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How to Start Selling Wholesale on Shopify — No Plus Plan, No Marketplace, No Apps

By Bhavin Gopani · Last updated 13 August 2026 · every fact checked against Shopify's current docs on that date

You can start selling wholesale on the Shopify plan you already have. Since 2 April 2026, native B2B — company profiles for your buyers, separate wholesale price lists, and payment terms — is included on Basic, Grow, and Advanced at no extra cost (checked 13 August 2026). You don't need Shopify Plus, a wholesale app, or a marketplace taking commission.

I'm spelling that out first because most guides ranking for this question still say the opposite — "native B2B needs Plus at $2,300 a month, so install a pricing app or list on Faire." That was true for years. It stopped being true this April, and the difference is a wholesale setup that costs you nothing extra and lives inside the admin you already know.

The honest catch: Shopify settings are the easy half. The half that decides whether wholesale makes you money is a price that survives the maths, and a policy for who gets credit. Do those two on paper first — they take an evening.

Does wholesale even work for your product? (Do this maths first)

Wholesale means selling at roughly half your retail price — the trade calls it keystone: the shop buying from you doubles your price back up, so their margin exists only if you give it to them. Before touching any setting, run one line of arithmetic:

Say your product retails at $40 and costs you $10 landed (make or buy, shipped to you, sample numbers). Wholesale at 50% off is $20 — you gross $10 a unit instead of $30. That's a fine trade if the volume is real: one boutique reordering twelve units a month is $240 a month you didn't chase, at a marketing cost of zero.

The rule of thumb: your wholesale price should still be about double your landed cost. If it isn't, wholesale will feel like working twice as hard to earn less — fix the cost or the retail price first, or offer a shallower trade discount (40%, even 30% for very low-volume stockists) and say so plainly. Convention is a starting point, not a law.

The native setup, in the order you'd actually do it

Five steps, all in the admin, no code. (Full click-by-click for the payment-terms part is in the setup guide.)

• 1. Create a catalog — your wholesale price list. Set a percentage off your retail prices or fixed per-product prices, and add volume pricing (price breaks at 12, 48, 144 units) and quantity rules — per-product minimums, maximums, and case-pack increments — if you sell in cases. Standard plans get up to 3 active catalogs; that's enough for a standard-wholesale tier, a high-volume tier, and one special.
• 2. Create the company — Customers → Companies → Add company: the buyer's business name, their location, and the person who orders (their email becomes the login). A company can hold multiple locations and buyers later; start with one of each.
• 3. Attach the catalog and set payment terms on the company — no terms (card at checkout), net 7 through net 90, due on fulfillment, or a fixed date. My advice for brand-new accounts: card at checkout for the first two or three orders, then Net 30 with a modest limit — said up front as policy, it offends nobody. (Whether to offer Net 30 at all is its own decision.)
• 4. Decide if their orders need your review. The company setting "submit all orders as drafts for review" turns checkout into a request you approve — the same lever that later doubles as a credit hold. Turn it on for new accounts; turn it off once trust is earned.
• 5. Send the buyer their login. That's the whole go-live: they sign in to your normal storefront, see their prices and their terms at checkout — and if you gave terms, checkout skips the card and the order carries a due date. Retail customers notice nothing. A separate wholesale store (a second subscription, double maintenance) is only worth it when your B2B range or branding genuinely diverges from retail.

How do buyers actually get wholesale access?

Here's the gap nobody warns you about: there's no native "apply for wholesale" button. Buyers can't request an account — merchants were still asking for this in July 2026 — so every stockist starts with you creating their company by hand. In practice merchants run a contact form or Google Form, check the applicant, then do the two-minute admin setup. At one to three applications a month, that manual loop is a complete system — don't let it stop you launching.

Do make them fill in something before you grant a login, though — at minimum trade references you'll actually phone and the email of the person who pays invoices. Our free one-page credit application covers it. (Full disclosure: the application-to-company gap bothered me enough that I built a second small app, ApprovePilot, for exactly that — but a form and ten minutes a week genuinely is enough at the start.)

Where do the buyers themselves come from? The unglamorous truth for a new wholesale line: shops already stocking products like yours (walk in, post samples), your own retail customers who own shops — they're the warmest list you have — and trade fairs long before cold marketplaces. A marketplace like Faire can add reach later; it also adds commission and owns the relationship. Native wholesale is yours.

The part that actually gets hard: the money

Your first proper stockist will ask for payment terms — "do you offer Net 30?" is practically the wholesale handshake. Terms are normal and worth offering deliberately: written rules, a starting credit limit around twice their expected monthly order, prepay while they're new. What catches merchants isn't the policy, it's the bookkeeping — Shopify marks each order paid or unpaid but has no screen listing who owes you what across orders. At two stockists you'll hold it in your head; at ten you'll want a 15-minute spreadsheet aging report (or TermsPilot's free dashboard, which is that report kept current for you).

When should you skip all this?

If one customer occasionally asks to buy in bulk, you don't need companies, catalogs, or any of the machinery above — send a draft order with a manual discount and move on. Same if your margins can't survive the maths at the top: wholesale amplifies volume, and it amplifies thin margins into losses just as efficiently. Build the setup when a repeat trade buyer shows up — it'll take you under an hour once they do.

Common follow-up questions