Shopify's built-in B2B suite — company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing — is genuinely good, and since April 2, 2026 it has been included on Basic, Grow, and Advanced at no extra cost. If you are on a standard plan and haven't switched it on, start there rather than here.
What the non-Plus plans include is up to 3 active B2B catalogs across all your B2B markets, assigned via Markets. Unlimited catalogs, and assigning a catalog directly to a specific company or location, remain Plus features. So the question for most brands is no longer whether you can sell wholesale without Plus — you can — but what to do when you need a fourth price level, or pricing that belongs to one account rather than a group. We cover that boundary in detail in what the 3-catalog limit means.
The good news: since Shopify opened up Shopify Functions to all plans, the pricing logic above that line can be run on Basic, Grow, or Advanced too. Here's what you can build past the three-catalog budget, 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 extends past the three-catalog budget 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 catalogs let you set exact prices per product per company, without a ceiling on how many. 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
Company profiles now model your buyer as a business on any plan, but deciding who gets wholesale access in the first place isn't part of native B2B on any plan, Plus included. 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, and this list got shorter in April 2026 — net payment terms and company profiles are both on the standard plans now. Stay on (or move to) Plus if you need:
- More than 3 active catalogs natively, or catalogs assigned directly to a company or location rather than via Markets
- Deposits and partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment
- Checkout UI customization beyond discounts
- B2B-specific tax exemption workflows at scale
If your wholesale channel is deposit-driven or every account is individually negotiated inside Shopify's own catalogs, Plus earns its price. If it's "my stockists log in and order at their price," it doesn't.
Cost comparison
- Standard plan, native B2B only: $0 extra — included, capped at 3 active catalogs
- Standard plan + free wholesale app: $25–$399/month for Shopify itself, $0 for the pricing layer, no catalog ceiling
- Shopify Plus: starts at roughly $2,300/month, which is what unlimited catalogs and per-company assignment cost natively
The first row is free and covers a lot of businesses. The gap that matters is between the first row and the third — and for a store doing $20k/month wholesale at 30% margin, that gap 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.