Shopify Plus merchants could put wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales in one store under new business-to-business features that Shopify said were ready on June 27, 2022. Its release note described the features as enabled by default in the administration interface, with a dedicated B2B expansion store available as an alternative. The offering, introduced on June 22, gave merchants a choice about where business buyers would order without requiring them to run wholesale through a separate storefront. [S1][S2]
The business account was central to the setup. Shopify listed company profiles with multiple locations and buyers, alongside price lists and payment terms. For wholesale staff, the practical implication is that customer setup becomes part of the ordering process: the merchant needs to establish the business relationship and its commercial terms, rather than expect the software to decide them. The release identified those account features but did not specify payment-term lengths. [S2]
Pricing could be tailored to the customer. Shopify's June 22 announcement described fixed prices or discounted retail prices for a merchant's products. For a sales team, that is a choice between recording a specific wholesale price and expressing the deal in relation to retail. It is more precise than treating every business buyer as entitled to the same discount. The announcement supports those two pricing approaches, not a claim that Shopify negotiates the terms for the seller. [S1]
Merchants wanting a more distinct wholesale shop still had that option. Shopify described its dedicated B2B-only expansion store as allowing greater customization, while the combined store supported both wholesale and consumer sales. The useful distinction is between tailoring a business customer's buying terms and separating the storefront itself: the new offering did not make the second a prerequisite for the first. Shopify's release note did not compare the staff time or operating cost of the two arrangements. [S1][S2]
The connection to existing business records was another piece of the launch. Shopify named enterprise resource planning providers NetSuite, Brightpearl and Acumatica as partners for integrating merchants' essential data with the B2B offering. It pitched the product as a way out of spreadsheet work, individual invoicing and manual entry, but supplied no measured workload reduction in these releases. Nor did the announcements document a completed migration for a particular seller. A named software partnership was not evidence that a merchant's customer and pricing records had already reached its new store. [S1][S2]
Source documents
- Introducing Shopify Editions: 100+ product releases for the next era of commercehttps://www.shopify.com/news/introducing-shopify-editions-100-product-releases-for-the-next-era-of-commerce
- Use all-new B2B features in the Online Storehttps://changelog.shopify.com/posts/use-all-new-b2b-features-in-the-online-store