Do you still need
Plus for B2B?

For years, the answer to "how do I sell wholesale on Shopify" started with an upsell. You wanted real B2B, company profiles, custom catalogs, net terms, so you needed Plus. That made the B2B question and the Plus question the same question for a lot of growing brands, and it pushed plenty of them onto an enterprise plan before their volume justified it.

On April 2, 2026, Shopify changed that. Native B2B now ships on all plans, Basic, Grow, and Advanced, not just Plus. The lower plans now include company profiles, up to 3 custom catalogs, volume and quantity pricing, payment terms, vaulted cards, and B2B checkout. That is a genuinely capable B2B toolkit, and for a large share of brands it is enough.

I have built wholesale channels from the operator seat at WIN Brands Group, and I have advised brands through the Plus decision many times. So let me do the useful thing and give you a framework, not a verdict. The honest answer for most brands changed in April. Here is how to tell if it changed for you.

B2B left the Plus
walled garden.
That is the news.

The structural change is simple: B2B used to be a Plus-only feature set, and now it is a core feature set available on every plan. The thing that made Plus the default answer for wholesale is gone. A brand on Basic or Advanced can now stand up a real B2B operation without paying the enterprise premium for the privilege.

This does not mean Plus lost its B2B value entirely. It means the floor moved up. The basic, most common B2B needs are now table stakes on any plan, and Plus has been pushed to compete on the higher end of complexity rather than on access to the feature at all.

It is worth pausing on why this is a bigger deal than a feature note suggests. For a long stretch, the cleanest path to wholesale on Shopify ran through a wholesale app or a Plus upgrade, and both carried cost and friction that kept smaller brands out of B2B entirely. Plenty of brands that should have been selling to stockists simply did not, because the tooling sat behind a paywall they had not crossed yet. Moving native B2B down to every plan does not just save those brands money, it removes the reason they were skipping a profitable channel in the first place.

The non-Plus B2B
kit covers most
brands cleanly.

Look at what is now included on the lower plans and ask honestly whether it covers your wholesale needs. Company profiles let you manage business buyers as distinct from retail customers. Up to 3 custom catalogs let you show different products and pricing to different buyer groups. Volume and quantity pricing handle the tiered discounts wholesale runs on. Payment terms and vaulted cards handle net terms and stored payment. And B2B checkout gives buyers the purchasing flow they expect.

For a brand running a handful of stockists, a few pricing tiers, and standard net terms, that list is the whole job. You do not need anything Plus adds on top of it. The hard part of B2B for most growing brands was never the edge cases, it was getting these fundamentals in place, and they are now in place on plans you may already be paying for.

The three-catalog cap is the line most people will bump into, so be honest about what a catalog actually maps to in your business. A catalog is a distinct set of products and prices shown to a defined buyer group. If you sell the same range to everyone at one wholesale price tier, that is one catalog. If you have a domestic tier, an international tier, and a key-account tier, that is three, and you are at the edge. Most brands adding wholesale for the first time need one or two. The cap only bites once you are running genuinely segmented pricing across many buyer types, and if you are there, you are probably at the scale where Plus pays for itself anyway.

Plus still wins at
catalog scale and
real complexity.

Plus did not get hollowed out, it got refocused. Where it still clearly leads on B2B is at the high end of catalog count and operational complexity. Plus keeps unlimited catalogs versus the 3-catalog cap, direct catalog assignment for finer control over who sees what, deposits and partial payments for more sophisticated payment arrangements, more company locations, and the deeper customization that larger operations need.

The pattern in that table is the whole story. Non-Plus gives you the B2B fundamentals. Plus gives you scale and control on top of them. If your wholesale operation has outgrown three catalogs, needs partial payments or deposits, or spans many company locations, Plus is still the right home. If it has not, you are paying for headroom you are not using.

Count your catalogs.
Then count your
real complexity.

The decision comes down to two questions, and you can answer both in an afternoon. First, how many distinct catalogs does your B2B actually need? If the honest answer is three or fewer, the catalog cap is not a constraint for you. Second, do you need the complexity Plus adds, deposits, partial payments, direct catalog assignment, many company locations? If not, you have your answer.

The mistake to avoid is upgrading to Plus for B2B on reflex, the way brands did for years, when the feature you wanted is now sitting on your current plan. The opposite mistake is real too: clinging to a lower plan when your catalog count and complexity genuinely demand Plus, and bolting on apps to fake what the enterprise tier does natively. Both cost you money. The framework just tells you which way the line falls. For the deeper version of this call beyond B2B, read when to move to Shopify Plus.

If B2B was your
Plus reason, re-run
the math now.

If you are currently on Plus and B2B was a meaningful part of why, this is the moment to check whether the rest of your Plus usage still justifies the price. Maybe it does, checkout customization, scripts and functions, scale, support, those are real Plus reasons. But if B2B was carrying the case, the April change just removed it, and you owe yourself an honest review.

And if you have been holding off on adding a wholesale channel because Plus felt like too big a leap, that barrier is gone. You can launch B2B on the plan you are on, prove the channel, and only consider Plus when catalog count or complexity actually forces the question. That is a far healthier order of operations, and it is exactly the under-used revenue I keep pointing brands toward. I make the full case for it in B2B as the hidden revenue channel.

The bottom line: as of April 2026, B2B is no longer a reason to be on Plus for most brands. Run the two questions, count your catalogs and your real complexity, and let the answer pick the plan. Start with how B2B works without Plus, make sure you are not leaving wholesale money behind in the hidden revenue channel, and if you are still weighing the upgrade, read when moving to Plus is actually the right call.