Shopify B2B Without Plus: The 2026 Guide for UK Wholesalers
Short answer: As of April 2026, the core of Shopify’s native B2B — company profiles, custom catalogues and payment terms — is available on Basic, Grow and Advanced, not just Plus. For most UK wholesalers turning over under about £2m, that removes the main reason to pay for Plus. Budget £8,000–£25,000 for a working B2B build on a standard plan, depending on how much of your trade pricing lives in a spreadsheet.
This changes the calculation for a lot of British brands who had been quoted Plus purely to get wholesale working.
What moved off Plus
Shopify opened key B2B features to non-Plus plans in April 2026. The features that matter most to a UK wholesaler:
Company profiles. A B2B customer in Shopify is not a person, it is a company with one or more locations, each with its own addresses, payment terms, tax settings and assigned buyers. This is the structural piece that separates real B2B from “a customer with a discount code”, and it is the one that used to require Plus.
Custom catalogues. Different products and different prices for different companies. A distributor sees one price list; a small independent retailer sees another; a company on a legacy agreement keeps their historic pricing. Catalogues also handle currency, so an Irish or EU trade account can be priced separately from a UK one.
Payment terms. Net 30, Net 60, due on fulfilment, due on receipt. Orders can be placed without immediate payment and invoiced against terms — which is how most UK wholesale actually works, and which was previously the single most common reason merchants bolted on a third-party wholesale app.
Alongside this, a few 2026 changes are worth knowing:
- B2B discounts are now on by default for new B2B stores and for existing B2B stores without active discounts (June 2026), so you no longer need to contact Support to enable them.
- All ten Horizon themes support B2B natively — volume pricing, quantity rules and quick order lists, without custom code.
- B2B checkout supports Apple Pay, and there is a Flow action for automatically charging vaulted payment methods triggered by fulfilment, due dates or invoicing.
What still requires Plus
Be clear-eyed about this, because it is where projects go wrong at month four.
- Checkout customisation beyond the standard extensibility surface. If your trade checkout needs to enforce logic that goes past what checkout UI extensions and Functions allow, you are back in Plus territory.
- Multi-entity selling — separate legal entities under one store, which matters for groups running UK and EU companies.
- Higher API and automation limits, which start to bite on large catalogues and frequent ERP syncs.
- Organisation-level features for merchants running multiple stores.
The pragmatic reading: if you are one legal entity, one store, and your trade rules are pricing and terms rather than bespoke checkout behaviour, non-Plus is now genuinely viable.
Where UK wholesale builds actually get complicated
The Shopify feature list is the easy part. Three things reliably consume the budget on a UK B2B project.
1. Pricing that does not fit a catalogue
Shopify catalogues handle “this company gets this price list” cleanly. They handle less cleanly:
- Volume breaks that vary by customer and product group
- Case-quantity ordering where the trade unit differs from the retail unit
- Prices that are calculated from a cost-plus formula in an ERP rather than stored as a list
- Rebates and retrospective discounts
The first two are solvable in Shopify with quantity rules and product structure. The second two usually mean the price of record lives in your ERP and Shopify needs to be fed, which turns a theme project into an integration project.
2. VAT and pricing display
UK trade customers expect to see prices ex-VAT. Retail customers expect inc-VAT. If you are running B2B and DTC from one store, you need this to switch cleanly by customer context, including in the cart, in emails and on invoices. It is entirely achievable, and it is a recurring source of launch-week bugs when nobody specified it upfront.
If you are also selling into the EU post-Brexit, VAT number validation at checkout (available with Shopify Tax in the UK and EU) handles the reverse-charge exemption on eligible orders.
3. The ERP or WMS
Most UK wholesalers of any size have a system of record that is not Shopify — stock lives in a WMS, customer accounts and credit limits live in an ERP, and the accounts team will not accept a second source of truth.
This is the piece to scope honestly. A middleware layer that syncs companies, catalogues, stock and orders between Shopify and something like SAP, Sage, NetSuite or a bespoke WMS is a real project — our ERP integration guide covers how those are costed and where they fail. It is also usually the difference between a B2B store that gets used and one that quietly gets abandoned because the sales team keeps taking orders by email.
What it costs in the UK
Rough guide, assuming UK contractor and small-studio rates of £350–£450 per day:
| Scope | Typical range |
|---|---|
| B2B enabled on an existing store, standard catalogues and terms, Horizon-based theme | £8,000 – £15,000 |
| Above plus a custom trade portal, quick-order, case-quantity logic | £15,000 – £30,000 |
| Above plus ERP/WMS integration with two-way sync | £30,000 – £60,000+ |
The variable that moves this most is not design. It is how many of your trade rules currently live in someone’s head or in a spreadsheet, because those have to be written down and specified before anything can be built.
Is it worth leaving Plus?
If you are already on Plus and paying for it primarily to run B2B, it is worth a review — but do the review properly, and read our Shopify vs Plus comparison for what else the plan buys you. Check whether you are relying on multi-entity, checkout scripts or organisation features, and check your API call volumes against non-Plus limits. Downgrading and discovering a hard dependency six weeks later is more expensive than the difference in subscription cost.
If you are not on Plus and have been quoted an upgrade in order to launch wholesale, get a second opinion. Since April 2026 that quote may be out of date.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do B2B on Shopify without Plus? Yes. Since April 2026, company profiles, custom catalogues and payment terms are available on Basic, Grow and Advanced plans.
What is the difference between B2B customers and regular customers in Shopify? B2B customers are structured as companies with one or more locations, each with their own buyers, addresses, payment terms and tax settings. Regular customers are individuals.
Can I run B2B and DTC from the same Shopify store? Yes, and for most UK brands it is the right choice — one catalogue, one stock pool, one admin. The main design work is making pricing, VAT display and messaging switch correctly by customer context.
How do trade prices work? Through catalogues. Each company is assigned a catalogue that controls which products they see and at what price, including per-currency pricing for export accounts.
Can I offer Net 30 payment terms? Yes. Payment terms are native and available on non-Plus plans, including net terms, due on fulfilment and due on receipt.
Do I need a separate wholesale app? Increasingly, no. Third-party wholesale apps existed mainly to provide company accounts and terms on non-Plus plans. That gap has now largely closed. Apps still make sense for niche requirements such as complex rebate structures.
Will my theme support B2B? All ten Horizon themes support B2B natively, including volume pricing, quantity rules and quick order lists. Older themes may need work.
Can trade customers see prices excluding VAT? Yes, but it needs configuring deliberately, particularly if you also run DTC from the same store. Specify it before the build starts.
Can Shopify B2B connect to my ERP? Yes, via the Admin GraphQL API, usually through a middleware layer that syncs companies, catalogues, inventory and orders. This is the largest single cost item on most B2B projects.
How long does a Shopify B2B build take? A straightforward build on an existing store is typically four to eight weeks. Add eight to sixteen weeks if ERP or WMS integration is in scope.
Last reviewed August 2026. Shopify moves features between plans periodically — confirm plan availability against Shopify’s published feature list before committing.
Been quoted Plus just to get wholesale working? We build Shopify B2B and trade portals for UK wholesalers, including the ERP and WMS integration behind them. Get in touch.