Shopify B2B
without Plus
is now real.

On April 2, 2026, Shopify changed the entry point for native B2B from roughly $2,300 per month to $39. That's the actual scope of what happened: core B2B features that had been locked to Shopify Plus for nearly four years (company profiles, custom price lists, payment terms, volume pricing) opened to every paid Shopify plan at no additional cost.

If you run a DTC brand at $2M–$5M and you've been getting inbound wholesale requests you handle by emailing discount codes and chasing invoices in a spreadsheet, this changes your options. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But it removes the most common excuse I hear from founders when the topic of B2B comes up: "We'll sort that out when we get to Plus."

That excuse is now gone. Here's what's actually changed, what matters, and what doesn't.

Four years of Plus-only B2B
just opened to
every paid plan.

Shopify has offered native B2B features since 2022. For all of that time, they were exclusively available to Shopify Plus merchants, the $2,000–$2,300/month tier aimed at high-volume enterprise brands. The logic made sense: B2B infrastructure is complex, and Plus merchants had the volume to justify it.

The April 2026 expansion decouples that logic. The features now available on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans include:

The entry-point drop is not a coincidence. Shopify has been pushing toward broader merchant adoption across its feature set, Markets, B2B, Subscriptions. Making B2B available to everyone increases platform stickiness and gives Shopify data on how the features perform at higher volume before merchants scale into Plus. For the broader picture of how Shopify's platform changes affect the app ecosystem and merchant tooling, see the Shopify ecosystem value map for 2026.

The channel most DTC founders
ignore until they can't
afford to anymore.

I covered the strategic case for B2B in depth in an earlier post. The short version: B2B buyers reorder on a schedule. DTC buyers reorder when they feel like it. Per Shopify's earnings reporting, merchants using Shopify's B2B features see 4.1x higher reorder frequency compared to DTC orders. That's not a small channel uplift, that's a different kind of customer relationship. For the full unit economics comparison, the DTC contribution margin framework gives you the structure to model it properly.

The margin profile is counterintuitive to founders who price B2B at 50% of retail and immediately conclude it's worse economics. It usually isn't. Here's why.

Your DTC contribution margin is not your gross margin. By the time you account for blended CAC, paid social, influencer, affiliate, email acquisition, most DTC brands are spending $12–25 to acquire a first-time customer. That comes directly off your gross margin. A $60 product at 65% gross margin leaves you $39 before marketing costs. After a $15 blended CAC, you're at $24 contribution margin on a first order. A B2B buyer who places a $480 first order (8x DTC AOV is common) at 50% of retail wholesale pricing has a $12-per-unit gross margin. But your CAC on that account was an outreach email and a call, not $15 per unit. The contribution margin per order often exceeds the DTC channel, not despite the lower pricing but because of the eliminated acquisition cost.

The categories where this plays out most cleanly: food and beverage (restaurants, hospitality, catering), personal care and beauty (salons, spas, clinics), wellness and supplements (gyms, corporate wellness programs, professional practitioners), home goods and gifts (hotels, corporate gifting teams, event planners), and branded lifestyle products with a clear gift-giving occasion. If your products land in any of these, there's probably a B2B buyer segment that would order from you wholesale, the only question is whether you've made it possible to do so.

Feature by feature,
what's useful, what's
table stakes, what's missing.

Not all of the newly available features matter equally. Here's how to think about each one.

Company Profiles

This is the foundational piece. A company profile in Shopify B2B lets you create a named business account ("Coastal Hotel Group" instead of "John Smith") with multiple buyer seats under it. Each seat can have different roles: admins can manage the account and add buyers, buyers can place orders but can't change account settings. For a wholesale buyer with a purchasing department, this is how they actually want to buy. Getting an email from "hello, your order is ready" addressed to a person's name when they're buying on behalf of a 200-person organization is an immediate credibility problem. Company profiles fix that.

Customer-Specific Pricing via Catalogs

This is the one most DTC founders tried to fake with discount codes or draft orders. The native implementation is meaningfully different. You create a price list (a catalog with products at specific prices) and assign it to a company. When that company's buyer logs in, they see their prices automatically. You can have up to three active catalogs on non-Plus plans. In practice, that means: one catalog for retail/boutique buyers, one for corporate gifting accounts, and one for professional resellers. Three tiers covers most B2B operations at the $2M–$5M DTC revenue level. If you have six or seven distinct buyer segments that need different pricing, you're probably at a volume where Plus makes sense.

Payment Terms (Net 15/30/60)

This was the feature that made doing B2B on standard Shopify plans genuinely painful before. Net terms aren't optional for most wholesale buyers, they're standard. A boutique buyer placing a $1,200 order expects to pay within 30 days of receipt, not upfront. Building that workflow outside native Shopify meant custom invoicing apps, manual follow-up, and awkward checkout experiences. Native Net 15/30/60 with automatic payment reminders removes that friction. Worth knowing: extending net terms means extending credit. You're shipping inventory and collecting later. Model the cash flow implications before you offer Net 60 at scale, at 30 active accounts averaging $2,000/month each, you could have $120,000+ in outstanding receivables. That's a real working capital consideration.

Volume Pricing

Quantity-based pricing tiers are available natively. Set them at the product level or collection level. Most brands start simple: single-unit wholesale price, then a 10% break at a dozen, another 10% at a case quantity. You don't need complex tiering to start. What matters is having it configured before you're in a sales conversation with a buyer who asks "what's the break at 100 units?", having to say "let me get back to you on that" is a friction point you can eliminate with one hour of setup.

Self-Service Buying Portal

B2B buyers get a dedicated authenticated experience on your existing Shopify storefront. They log into their company account, see their catalog and pricing, and place orders directly without contacting you. They can reorder previous orders, check order status, and manage their account, all without a phone call or email thread. Shopify's data: self-serve handles roughly 80% of B2B requests for merchants who've built it out properly. That's the operational difference between a B2B channel that creates work and one that generates revenue with minimal overhead.

The specific brands
this moves the needle for,
and the ones it doesn't.

This expansion matters most for four specific merchant profiles. If you're outside these profiles, the feature availability is interesting but probably not immediately actionable.

The "Ad-hoc B2B Operator"

You're at $2M–$5M DTC revenue. You get 3–8 wholesale inquiries per month. You're handling them manually, a custom discount code here, a draft order there, an invoice PDF emailed after the fact. You have no B2B system; you have B2B workarounds. This expansion gives you a real channel. Two to four hours of setup work gets you off the manual workflow entirely. The buyers you're already converting will reorder more reliably. The buyers you're losing because the experience is clunky will have fewer reasons to go elsewhere.

The "Inbound Wholesale Brand"

A hospitality company, corporate HR team, or specialty retailer found you through your DTC channel and asked about ordering in volume. You said "let me figure out our wholesale program" and then never followed up because the setup felt like a project. That project is now a four-hour task in your Shopify admin. Run it.

The "Right Category, Wrong System"

Your products land in food and beverage, personal care, gifts, branded lifestyle, or home. You know there's a B2B buyer segment for what you sell. You've been waiting for the right moment to build it. The entry point just dropped from $2,300/month to $39/month and a Sunday afternoon. That's the moment.

The "Pre-Plus Test"

You're approaching Plus territory. You know B2B will be part of the strategy at scale. Testing the channel, proving the economics, and building the operational muscle before you commit to the Plus upgrade is now possible. The data you generate will make the Plus conversation cleaner, you'll know your B2B AOV, reorder rate, and top account profiles before you're paying $2,300/month for the enterprise tools. (For context on where Plus sits relative to every other platform option, see the 2026 ecommerce platform comparison.)

This expansion does not meaningfully change things for brands that need unlimited catalog segmentation for dozens of buyer tiers, complex ERP integrations, automated B2B workflows, or white-label wholesale storefronts. That's the Plus use case. If B2B is going to be a $500K+ annual revenue channel, the ROI on Plus versus standard plans becomes clear quickly, and the tools available on Plus are meaningfully more capable for high-volume wholesale operations. If you're weighing the upgrade, I walk through the full decision in do you still need Plus for B2B.

Two to four hours
to a working
B2B channel.

The setup sequence is straightforward. Most brands spend more time deliberating about whether to do it than actually doing it. Here's the practical path.

The margin math
most founders get
wrong on wholesale.

Wholesale pricing intimidates DTC operators because the sell-through price is lower. The math usually looks like a step backward. When you run it properly, it often doesn't. The same analytical lens used in the DTC brand profitability teardown applies here: you need to look at contribution margin, not just gross margin.

The Standard Wholesale Pricing Structure

Most B2B brands start at 40–50% of retail for wholesale pricing. If your retail product sells for $60, your wholesale price is $24–$30. Your buyer marks it up to $48–$60 retail in their store. That's the standard formula and it works for the majority of categories.

The Account Manager ROI Calculation

B2B doesn't run itself, at least not until you have a self-serve system and enough repeat accounts that the volume comes in without active selling. The realistic cost structure for a growing B2B channel: one account manager, hired when B2B revenue justifies it, managing 40–60 active wholesale accounts.

Account manager fully loaded cost: $70,000–$90,000/year. That person can realistically manage 40–60 active B2B accounts, handling onboarding, reorder follow-ups, account questions, and occasional relationship management. At an average B2B account generating $15,000–$20,000/year in wholesale revenue (common for boutique and corporate gifting accounts at a $5M DTC brand), 40 accounts = $600,000–$800,000 in annual B2B revenue. That's a 7–10x return on the salary cost, before accounting for the high contribution margin on those orders.

The Cash Flow Consideration

Net terms create a receivables gap. You ship inventory and collect later. At 10 accounts with average $2,500 monthly orders on Net 30, you have $25,000 in outstanding receivables at any given time. At 40 accounts, that number is $100,000. This is not a reason to avoid B2B, it's a reason to model your working capital requirements before you offer Net 60 terms to every account. Start with Net 30 as the default. Extend Net 60 manually to accounts that have demonstrated payment reliability over three to four order cycles.

When the standard plans
aren't enough.

The April 2026 expansion is real and meaningful. It's also not a complete feature parity with Shopify Plus B2B. Here's what remains exclusive to Plus, and why it matters at scale.

Unlimited Catalogs with Direct Company Assignment

On standard plans, you get three active catalogs assigned through Markets, not directly to individual companies. If you have 50 accounts and 12 of them need custom pricing specific to their account (negotiated rates, special agreements, category-specific pricing), you can't do that without Plus. The workaround on standard plans, segment by Market, works for broad tiers but breaks down when individual account pricing is required.

Partial Payments and Deposits

Large B2B orders often use deposit-based payment terms: 50% upfront, 50% on shipment. That workflow isn't available on standard plans. For brands doing one-off custom orders, large seasonal orders, or international wholesale, this becomes a real constraint.

Shopify Flow Automation

Automated B2B workflows (reorder reminders triggered by purchase frequency, automatic account tier upgrades based on annual spend, payment overdue follow-up sequences) require Shopify Flow, which is a Plus feature. On standard plans, you're doing this manually or with third-party apps. That's manageable at 10–20 accounts. At 60+, the operational overhead becomes a real cost.

The Plus ROI Threshold

Once your B2B channel is generating $400,000–$500,000 per year, the math on Plus becomes clear. The platform cost ($2,000–$2,300/month) versus the features unlocked (unlimited catalogs, direct company pricing, Flow automation, dedicated support) usually pencils out well before $1M in annual B2B revenue. The full decision framework for the Plus upgrade is in When to Move to Shopify Plus: The Real Triggers. The risk is jumping to Plus before you've validated the B2B channel. The standard plan expansion fixes that: prove the model on Basic, Grow, or Advanced, then upgrade to Plus when the volume justifies the infrastructure.

The principle here isn't complicated. Shopify removed the biggest barrier to testing B2B (the $2,000/month entry cost) without removing the upside for brands that scale. Which apps you add alongside native B2B depends on your revenue stage, and the Shopify tech stack guide by revenue tier maps that decision. You can now build a meaningful B2B channel without committing to enterprise pricing. The channel has always been available to your customers. Now it's available to your brand at a cost that makes sense to test.

B2B buyers reorder on a schedule. DTC buyers reorder when they feel like it. Four years into watching brands discover this, the ones who built the wholesale channel early (even messily, even manually) are consistently glad they did. The friction just got lower. The excuse that it's not worth setting up until you're on Plus is now gone. If wholesale is on the table, it is also worth weighing Shopify Collective as a supplier and reseller channel alongside it.

Building a B2B motion without jumping to Plus is a margin decision worth getting right the first time. The DTC brand consulting practice is where we map it. The form takes two minutes: start the conversation.

Questions I keep
getting asked.