Is Shopify good for B2B?

Yes, with one caveat about scale. A standard Shopify plan handles trade customers well through customer tagging, automatic discounts and locked collections - and a £15-30/month wholesale app adds per-product price lists if you need them. What a standard plan doesn't give you is company accounts with multiple buyers, net payment terms and contract pricing - that's Shopify Plus territory, and most small and mid-sized B2B sellers don't need it.

Can I show different prices to different customers on Shopify?

Yes. The simplest route is tagging your trade customers and running an automatic discount against that customer segment - they log in, the discount applies. If your trade pricing is per-product rather than a flat percentage, a wholesale app lets you load proper price lists against tagged customers. Both work on a standard Shopify plan.

Do I need Shopify Plus for wholesale?

Usually not. Plus starts at roughly $2,300 a month, and what it buys you on the B2B side is company accounts, multiple buyers per company, net payment terms and negotiated catalogues. If your wholesale operation is 'approved trade customers see trade prices and order online', a standard plan plus a modest app does the whole job for a fraction of the cost.

Can customers log in to see trade prices on Shopify?

Yes. Trade customers get accounts, you approve and tag them, and prices or whole collections can be restricted to logged-in tagged customers. The trade customer sees their pricing; the public sees retail or nothing, depending on how you set it up. Apps like B2B Login/Lock make the hiding airtight if you need pages fully invisible to the public.

Can I sell retail and wholesale from the same Shopify store?

Yes, and for most businesses one store is the right answer - one catalogue, one inventory, one set of orders. Retail customers see retail prices; tagged trade customers see theirs when logged in. A separate wholesale store only earns its keep when the catalogues or brands genuinely diverge, because two stores means maintaining two of everything.

Shopify B2B and Wholesale Pricing: 2026 Guide

Percentage off retail is free. A per-product price book is £25 a month. Company accounts are £2,300 a month. Most stores only need the first one.

A brief landed on my desk this week from a brand that sells to the public and to the trade — a retail storefront out front, and a registered-trade area behind a login where approved professionals see different prices and a members-only product range. They’re moving platforms, and somewhere in the planning the trade area had quietly fallen off the requirements list. Not because it doesn’t matter — it’s a serious slice of their revenue — but because when trade pricing is just how your shop works, you stop thinking of it as a feature.

So this piece is the answer I worked through for them, written down properly: how Shopify actually handles B2B and wholesale pricing, what it costs at each level, and where the line actually sits between “included in your plan”, “a £25-a-month app”, and “you need Shopify Plus” — which is a £2,300-a-month answer to what is usually a £0 question.

The three levels of trade pricing on Shopify

Shopify gives you three ways to run trade pricing, and the right one depends on a single fact about your business: is your trade pricing a percentage, or a price list?

If your barbers, contractors or stockists get “trade price = 30% off retail”, you can build the whole thing with what’s already in your plan. If every SKU has its own hand-set trade price that doesn’t track retail, you need an app — a modest one. And if your trade customers are companies with multiple buyers, purchase orders and 30-day payment terms, that’s the point where Shopify Plus stops being overkill and starts being the product you actually need.

Most stores I look at think they’re in the third category and are actually in the first.

Customer tags and automatic discounts — the £0 route

The machinery for percentage-based trade pricing ships with every Shopify plan, and it’s built from three pieces.

Registration and approval. Trade customers create an account — you can add an “apply for a trade account” form to make the intent explicit. Nothing happens until you approve them, which takes one action in the admin: adding a tag, say trade, to their customer record. You hold the gate. Nobody self-certifies into your trade prices.

The automatic discount. Shopify discounts can target a customer segment, and segments can be built from tags. One rule — 30% off for customers tagged trade, applied automatically at checkout when they’re logged in — and your entire trade counter is running. No codes to share, nothing for the customer to remember, and the public never sees it.

Locked collections. If you carry trade-only products — the members-only range, the professional sizes — those collections can be hidden from navigation and search for everyone except logged-in tagged customers. The public doesn’t browse what it can’t buy.

That’s the whole build. I’ve just scoped exactly this for the migration that prompted this piece, and it’s an afternoon’s configuration inside a larger project — not a line item, and certainly not a reason to pay for a bigger platform. Volume and quantity breaks (“10% off boxes of 50”) fit the same machinery, because Shopify’s discounts can carry quantity conditions.

When you need a wholesale app — the price-list route

The native machinery has one limit worth knowing before you commit to it: it discounts from retail. If your trade pricing doesn’t track retail — the trade price of one product is 20% off, another is 45% off, a third is priced below retail cost because it’s a volume line — then a percentage rule can’t express your price book, and you need an app that can.

This is what the wholesale apps are for: Wholesale Gorilla, B2B Login/Lock, Wholesale Club and their competitors. They bolt proper price lists onto a standard plan — upload your trade prices per SKU, assign them to tagged customers, and add the supporting trade machinery as you need it: minimum order quantities, net-terms-style draft orders, fully locked storefronts where prices don’t exist until you’re signed in.

Typical cost is £15–30 a month on your Shopify bill. Against what the same capability used to cost — a developer building bespoke price logic into a WooCommerce site, then maintaining it through every update — it’s one of the better bargains in the app store.

A question that comes up constantly with trade-facing stores: can the public see the prices at all? Some businesses want the catalogue public and the prices gated — the classic trade-counter window display. On Shopify this is app territory (B2B Login/Lock is built around exactly this), and it works: products visible, prices replaced with “log in for trade pricing”, checkout disabled until approved.

My advice, for what it’s worth: gate as little as possible. Hidden prices cost you Google traffic — a product page without a price is a weaker search result and can’t appear in Shopping listings — and they cost you the retail customers who would have happily paid full price. Lock the trade discount, not the catalogue. The businesses that gate everything are usually protecting a price book their competitors already have a copy of.

Retail and wholesale in one store

One store is almost always right. One catalogue, one inventory count, one place orders land, one feed into your accounts. Retail customers see retail; tagged customers see trade; the product feed and ads machinery only ever sees the retail side.

The separate-wholesale-store pattern — a second Shopify store on a trade. subdomain — earns its keep only when the two operations genuinely diverge: different brand, radically different catalogue, export pricing in different currencies. Two stores means two themes, two sets of apps, two inventories to reconcile. Don’t take that on to solve a problem a customer tag solves.

What Shopify Plus actually buys you

Plus gets invoked in every B2B conversation, so here’s what it actually is. Shopify’s native B2B suite — company profiles with multiple buyers, per-company price lists and catalogues, net payment terms, vaulted cards, draft-order workflows — is genuinely good, and it’s Plus-only, at roughly $2,300 a month.

The test is in the nouns. If you sell to companies — a buyer places orders, accounts pays on 30-day terms, three people share the account — Plus is solving real problems and the price can make sense. If you sell to people who happen to be trade — a barber, an installer, a small shop owner with a card — you’re in tag-and-discount territory, and Plus would be the most expensive percentage calculator you’ve ever bought.

Moving an existing trade setup to Shopify

If you’re migrating from WooCommerce or another platform and you already run a trade area, the work is mapping, not rebuilding: which customers carry trade status (they migrate with their tags), whether your price book is a percentage or a list (that decides native vs app), and which products are trade-only (those become locked collections). It’s the kind of detail that falls off a migration brief easily — as the brand at the top of this piece nearly proved — so if you’re scoping a move, put your trade counter on the requirements list explicitly. The migration itself is a known quantity, and if you’re coming from WordPress, the WooCommerce route is well-trodden.

The decision rule

Percentage off retail → customer tags and an automatic discount, included in your plan. Per-product price book → a wholesale app at £15–30 a month. Company accounts and payment terms → that’s the Plus conversation, and it’s worth having properly rather than by default.

If you’re setting up trade pricing on Shopify — or moving a store that already has it — get in touch and I’ll tell you which of the three you actually need. It’s usually the cheap one, and I’d rather tell you that before you’ve paid for the expensive one.