Shopify's built-in B2B suite — company profiles, price lists, net payment terms — is genuinely good. It's also exclusive to Shopify Plus, which starts at roughly $2,300/month. For most small and mid-size brands that get wholesale inquiries, that math doesn't work: you might be doing $10–50k/month in B2B, and Plus would eat the margin.
The good news: since Shopify opened up Shopify Functions to all plans, almost everything wholesale actually requires can be done on Basic, Grow, or Advanced. Here's what you can replicate, what you genuinely still need Plus for, and how to set it up.
What wholesale actually requires
Strip away the enterprise branding and a wholesale channel needs five things:
- Different prices for different customers (tiers or price lists)
- Automatic enforcement — the buyer shouldn't need to paste codes
- Volume incentives — better pricing at higher quantities
- A way to vet who gets wholesale access
- Visibility — the buyer should see their price before checkout
All five are achievable without Plus.
Customer-tier pricing on any plan
The pattern that replaces Plus price lists is tier-based customer pricing: create tiers (Bronze/Silver/Gold or Retailer/Distributor), assign each wholesale customer to one, and let a Shopify Function apply the right discount automatically at checkout when that customer is logged in.
Because Functions run inside checkout itself, the discount:
- works with every payment method, including accelerated checkouts like Shop Pay
- can't be bypassed by cart manipulation or shared links
- stacks predictably with quantity-break rules
Apps like Tradeleap (free on all plans) handle the tier management and generate the checkout function for you — the full walkthrough is in our Shopify wholesale setup guide.
Per-product and volume pricing
Plus price lists let you set exact prices per product per company. On standard plans you achieve the same result with per-product and per-variant percentage overrides layered over tier defaults, plus collection-level rates for whole categories. Add quantity breaks (e.g. +5% off at 50 units, +10% at 100) and you've covered the pricing logic of most real-world wholesale price sheets.
Vetting wholesale buyers
Without Plus company accounts, the standard flow is:
- A wholesale application form on your site (business name, tax ID, expected volume)
- Manual or rule-based approval
- Assigning the approved customer to a tier
The buyer then logs into the same storefront as retail customers — no separate password-protected store to maintain, no duplicate product catalog to keep in sync.
What you still need Plus for
Honesty matters here. Stay on (or move to) Plus if you need:
- Net payment terms at checkout (net 30/60/90 with draft-order invoicing is clunkier without Plus)
- Company accounts with multiple buyers sharing one ledger
- Checkout UI customization beyond discounts
- B2B-specific tax exemption workflows at scale
If your wholesale channel is invoice-first with dozens of buyers per company, Plus earns its price. If it's "my stockists log in and order at their price," it doesn't.
Cost comparison
- Shopify Plus: ~$2,300/month, native B2B included
- Standard plan + free wholesale app: $39–$399/month for Shopify itself, $0 for the wholesale layer
For a store doing $20k/month wholesale at 30% margin, the difference is the entire profit of the channel.
Getting started
You can have tier pricing live in an afternoon: create a free Tradeleap account, install the Shopify app, create two or three tiers, assign a test customer, and place a test order. From there it's just deciding your discount structure — which is a pricing-strategy question, not a technology one.