Shopify B2B without Plus: do you still need a separate wholesale store?

Until April 2026, you couldn't get native Shopify B2B without Plus. Shopify's built-in B2B features arrived in 2022 for Plus stores only. On smaller plans, a second store just for wholesale was a practical way to give buyers their own prices, minimums and shipping.

We built one of those for Sugar Blossom Jewelry in 2022. It was the right call then.

On April 2, 2026, Shopify opened native B2B to its Basic, Grow and Advanced plans at no additional cost. If your wholesale buyers still order from a separate Shopify wholesale store, you could be paying for a second plan and a second stack of apps, and doing every product edit twice, for tools your main store now has.

The question used to be how to keep two stores in sync. Now it's whether you need two stores at all.

What Shopify B2B without Plus includes now

Basic, Grow and Advanced now get:

• Company profiles, with locations and buyers under each wholesale account
• Up to 3 active B2B catalogs, which set the products and prices wholesale buyers see
• Payment terms, from Net 7 to Net 90 or due on fulfillment
• Volume pricing, plus quantity rules for minimums, maximums and increments
• Vaulted credit cards, and ACH payments in the U.S.

Wholesale buyers log in with customer accounts to see their prices.

What still needs Plus

Plus keeps unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment to specific companies and locations, deposits and partial payments. Below Plus, catalogs are assigned to B2B markets rather than to individual accounts, and your store has to use the new Shopify Markets.

Customizing the storefront and checkout by market needs Advanced or Plus. On Basic and Grow, a developer can still show or hide wholesale content in theme code, since the theme knows when a B2B customer is logged in.

Should you fold your wholesale store into your main store?

We'd fold it in if most of these are true:

• Your wholesale buyers order mostly the same products your retail shoppers see.
• Three catalogs or fewer cover all your wholesale pricing.
• You pay for a second plan, plus apps that only exist because there are two stores.

Slow down if every account has its own negotiated prices, because per-account catalogs are Plus only. The same goes for deposits and partial payments.

Also check Shopify's list of features that don't work with B2B, which includes accelerated checkouts like Shop Pay, local delivery, pickup points and subscriptions. If your wholesale buyers rely on one, plan for it before you move.

Where native B2B stops

Native B2B on Shopify covered most of what Sugar Blossom needed. It came up short in two places that wholesale buyers notice right away.

A minimum order that depends on the account

Native quantity rules count units of each variant, not order value. In Shopify's own example, a buyer facing a 10-hat minimum can't combine 5 gray hats and 5 blue ones to meet it.

Shopify's free Checkout Blocks app can set a minimum order subtotal for all customers or only for B2B companies, and it has been available on Basic, Grow and Advanced since April 13, 2026. A minimum that changes by account takes a custom checkout rule. Sugar Blossom's depends on whether the account is grandfathered and whether it has ordered before.

Checkout rules like that are Shopify Functions. Any plan can run functions that come inside public App Store apps, but custom apps with functions need Plus. Below Plus, that means a checkout rules app. And because validation runs on Shopify's servers, skipping the cart page doesn't skip the minimum.

Retail price next to the wholesale price

Retailers price against MSRP, so they want it on the page while they order. Out of the box, a logged-in buyer sees their catalog price.

Catalogs do have a compare-at price, and Shopify suggests using it to show MSRP. But you set it product by product in each catalog, and a percentage catalog applies its adjustment to compare-at prices by default. If you set it by hand, you update it by hand every time retail changes.

Neither gap is a setting you switch on. Both are Shopify customization work: an app, some theme code, or both.

For the app part, there's Switchboard, a checkout rules app I built with The Click Collective. It fills the gaps non-Plus stores run into on B2B: order minimums for wholesale buyers, shipping rates that only logged-in buyers see, and invoice terms shown first to B2B customers, all set up from your admin. Those rules run on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and there's a free plan to start. See Switchboard on the Shopify App Store.

What the move takes, step by step

Shopify calls one store that sells to both retail and wholesale customers a blended store, and publishes a setup checklist for blended B2B stores. When wholesale lives on its own store today, we work in this order:

1. Confirm you're on Basic or higher, and move to the new Shopify Markets if you haven't.
2. Turn every wholesale account into a company. Export the accounts from the old store, reshape them into companies with locations and buyers, and test the import on a development store before the real one at launch.
3. Build catalogs as a percentage of retail where you can. Wholesale prices then follow retail instead of being kept by hand.
4. Switch on customer accounts, since B2B can't run on legacy ones. Then gate wholesale-only pages, policies and links so only logged-in buyers see them.
5. Rebuild payment terms, wholesale shipping and minimums on the main store. Then check your discounts: since June 2026, B2B discounts are on by default for new B2B stores, and a discount open to all customers then reaches wholesale buyers too, unless you limit it by market.
6. Give new buyers a way to apply. With the free Shopify Forms app, an application creates the company, its location and the buyer in your admin. By default, they can't order or see B2B prices until you approve them.
7. Launch before you cancel anything, and point the old wholesale address at a "we've moved" page.

How Sugar Blossom Jewelry is moving to one store

Sugar Blossom Jewelry is a Winnipeg jewelry brand. It sells online, in its own flagship store, and through a wholesale program for stockists.

Two stores meant most products lived twice, with a sync app copying products and stock from retail to wholesale. Keeping it accurate took ongoing work. Cady Pavagadhi at Sugar Blossom put it this way: "In my dream world the metafields would sync consistently between the two stores and I wouldn't have to do copy-paste on each listing."

We suggested a fresh look at wholesale, and Cady asked whether wholesale buyers could log in on the main store instead. By then, Shopify allowed it. We planned the move on a September 23 strategy call. Sugar Blossom approved it the same day, and work started the next morning.

Retail shoppers keep the store they know. Wholesale buyers log in and get their own version of it:

• Every wholesale account becomes a Shopify company. A migration script reshapes the accounts, and the real import runs at launch.
• Two catalogs set the prices, both a percentage of retail.
• Buyers log in on the main store with a one-time email code, the same way retail customers do.
• Wholesale shipping and exchange policies only show to logged-in buyers.
• Switchboard already runs the wholesale shipping rules. At launch it also switches on a four-tier minimum, set by grandfathered status and order history, and an MSRP display next to each logged-in buyer's price.

The theme handles the wholesale-only pages in code, so Sugar Blossom skips the jump to Shopify Advanced unless buyers need it.

Once wholesale is live on the main store, the merge retires the wholesale store's Shopify plan, and the app cleanup that comes with it cuts more than $160 USD a month. Nothing gets cancelled until the new setup is live and doing its job.

The plan puts wholesale on the main store before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so the busiest weeks of the year run on one store. The Sugar Blossom Jewelry case study walks through the full build.

Still running two stores?

Talk to FireNet before you pay for another month of two stores. On a free call, we'll look at your setup and tell you straight whether moving is worth it and what it would retire. You'll talk to a developer, not a sales rep.