B2B and wholesale
Shopify B2B
Shopify B2B is the set of wholesale features built into the store itself: the customer stops being a person and becomes a company with its locations, and prices come from catalogs assigned to those companies. It is not an app or a separate theme, it is a data model inside the store you already have.
Also called: native B2B, Shopify wholesale, B2B on Shopify
What separates native B2B from the workarounds people used before it (customer tags, automatic discounts, a second store running in parallel) is that the wholesale price arrives at the theme already resolved. The front-end calculates nothing: it asks for the variant price and gets the one that belongs to the company of whoever is logged in.
Which plans have it
Shopify’s documentation lists B2B on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus, and excludes it only from Starter and Retail. The difference between plans is not whether you can sell wholesale, it is how many active catalogs you can have: three in total on the plans without Plus, unlimited on Plus.
What the theme has to do
One thing, and it is the one most often done wrong: decide who sees prices. The condition is customer.b2b?, and the rule is that if the visitor is not B2B the price must not reach the HTML — hiding it with CSS is not enough.
{% if customer.b2b? %}
<span class="price">{{ product.selected_or_first_available_variant.price | money }}</span>
{% else %}
<a href="/account/login">Log in to see prices</a>
{% endif %}The rest of the work in a wholesale portal depends on neither the plan nor B2B: it is order flow. A size table with live stock, SKU search, reordering last month’s order. That is front-end work, and it is where the buyer notices the difference.
The model is documented under B2B on Shopify.