B2B and wholesale
B2B catalog
A B2B catalog is the set of products with their prices, quantity rules and volume pricing that gets assigned to specific companies. It is the equivalent of a wholesale price list, and it is the object whose limit decides whether a B2B project fits your plan: three active without Plus, unlimited with it.
Also called: catalog, wholesale catalog, B2B price tier
The catalog is the piece to count before choosing a plan. Everything else in B2B has ceilings nobody reaches in practice; this one does not.
The limit that decides the project
On Basic, Grow and Advanced you get 3 active catalogs in total, counting all your B2B markets together, not three per market. On Shopify Plus there is no limit, and the catalog can also be assigned directly to a company or to a location.
Three catalogs are enough for a tiered structure — wholesale, distributor, key accounts — which is how most brands actually work. What they are not enough for is a negotiated price account by account.
Assignment changes how you build
This point drags more decisions behind it than the number itself. Without Plus a catalog is not plugged into a company: it is plugged into a B2B market, and the companies in that market inherit it. The consequence is that your price segmentation has to match your geographic segmentation. If your three tiers are “wholesale Spain”, “wholesale Portugal” and “distributor”, you have spent all three.
When several catalogs price the same product, the lowest price wins. Worth knowing before you overlap catalogs to handle an exception: overlapping does not add up, it picks.
What fits inside one catalog
More than it looks. A fixed price per variant or a percentage off the whole price list, quantity rules and volume pricing. Before asking for a fourth catalog it is worth checking whether the difference between two customers is about price or about quantity: if it is quantity, volume breaks solve it inside one.
The caps are in the catalogs documentation.