Shopify B2B vs Shopify Plus: Do You Still Need Plus for Wholesale?
The answer changed in April 2026. Before that, if you wanted to sell wholesale on Shopify with company accounts, custom pricing catalogs, and net payment terms, you needed Shopify Plus. After April 2026, most of those features moved to every paid Shopify plan.
That shift makes the B2B vs Plus question more nuanced than the articles currently ranking for it, many of which were written in 2022 and 2023, when B2B was Plus-only. Here is an honest, current answer to whether you still need Plus for wholesale in 2026 and what the actual determining factors are.
No. As of April 2026, most B2B features are available on every paid Shopify plan. Company accounts, customer-specific pricing catalogs (up to three), net payment terms (Net 30/60/90), purchase order numbers, self-serve buyer ordering, quick order lists, draft orders, and Shopify Flow automations all work without a Plus subscription.
What still requires Shopify Plus is a specific list of advanced capabilities: unlimited pricing catalogs, a dedicated B2B storefront with its own domain, vaulted credit card storage for buyer accounts, deposit and partial payment workflows, and checkout extensibility via Shopify Functions. If your wholesale operation does not need any of those, Plus is not required.
For a complete breakdown of what each plan tier includes after the April 2026 expansion, Shopify's official B2B features by plan documentation is the authoritative reference. The April 2026 announcement post at shopify.com/news/b2b-for-all covers the context behind the expansion.
Before April 2026, native B2B on Shopify was a Plus-only feature. Company accounts, custom pricing, and net payment terms required a Plus contract to access. Merchants on lower plan tiers had to use apps, primarily the Wholesale Channel (now deprecated) or third-party wholesale apps, to run a buyer program.
The April 2026 expansion moved the foundational B2B feature set to every paid plan: Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. This was a material change, not a minor update. The majority of what made Shopify B2B commercially useful is now accessible to every Shopify merchant.
What did not move: the advanced capabilities that distinguish Plus at scale. Unlimited catalogs, a dedicated B2B storefront, custom checkout logic, and advanced payment workflows stayed Plus-only. The gap between plans narrowed significantly, but it did not disappear.
A Shopify merchant on Basic, Grow, or Advanced now has access to a substantial B2B toolkit. Here is what that means in practice.
Company accounts with up to 50 locations. Create a company record for each wholesale buyer. Assign multiple contacts, control their permissions, and manage up to 50 ship-to locations under a single company profile. A regional distributor with multiple warehouse addresses can manage them all under one account.
Up to three pricing catalogs. Build custom price lists and assign them by company or location. Each catalog can use fixed prices, percentage discounts from retail, or quantity-tiered pricing. Three catalogs covers a standard manufacturer pricing structure: distributor, dealer, and direct tiers.
Net payment terms at checkout. Net 30, Net 60, and Net 90 are enforced at the checkout layer, not as an honor system you manually track. Buyers check out on terms; Shopify creates the order with a payment due date and sends payment reminders automatically.
Purchase order numbers and draft orders. Every B2B checkout includes a PO number field. Your sales team can create orders on behalf of buyers through the draft order flow and send invoices directly from the admin.
Shopify Flow automations. Automate company onboarding, order routing, account tagging, and payment term assignments without code. Flow is included on all paid plans.
For a complete feature-by-feature breakdown, the Shopify B2B on all plans guide covers exactly what changed and what each plan tier unlocks.
The gap between Plus and non-Plus on B2B is real. Here is what Plus unlocks specifically for wholesale operations.
Unlimited pricing catalogs. The three-catalog cap on lower plans does not exist on Plus. For wholesale operations managing pricing across dozens of accounts with individually negotiated rates, or for distributors running regional pricing books across multiple markets, unlimited catalogs are not a nice-to-have. They are a practical requirement.
Dedicated B2B storefront. Plus allows you to run a separate storefront exclusively for wholesale buyers, with its own domain, navigation, and branding. On non-Plus plans, B2B and DTC buyers share the same storefront, with the experience differentiated by login. For wholesale operations where keeping the two audiences entirely separate matters operationally or for brand reasons, Plus is the only option within the native feature set.
Vaulted credit cards. B2B buyers on Plus accounts can save payment methods on file. Repeat orders are charged without the buyer re-entering card details at each checkout. For buyers who place frequent, high-volume orders on a net-terms or credit card basis, this removes a real friction point.
Deposit and partial payment workflows. Plus merchants can collect a deposit on a B2B order and settle the remainder on fulfillment, or accept partial payments against a single invoice. For made-to-order manufacturers and large-volume contracts, this reflects how the transaction actually works in practice.
Shopify Functions for custom checkout logic. Functions is the mechanism that allows developers to write custom rules at the checkout layer: enforcing buyer-specific order minimums, validating credit limits before an order confirms, building approval workflows, or adding custom fields for downstream fulfillment. This is Plus-only and requires developer resources to implement.
For the history of how the Plus B2B feature set has evolved, including changes to checkout extensibility and Functions access, the Shopify Plus B2B updates overview covers the progression.
Shopify Plus pricing starts at approximately $2,300 per month. At higher revenue volumes, pricing shifts to a percentage-of-revenue model. B2B features are included in Plus, they are not an add-on and do not carry separate licensing costs. The same Plus plan that powers your DTC storefront gives you access to the full B2B feature set.
For wholesale operations where the revenue volume and order complexity justify it, the per-month cost is often offset by the operational capacity it unlocks, particularly if unlimited catalogs, dedicated B2B storefront access, or Shopify Functions are requirements for the operation to function correctly.
For merchants who are not yet at Plus scale, the economics typically do not work. The non-Plus B2B feature set is capable enough that most operations below $5M in wholesale revenue do not need what Plus adds to make the wholesale channel function.
There are specific conditions where Plus is the right call for B2B. The clearest indicators are:
You need more than three pricing catalogs. This is the hardest cap to work around on lower plans. If your wholesale buyer program involves more than three distinct pricing tiers (national accounts, regional distributors, independent dealers, key accounts with individually negotiated rates), the catalog ceiling forces a difficult choice. You either collapse pricing tiers to fit within three catalogs, which means not all buyers see their actual contracted prices, or you move to Plus.
A dedicated B2B storefront matters for your buyers or your brand. Some wholesale operations need the buyer portal to be visibly distinct from the retail storefront, separate URL, separate navigation, separate branding. On non-Plus plans, that separation does not exist natively. If your wholesale buyers are large institutional accounts where the experience of a consumer-facing retail site creates friction or concern, Plus resolves it.
Custom checkout logic is a hard requirement. If your operation needs to enforce credit limits at checkout, route orders based on buyer tier, or add compliance fields that flow through to downstream fulfillment systems, Shopify Functions is the only native mechanism to build it. That means Plus and a developer investment.
Your buyers place frequent orders and vaulted payment matters. Operations where buyers order weekly or daily benefit significantly from saved payment methods. The checkout friction reduction compounds over hundreds of orders across dozens of accounts.
You are running at a scale where Plus support tier is operationally relevant. Beyond the features, Plus includes dedicated launch support, priority account management, and SLA-backed uptime commitments. For wholesale operations at high volume where downtime has direct revenue impact, the support tier is part of the value.
For a substantial range of wholesale operations, Plus is not the right call. Here is where non-Plus Shopify B2B performs well.
Manufacturers launching their first formal wholesale channel. If your current wholesale operation runs on email, phone, and spreadsheets, getting to Shopify B2B on any paid plan is a significant step forward. Company accounts, pricing catalogs, and net payment terms bring a manual process onto a digital channel. You do not need Plus to make that transition.
DTC brands adding a dealer or trade program. If you are already on Shopify, extending into B2B with company accounts and a price catalog is lightweight operationally. You are not building a second system. You are extending the one you have. The unified admin is a real advantage here, and non-Plus handles it cleanly for most dealer and trade programs.
Wholesale operations with a straightforward pricing structure. Three pricing catalogs covers a wide range of setups. Manufacturer pricing with distributor, dealer, and direct tiers is the standard configuration. If your buyer program fits that structure, the non-Plus catalog limit is not a constraint.
Operations that have not yet reached the revenue threshold where Plus economics make sense. At $2,300/month, Plus requires volume to justify. An operation running $2M in wholesale revenue is not going to find the Plus ROI favorable for what it adds specifically to B2B. The non-Plus feature set is the right operational starting point.
Both Plus and non-Plus Shopify B2B share the same gaps in two areas that matter significantly for most wholesale operations.
ERP integration is not native on any plan. If your pricing, customer data, inventory, and order records live in NetSuite, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics, that data does not flow to Shopify automatically regardless of which plan you are on. Without reliable sync, your storefront shows prices that may be out of date, your orders do not generate the downstream ERP records they need to, and your operations team manually corrects what an integration should handle. Solving this is not a plan decision; it is an implementation decision. For wholesale operations on Shopify, Uncap's wholesale commerce solutions are built specifically around this: connecting Shopify to the back-office systems that B2B operations depend on.
Quoting and RFQ workflows are not native on any plan. If your sales motion includes pricing requests, proposal generation, or any negotiation before a purchase order is confirmed, that workflow is not inside Shopify's native feature set on Plus or on Basic. You need a quoting layer on top, either through an app or a custom implementation.
These gaps are relevant to the Plus vs. non-Plus decision because they are costs and capabilities that exist at both plan levels. A merchant considering Plus to fix an ERP integration problem will find that Plus does not fix it. The plan decision and the integration decision are separate.
For most wholesale operations, the right question is not whether to use Plus for B2B, it is whether your specific operation requires what Plus uniquely provides. Most wholesale operations launching on Shopify in 2026 do not need Plus on day one. The foundational B2B feature set that is now available on every plan covers company accounts, pricing, net terms, and self-serve ordering.
The operations that need Plus are the ones that have crossed a specific threshold: more than three pricing tiers, a buyer base that needs a dedicated storefront, custom checkout logic requirements, or a revenue scale where Plus economics make sense and the support tier carries operational value.
If you are not sure which side of that line you fall on, or if you want an assessment of what your wholesale channel actually needs before you make a plan decision, talk to our experts about your operation. As a Shopify Platinum Partner since 2013 with more than 380 B2B implementations, we can tell you directly where the plan matters and where the implementation is what actually determines the outcome.
