesale accounts to create, Shopify's help center points to Matrixify, a third-party app, for importing companies and company locations in bulk. Use bulk import for migrating an existing wholesale customer list rather than creating records one by one. Merchants coming off Magento often start here, rebuilding the wholesale account list in Shopify's native model rather than porting the old structure over.

If you are creating these companies as part of a move off another platform rather than a fresh build, the sequencing carries extra considerations we walk through in our step-by-step guide to replatforming a B2B store onto Shopify Plus.

Step 2: Build Your Pricing Catalogs

A pricing catalog is a collection of products with prices set specifically for assigned buyer accounts. Every B2B buyer is assigned a catalog, they see those prices when they log in, regardless of what your public retail prices show.

Go to Products > Catalogs in your Shopify admin. Click Create catalog.

Name it clearly. If you run distributor, dealer, and direct tiers, name each catalog accordingly. You will be assigning these to company accounts, so descriptive names reduce confusion in the admin.

Set pricing for products in the catalog. You have three pricing options for each product.

Percentage off. Apply a percentage discount from the product's retail price across all products in the catalog. This is the easiest approach if your wholesale tier is a flat discount on everything. It also updates automatically when you change retail prices, which reduces maintenance.

Fixed prices. Set specific dollar amounts per variant. Use this when your wholesale pricing is individually negotiated or cost-plus calculated per SKU. This requires manual updates when costs change but gives you exact control.

Volume pricing and quantity rules. Within either pricing method, you can add quantity-based pricing (price breaks at 10, 50, and 100 units, for example) and order minimums or multiples per product. These rules are enforced at the cart level without custom code.

Assign the catalog. On the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, you assign catalogs to B2B markets, covered in Step 4. On Shopify Plus, you can also assign a catalog directly to companies and company locations. A buyer from an assigned company location will see the catalog pricing when logged in. A buyer whose company has no assigned catalog will see retail pricing.

On the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets. Shopify Plus removes the limit. Plan your catalog structure with this cap in mind before building, if you need four or more distinct pricing tiers, a Plus plan or a plan to consolidate tiers is needed. How to structure wholesale tiers within that limit is covered in Shopify wholesale catalogs, pricing, and net terms.

Step 3: Configure Payment Terms

Payment terms control how and when B2B buyers pay for their orders. You can set these at three levels: the company, the company location, or the individual order.

To set payment terms, go to the company record in Customers > Companies. Open the location you want to configure. In the Payment terms section, choose a payment term type: no payment terms (payment due immediately), net 7, net 15, net 30, net 45, net 60, net 90, or due on fulfillment.

When a buyer assigned to that location places an order, Shopify creates the order with a payment due date matching the assigned terms. The buyer completes checkout without paying immediately. Shopify says you can "send payment reminders on the payment due date for orders with payment terms using Shopify Flow."

Purchase order numbers come with Shopify B2B on every plan that has it. Shopify's B2B features page says you can "allow B2B customers to add purchase order (PO) numbers to an order," and "you can also add PO numbers to an order or a draft order from your Shopify admin." The PO number then sits on the order record in your admin.

Draft orders for rep-assisted purchasing. Your team can create orders on behalf of buyers directly from the Shopify admin using draft orders. Go to Orders > Drafts, create a new draft, assign it to a company and location, apply the appropriate catalog pricing, and send a payment link or invoice. The buyer pays from the link; the order is created when payment is received or, for net-terms buyers, when the draft is confirmed.

Step 4: Set Up B2B Markets

B2B Markets is the mechanism that connects pricing catalogs to the buyer-facing experience, specifically, what a buyer sees when they land on your storefront and log in. Setting up a B2B market correctly is what makes catalog pricing visible to the right buyers.

Go to Settings > Markets in your Shopify admin. You can add B2B functionality to an existing market or create a new market specifically for your wholesale segment.

In the market settings, add company locations to the market's "Includes" section. This is where you connect a market to the specific company accounts or locations that should experience it. Without this step, buyers log in but do not see their catalog pricing, the market connection is what activates the B2B pricing display.

Assign your catalogs to the market. Within the market settings, you can attach pricing catalogs directly. This layer of configuration is what makes catalog pricing appear for buyers in that market when they are logged in.

For the complete blended-store setup sequence from Shopify's own documentation, including how markets connect to catalogs and company locations, Shopify's blended store setup checklist covers every step in their recommended order.

If you are not selling internationally and all your wholesale buyers are in the same region as your retail customers, your market configuration is minimal, you may only need to add your wholesale buyers to your primary market. For international wholesale with currency or tax differences, a dedicated B2B market with the relevant regional settings is the right approach. This kind of segmentation matters in verticals like hospitality food and beverage supply, where standing orders and location-based accounts have to be modeled before launch, not patched afterward.

Step 5: Set Up the Wholesale Account Registration Form

Once your B2B infrastructure is configured, you need a way for prospective buyers to apply for access. Without a registration process, wholesale accounts can only be created manually by your team.

Install the Shopify Forms app from the Shopify App Store. Shopify Forms is free and built specifically for this.

Create a B2B account request form. Add fields for the prospective buyer's company name, business type, annual purchase volume, and any other qualification criteria your sales team needs. The form submission notifies your team.

Review and approve from your Shopify admin. When a submission comes in, your team reviews it, creates the company account manually, adds the contact, assigns the catalog and payment terms, and sends the login invitation. The entire process, from form to live buyer account, can be handled from the Shopify admin without external tools.

This flow is the recommended approach for any B2B operation that does not want unapproved buyers accessing wholesale pricing. It also works well for generating qualified inbound sales leads from buyers who are not yet customers.

For operations with a known, existing wholesale customer list, the form may be less relevant, you are importing existing accounts rather than building an inbound funnel. In that case, skip the form and import the accounts in bulk instead.

Step 6: Test the Complete Buyer Experience Before Going Live

Before opening your B2B setup to actual buyers, run through the complete buyer journey from a test account to verify every step works as expected. This is where most configuration errors surface.

Create a test company account with your own email address as the contact. Assign a catalog and net payment terms.

Log in as the buyer. Open your store in a new browser session (or an incognito window). Log in with the test buyer email. Confirm that you receive the login link, can access the store, and see the catalog-specific pricing on product pages rather than retail prices.

Add items and go through checkout. Confirm that the PO number field appears at checkout, that the net payment terms allow you to complete the order without immediate payment, and that the order record in your admin shows the correct company, location, pricing, and payment due date.

Test the quick order list. In the buyer's account area, the quick order list is the spreadsheet-style bulk order form. Confirm it loads, that SKU lookup works, and that products from the catalog appear with the correct catalog pricing.

Verify reorder from history. If you have existing order history for the test account, confirm the reorder flow works and pulls the correct products at catalog pricing.

If any step in this flow does not work as expected, the most common causes are: customer accounts not active (go back to Settings > Customer accounts), the company location not assigned to a market (go to Settings > Markets), or the catalog not assigned to the buyer's B2B market (or, on Shopify Plus, to the company location). All three of these are easy to miss and quick to fix once identified.

Step 7: Configure Shopify Flow for B2B Automations

With the core setup working, Shopify Flow is worth configuring before you scale your wholesale buyer base. The automations that matter most for B2B operations are low-effort to set up and high-impact to run.

Company onboarding automation. Create a Flow that triggers when a new company is created in your admin. Actions: assign a default catalog, apply default payment terms, send a welcome email to the primary contact, and notify your sales team in Slack or email. The entire new-account setup runs automatically rather than requiring your team to manually complete each step for every new buyer.

Order flag automation. Create a Flow that triggers on B2B order creation and flags orders above a certain dollar value for manager review. Useful for new accounts, unusual volume, or orders that exceed a buyer's typical purchase size.

Reorder reminder. Create a Flow that triggers when a company has not placed an order within a set number of days. Sends an automated email to the buyer contacts prompting a reorder. Effective for accounts with predictable, repeating order cycles.

Shopify Flow is included on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans. None of these automations require Plus or third-party tools.

What Setup Does Not Cover: ERP Integration and Quoting

The steps above get your Shopify B2B storefront working. For what that buyer-facing portal covers once it is live, and where it stops, see our Shopify B2B portal guide. What the steps do not cover are the two most operationally significant layers for wholesale businesses running at scale.

ERP integration. If your pricing, customer data, inventory, and order records live in NetSuite, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics, your Shopify storefront needs a reliable sync to stay accurate. Customer pricing from your ERP needs to reflect in Shopify catalogs. Orders placed in Shopify need to create records in your ERP. Without this sync, your storefront pricing goes stale, your operations team manually reconciles orders, and the efficiency benefits of self-serve B2B are largely offset by back-office correction work. Uncap Connect is built specifically for this use case, connecting Shopify B2B to the major ERP systems with real-time sync for orders, pricing, and customer account data.

Quoting and RFQ workflows. The setup above handles buyers who know what they want and are ready to place an order. For operations where buyers submit pricing requests, where reps build proposals, or where pricing is negotiated before a purchase order is confirmed, Shopify's draft orders let you set a custom price on the line item to quote a negotiated price, and the full sales motion usually runs on a quoting layer on top, either a third-party quoting app or a custom implementation. For a full breakdown of what Shopify B2B handles for suppliers, the complete Shopify B2B features guide covers where wholesale teams add tooling.

Common Shopify B2B Setup Problems and How to Fix Them

These are the issues that come up most often after initial setup. Knowing them ahead of time saves troubleshooting time.

B2B buyer sees retail pricing after logging in. The most common cause: the company location is not assigned to a B2B market. Go to Settings > Markets, open the relevant market, and confirm the company location appears under the market's company locations. Second cause: customer accounts are not active. Shopify says "You can't use legacy customer accounts for B2B customers and orders." Check Settings > Customer accounts.

Catalog is not visible to the buyer. The catalog may not be assigned to the buyer's B2B market or, on Shopify Plus, directly to the buyer's company location. Check the catalogs assigned to the market, and on Plus check the catalog's company and location assignments.

Net payment terms are not applying at checkout. Payment terms are set per company location, not globally. Go to Customers > Companies, open the relevant company, then open the location, and confirm terms are set in the Payment terms section for that location.

Buyer's login invitation email was not received. Check that the buyer email was entered correctly in the contact record. Check your Shopify notification settings to confirm the invitation email is enabled. If using a custom domain email, check spam folders on the buyer's end.

Catalog limit reached on non-Plus plan. On the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets. If you need a fourth, either consolidate an existing catalog by merging pricing tiers, or assess whether Plus economics are justified. The Shopify B2B vs Shopify Plus guide covers when Plus adds the most value for wholesale operations.

Getting Your Shopify B2B Setup Right From the Start

The configuration above sets up a working B2B buyer program. The quality of that program depends on how accurately your catalog pricing reflects what your buyers should see, how reliably your payment terms reflect your actual agreements, and how well the storefront connects to the systems your operation depends on. Getting all of that right without the trial and error is exactly what Shopify ecommerce consulting is for, catching these configuration gaps before they turn into a broken buyer experience.

As a Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, Uncap has launched more than 380 storefronts on Shopify, including for manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. The setup steps are not where most operations run into problems, it is the integration layer, the data accuracy, and the back-office connection that determine whether a B2B program runs well or requires constant manual correction. Knowing how to set up B2B on Shopify is the first step; our wholesale solution page shows what a complete, ERP-connected build actually includes.

If you want an expert review of your B2B setup, help with ERP integration, or Shopify B2B development from scratch, talk to our experts about your wholesale channel.