Shopify B2B on All Plans: What Actually Changed, and the Ceiling Everyone Describes Wrong
The short answer, for anyone skimming.
Since 2 April 2026, most Shopify B2B features work on Basic, Grow and Advanced, not just Plus. Company accounts, net payment terms, vaulted cards, ACH, quantity price breaks, PO numbers, draft orders, quick order lists, the Trade theme and Flow automation are all available on every paid plan. The real Plus ceiling is not the three-catalog limit that every article cites. It is that catalogs can only be assigned to B2B markets below Plus, never directly to a company. If you need per-customer pricing, the number three is irrelevant, because you cannot do it at all without Plus. That single distinction decides the plan for most wholesale businesses.
Most of what ranks for this question is wrong
Not maliciously. Just stale, or copied from something stale.
Shopify B2B spent most of its life as a Plus-tier product. Nearly every comparison article that ranks today was written against that model, or written in the two weeks after the April announcement by someone paraphrasing a press release. We have now read a lot of them, and the same errors repeat.
So we did the boring thing and checked every claim against Shopify's own plan-features documentation. Here is what is actually true as of today, and where the widely-repeated version is wrong.
What changed on 2 April 2026
Shopify moved the core of B2B onto every paid plan at no extra cost. Not a trial, not a limited version. The functional core.
If you evaluated Shopify for wholesale in 2024 and concluded the entry price was a Plus contract, that conclusion is now out of date, and it is out of date in a way that changes real decisions. We have had three conversations this quarter with brands who had ruled Shopify out for exactly that reason and had not revisited it.
Since then, two Editions releases have added more. Winter '26 brought pickup as a B2B delivery option at checkout and dynamic payment terms via Functions-powered apps. Summer '26, announced 17 June 2026, added net terms with automated invoicing, region-specific B2B markets with their own catalogs and themes, VAT number validation, B2B gift cards, and tighter NetSuite integration.
There is also a deadline that has already passed and is worth knowing about if you are on Plus: Shopify Scripts were replaced by Functions on 30 June 2026. A lot of older wholesale logic on Plus stores lived in Scripts. If yours did and nobody migrated it, that is a live problem, not a future one.
The accurate plan matrix
Verified against Shopify's published B2B plan documentation. Where this differs from other articles you have read, this is the version that matches Shopify's own docs.
| Feature | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Companies and customers | ||||
| Companies | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Company locations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Location-level permissions | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Catalogs and pricing | ||||
| B2B catalogs assignable to markets | 3 | 3 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Direct company catalogs | No | No | No | Yes |
| Quantity rules (min, max, increment) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quantity price breaks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Payments | ||||
| Net terms | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Payment reminders | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ACH (United States only) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vaulted credit cards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Deposit requirements | No | No | No | Yes |
| Partial payments | No | No | No | Yes |
| Payment requests per fulfillment | No | No | No | Yes |
| Checkout and orders | ||||
| Draft order to invoice | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Checkout to draft | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Easy reorders | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PO numbers | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contextual checkout (via Markets) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Storefront and staff | ||||
| Sales staff permissions | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Trade theme | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quick order list | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contextual storefront (via Markets) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Shopify Flow with B2B objects | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Bolded rows are the ones most commonly reported incorrectly elsewhere.
One prerequisite nobody mentions. To use B2B catalog features on Basic, Grow or Advanced, your store must be on new Shopify Markets. If you are on an older Markets configuration, that is a migration step before any of this works. It is a genuine blocker and it is buried in a single line of Shopify's documentation.
Five things the ranking content gets wrong
1. Vaulted credit cards are not Plus-only
Multiple widely-shared articles list vaulted card storage for buyer accounts as a Plus feature. Shopify's documentation shows it available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus.
This matters practically. Vaulted cards are how you let a returning buyer reorder without re-entering payment details, which is most of the convenience argument for a self-serve wholesale portal in the first place. If you ruled out a lower plan because you thought you would lose that, revisit.
2. The three-catalog limit is not the real ceiling
This is the important one, and it is the reason we wrote this post.
Every article frames the constraint as "three catalogs below Plus, unlimited on Plus," as though the difference were a quantity. It is not. It is a difference in kind.
Below Plus, catalogs are assigned to B2B markets. On Plus, you can additionally assign catalogs directly to a specific company or company location.
That means customer-level pricing is not limited to three below Plus. It is unavailable. If your model is "Acme Distributors gets their own negotiated price list," there is no configuration of the three catalogs that produces it, because the assignment target does not exist on your plan.
Conversely, if your model is "we have three price tiers and every customer sits in one of them," then three market catalogs is not a limitation you will ever feel. You have exactly what you need, permanently, on Basic.
So the question is not how many catalogs you need. It is whether your pricing is tiered or per-customer. Tiered scales fine below Plus. Per-customer requires Plus, full stop. We have watched merchants agonise over the number three when the number was never the issue.
3. Advanced is a real B2B tier, and almost nobody says so
Contextual checkout and contextual storefront through Shopify Markets are available on Advanced and Plus. Not Plus alone.
This is the ability to show different checkout and storefront experiences to different B2B buyers and regions. It is a substantial capability and it sits two tiers below Plus, which almost no comparison article mentions because they are all written as a Plus versus not-Plus binary.
If you have wholesale buyers in different regions with different needs, Advanced may be the correct answer and it is dramatically cheaper than Plus. Worth pricing before you assume the jump.
4. Net terms did not just arrive, but automated invoicing did
Net terms have been available across plans. What Summer '26 added was net terms with automated invoicing, which is the part that actually removes work from your finance team. Several posts conflate the two and imply net terms are new. They are not. The automation is.
5. ACH is United States only
Frequently reported as simply "ACH is now supported." It is a US-only payment method. If your wholesale buyers are in the UK, EU or Australia, this does not apply to you and you should not build a plan around it.
So which plan do you actually need?
Here is the decision, in the order we would actually ask it.
Question one: is your pricing tiered or per-customer?
Write down your price levels. Not what your sales team says. What actually exists in your invoices.
- Three or fewer distinct tiers, applied consistently → Basic, Grow or Advanced. You are done. This describes far more wholesale businesses than admit it.
- Genuinely negotiated pricing per account → Plus. Nothing below it can express this.
- You think it is per-customer but you are not sure → do the audit. This is the single most valuable hour you will spend. We regularly find that a business describing itself as having forty bespoke price lists actually has three tiers plus a handful of exceptions that could be handled with quantity breaks. That finding is worth roughly $2,500 a month in avoided Plus fees.
Question two: do you need deposits or partial payments?
Deposit requirements, partial payments and payment-per-fulfillment are Plus-only and have no workaround worth building. If you take 30 percent upfront on made-to-order goods, you need Plus. This is a clean, binary answer and it is often the real reason a manufacturer needs Plus, not the catalog count.
Question three: do you sell wholesale across regions with different experiences?
If yes, you need at least Advanced for contextual checkout and storefront. Not Plus. Advanced.
Question four: are you on new Shopify Markets?
If not, that migration comes first regardless of plan. Sort this before you scope anything else.
That is the whole decision. Four questions. Most wholesale businesses land on Advanced, and a meaningful number land on Basic and are genuinely fine there.
What native Shopify B2B still cannot do, at any tier
We would rather tell you this now than have you discover it in month three. These are the walls we hit in real builds.
Complex pricing logic. Catalogs handle fixed prices, percentage discounts and quantity breaks well. They do not handle formula-driven pricing, pricing that depends on order composition, or contract pricing with escalators and effective dates. If your pricing needs a spreadsheet with nested logic to explain, native catalogs will not hold it at any tier.
Quote-and-negotiate workflows. Draft orders cover a lot of ground, and checkout-to-draft is genuinely useful. But a proper RFQ flow where a buyer requests pricing, a rep counters, the buyer counters back, and the whole thing is tracked with approvals is not native. That needs an app or custom work regardless of plan.
Multi-level buyer approval chains. Location-level permissions cover admin and ordering. A workflow where a junior buyer's order over $5,000 routes to their manager and then to procurement is not native at any tier.
Deep ERP-driven inventory and pricing. If pricing and availability live in your ERP and must be authoritative in real time, you are building an integration. Shopify will hold it, but it is custom work, not configuration.
Registration and vetting flows. Approving new wholesale accounts with document upload, tax exemption verification and manual review is not native. Common requirement, always needs building.
Mixed B2B and B2C on one storefront with intelligent switching. Possible, done frequently, but it is a design and development problem rather than a setting.
None of these are reasons to avoid Shopify. They are reasons to scope honestly before you commit, because each one is a line item somebody has to pay for.
What this means if you are on another platform
The April change matters most to merchants who ruled Shopify out for wholesale reasons.
On Magento or Adobe Commerce. Magento's B2B suite was the strongest argument for staying, and Shopify's answer used to be "buy Plus." If your wholesale runs on three or fewer price tiers, that argument is gone and you no longer need a Plus contract to leave. Given that Adobe Commerce 2.4.6 reached end of support in August 2026, and Magento Open Source gets no extended support window, the timing here is not academic.
On BigCommerce. BigCommerce's deeper native B2B was a real differentiator. It is a much closer comparison now, and worth redoing feature by feature rather than relying on a conclusion you reached in 2024.
On a legacy platform or a spreadsheet. If your wholesale currently runs through emailed order forms and a rep typing orders into an admin, the native feature set will feel like a different century. The work in that case is less technical than organisational: turning informal pricing agreements into structured catalogs, and habits into buyer permissions. That is the harder half of the project and it is not a development task.
If you are setting this up, the order matters
Some hard-won sequencing. Getting this wrong costs weeks.
- Confirm you are on new Shopify Markets. Before anything. This is a prerequisite for catalog features below Plus and it is the most common thing that stops a B2B build on day one.
- Audit your actual pricing before you touch the admin. Every price level that genuinely exists, with the customers in each. This determines your plan and it determines whether the project is simple or not. Do it in a spreadsheet, not in Shopify.
- Model your company structure next. Companies, locations, buyers, permissions. Wholesale customers are frequently more organisationally complex than merchants expect: one company, four locations, different buyers with different authority at each.
- Build catalogs after the audit, not during it. Catalogs built while you are still discovering your own pricing get rebuilt.
- Configure payment terms and decide your credit policy. Net terms are a finance decision before they are a settings decision. Who gets terms, at what limit, and what happens when they are late.
- Then think about the storefront. The Trade theme is free and available on every plan, and it is a reasonable starting point. Whether it is your final answer depends on how much your B2B experience needs to look like your brand.
- Automate last. Flow with B2B objects is powerful, and automating a process you have not yet run manually is how you automate the wrong process.
The mistake we see most often: merchants build catalogs first because it is the visible, satisfying part, then discover their pricing does not fit the model, then rebuild. The spreadsheet audit in step two is unglamorous and it saves the project.
What we would tell you if you called us
Most merchants asking "do I need Plus for B2B" do not. Since April, the honest answer for a majority of wholesale operations is Basic or Advanced. We say this knowing that Plus builds are larger projects and better revenue for us. It is still the right answer more often than not.
The pricing audit is the whole job. Not the build. If your pricing is genuinely tiered, this is a configuration project with a storefront on top. If it is genuinely per-customer, you need Plus and the conversation is different. Everything downstream depends on that one finding, which is why we do it first and why we will do it with you before quoting anything.
Check Advanced before you assume Plus. Contextual checkout and storefront land on Advanced. The gap between Advanced and Plus in monthly cost is substantial, and a lot of merchants jump it unnecessarily because every article they read framed the world as Plus or nothing.
If you are on Plus and were using Scripts for wholesale logic, check that now. Scripts were replaced by Functions on 30 June 2026. If nobody migrated your wholesale discount logic, you may have a live issue you have not noticed because it fails quietly.
Where it genuinely breaks, we will say so. The six limitations listed above are real, and we would rather scope the custom work honestly than let you discover it after launch. If your pricing needs formula logic, no amount of catalog configuration will save it and we will tell you that in the first call.
Frequently asked questions
Do I still need Shopify Plus for B2B in 2026? For most wholesale operations, no. Since 2 April 2026, company accounts, catalogs, net terms, vaulted cards, ACH, quantity price breaks, PO numbers, draft orders, quick order lists and Flow automation all work on Basic, Grow and Advanced. You need Plus if you require per-customer pricing assigned directly to a company, deposits or partial payments, or unlimited catalogs.
What is the three-catalog limit and does it matter? Below Plus you can assign up to three active catalogs across all your B2B markets combined, not three per market. But the number is usually the wrong thing to focus on. The sharper constraint is that below Plus, catalogs can only be assigned to markets, never directly to a specific company. If you need negotiated per-customer pricing, three versus unlimited is irrelevant, because direct company assignment requires Plus.
Are vaulted credit cards Plus-only? No, despite what several widely-shared articles claim. Shopify's own plan documentation lists vaulted credit cards as available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus.
What is contextual checkout and which plan do I need? Contextual checkout and contextual storefront let you present different checkout and storefront experiences to different B2B buyers and regions through Shopify Markets. They are available on Advanced and Plus, not Plus alone. This is the most commonly missed detail in plan comparisons and it can save a merchant a substantial monthly difference.
Can I run B2B and DTC from the same Shopify store? Yes, and it is the common setup. One catalog of products, one inventory pool, one admin, with B2B buyers seeing their own pricing when logged in. It works well. It does require deliberate design so that a wholesale buyer and a retail customer both get a coherent experience, which is a build decision rather than a setting.
What can native Shopify B2B not do? Formula-driven or contract pricing with escalators, full RFQ and negotiation workflows, multi-level buyer approval chains, real-time ERP-authoritative pricing, and wholesale account registration with document verification. All are solvable with apps or custom development, none are native at any tier.
Do I need to be on new Shopify Markets? Yes, if you want B2B catalog features on Basic, Grow or Advanced. It is a documented prerequisite and it is the most common thing that halts a B2B setup on day one. Check this before anything else.
Is Shopify B2B good enough to replace Magento or BigCommerce for wholesale? For most wholesale operations, yes, and this changed materially in 2026. The test is whether your pricing is tiered or per-customer, and whether you need deposits. If your pricing is tiered and you do not take deposits, native Shopify B2B on Advanced covers a great deal. If your pricing is genuinely bespoke per account, you need Plus, and that is still usually cheaper than an Adobe Commerce licence.
How long does a B2B setup take? For a straightforward tiered setup on an existing Shopify store, two to four weeks including catalog configuration, company modelling and storefront work. Add time for ERP integration, custom registration flows, or anything in the limitations list above. The pricing audit that precedes it takes a few days and determines everything.
Where to go from here
If you have been sitting on a 2024 conclusion about Shopify and wholesale, it is worth revisiting. The answer changed and it changed in your favour.
The useful first step is not a proposal. It is the pricing audit: every price level that genuinely exists, and which customers sit in each. That single document tells you which plan you need and whether this is a configuration project or a development one.
Send us your current setup and roughly how your wholesale pricing works. We will tell you which plan covers you, where native B2B will run out of room for your specific model, and what it would take. If the answer is that you need nothing from us beyond an afternoon of configuration, we will say that too.
One to two new partners a month. We reply within one business day.
Verified against Shopify's published B2B plan documentation as of September 2026. Shopify ships changes continuously, so confirm current availability in your own admin before making plan decisions.
Code2Commerce is a Shopify Select Partner studio. We build premium storefronts, run platform migrations, and stay on as the team behind the store. Chicago, remote-first, all timezones welcome.