Shopify is rolling out its B2B features to all non-Plus plans for the first time at no additional cost, enabling merchants to manage their wholesale and D2C businesses through the same store without the use of third-party plugins.
Merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans now have access to:
- Company profiles for wholesale buyers
- Up to three custom catalogs with wholesale pricing, though limited to individual markets, not individual customers
- Volume discounts and quantity rules
- Vaulted credit cards, which securely store the buyer's payment info for repeat orders
- ACH payments (U.S. only on non-Plus plans)
- Net payment terms
Previously these native B2B tools were exclusive to Shopify Plus, which costs $2,500 on a 1-year term and is out of reach for most small merchants, requiring them to rely on third-party solutions to run their wholesale business on Shopify.
It's a big unlock for D2C stores that need to run a simple wholesale program that offers the same pricing to all vendors, but B2B commerce consultant Jason Greenwood notes that the B2B feature tiers are designed in a way to push bigger stores to Shopify Plus. He wrote:
“While the ENGINE for B2B is now open to everyone, the flexibility of that engine is STILL heavily throttled on the non-Plus plans. The 3-catalog limit is the biggest barrier, designed to keep high-volume or complex wholesalers on the Shopify Plus plan. Because you must assign these catalogs via Shopify Markets, you cannot easily give ‘Company A' one price and ‘Company B' another price if you have more than three unique pricing tiers. Plus users have unlimited catalogs and can assign them directly to a Company Location. This means a Plus merchant can have 500 different customers, each with their own unique negotiated price list – as is common in B2B!”
Although one workaround is that a merchant could use one general price list and create unique discount codes for their various customers. For example, Wholesale Customer A has a 10% off discount code, while Wholesale Customer B gets a 12% off discount code. Or alternatively a merchant could create one general 10% off coupon and assign as many customers to that coupon as they'd like. It's not as sexy or streamlined as individual customer price lists, but effectively gets the job done in some cases where the merchant simply wants to offer the same discount on all products to a customer.
Jason also pointed out a couple of other limitations including:
- No partial payments or deposits, meaning no ability to ask for a 50% payment upfront. The only options are to require full payment upfront or offer net terms.
- ACH payments are geo-locked for standard plans, only allowing U.S. vendors to pay in this method. (However, I learned that Shopify currently does not restrict merchants from accepting B2B payments outside of its platform such as through check or wire transfer — a notable difference from its D2C payment policy.)
Obviously the available B2B features are always going to be smaller on non-Plus plans, just as it is on non-Plus plans for D2C, but I know a lot of merchants who will benefit just from the key B2B features that Shopify unlocked for all plans, so kudos to them for the move.
However, my condolences to the hundreds of B2B-enablement apps in the Shopify App Store that just became redundant. This was not a very satisfying announcement for them.