How to Set Up B2B on Shopify Plus

So you’ve decided to add wholesale selling to your Shopify Plus store. Good move. But deciding to do it and actually doing it are two different things. Let’s walk through exactly how to set up B2B on Shopify Plus, step by step, so you’re not left guessing where to click or what order to do things in.

Before You Start: What You Need

First things first, B2B functionality is only available on the Shopify Plus plan. If you’re on a lower tier, you’ll need to upgrade before any of this becomes accessible. It’s also worth knowing that B2B works with your existing store, so you won’t be creating a second website or a separate admin panel. Everything lives inside the store you already have.

Before diving into setup, it helps to have a rough plan in your head. Who are your wholesale buyers going to be? Do you already have a list of businesses you sell to informally through WhatsApp or email? Do different buyers need different pricing? Having these answers ready will make the actual setup process much faster.

Step One: Turn On B2B in Your Settings

Head into your Shopify admin and look for the Settings section. From there, you’ll find B2B under the Customers area. Turning this on activates the company account structure across your store. Once enabled, you’ll start seeing new options throughout your admin that weren’t there before, like the ability to create companies and assign catalogs.

This step is quick, but it’s the foundation everything else builds on, so don’t skip past it thinking there’s more to it. It really is just flipping a switch.

Step Two: Create Your First Company

A company in Shopify B2B represents the business you’re selling to, not an individual customer. So if you’re selling to a retail shop called Karachi Home Essentials, you’d create a company profile with that name.

Inside that company profile, you can add basic details like the business name, and then start adding locations. Locations matter if your buyer has multiple branches or warehouses. Each location can have its own shipping address, and later on, its own specific pricing if needed.

If most of your wholesale buyers are small operations with just one location, you’ll only need to add one location per company, which keeps things simple.

Step Three: Add Contacts to the Company

Once your company profile exists, you’ll add contacts. These are the actual people who will log into the storefront and place orders on behalf of that business. A single company can have multiple contacts, which is useful for businesses where more than one person handles purchasing, like an owner and a store manager.

Each contact gets their own login, but they all order under the same company account, meaning they all see the same pricing and catalog you’ve assigned to that company.

Step Four: Build Your Price Lists

This is where the real value of B2B setup starts to show. Price lists let you define custom pricing for your wholesale buyers, separate from your regular storefront pricing.

You have a couple of options here. You can apply a straightforward percentage discount across an entire catalog, which works well if you’re offering a blanket wholesale discount like 15 or 20 percent off retail pricing. Or you can go more granular and set fixed prices for individual products, which is better if certain items have very specific wholesale arrangements that don’t follow a flat percentage.

If you’re serving different tiers of wholesale buyers, like small boutique shops versus larger regional distributors, you can create multiple price lists and assign different ones to different companies. This lets you reward your biggest buyers with better pricing without giving that same discount to smaller occasional buyers.

Step Five: Set Up Catalogs

Catalogs control what products a company can actually see and purchase. Instead of showing your entire product range to every wholesale buyer, you can build catalogs around what makes sense for each type of business.

For example, if you sell both finished apparel and raw fabric, you might create one catalog for boutique clients who only buy finished pieces, and another catalog for manufacturers who only want raw materials. Once your catalogs are built, you attach a price list to each one and then assign the whole package to the relevant company.

This step takes a bit of planning upfront, but it pays off because your buyers only see relevant products instead of scrolling through your entire store trying to figure out what applies to them.

Step Six: Configure Quantity Rules

Wholesale selling usually comes with different quantity expectations than retail. You probably don’t want someone ordering a single unit through your B2B channel when you’re set up to sell in bulk.

Inside your product or catalog settings, you can set minimum order quantities, maximum limits, and order increments. For instance, you might require a minimum of 12 units per order, with purchases only allowed in increments of 12, so buyers can order 12, 24, or 36, but not 15 or 20.

This keeps your fulfillment process predictable and makes sure your margins hold up on every wholesale order that comes through.

Step Seven: Set Payment Terms

One of the biggest differences between B2C and B2B selling is how payment works. Most wholesale buyers don’t want to pay upfront by card the way a regular customer would. They often expect payment terms like net 30 or net 60, meaning they receive the goods first and pay within an agreed window afterward.

Shopify Plus lets you configure these payment terms at the company level. You can decide which companies get standard immediate payment and which ones qualify for extended terms based on your relationship and trust level with that buyer.

This is particularly relevant if you’re dealing with established wholesale relationships where trust has already been built over time, which is common in many local business relationships here in Pakistan. You’re essentially digitizing an arrangement that already existed informally.

Step Eight: Customize the B2B Checkout Experience

Once pricing, catalogs, and payment terms are in place, it’s worth spending time on the checkout experience itself. You can hide payment methods that don’t apply to B2B buyers, add fields for purchase order numbers if your buyers need that for their own internal record keeping, and adjust messaging so the checkout feels built for business purchasing rather than a typical consumer flow.

Small details like this make a big difference in how professional your wholesale channel feels to buyers who are used to more traditional B2B software.

Step Nine: Test Everything Before Going Live

Before rolling this out to real wholesale clients, create a test company account for yourself and walk through the entire experience. Log in as that test buyer, check that you’re seeing the correct catalog, confirm the pricing matches what you set up, and place a test order to make sure quantity rules and payment terms behave as expected.

It’s much easier to catch a pricing mistake or catalog mix up during testing than after a real client has already placed an order at the wrong price.

Step Ten: Onboard Your Wholesale Clients

Once everything is tested and working, it’s time to actually bring your wholesale buyers onto the new system. This step is more about communication than technical setup. Many of your existing wholesale clients are probably used to ordering through WhatsApp or phone calls, so you’ll want to walk them through their new login, show them where their pricing appears, and explain how to place an order.

Don’t assume they’ll figure it out on their own just because the system is self-service. A short video walkthrough or even a phone call explaining the new process goes a long way in getting buyers to actually adopt it instead of falling back on old habits.

Common Setup Mistakes to Avoid

Skipping the catalog planning stage. If you rush into assigning products without thinking about what each buyer actually needs, you end up with cluttered catalogs that confuse buyers and slow down their ordering process.

Setting one price list for everyone. Not all wholesale buyers deserve the same discount. Bigger, more consistent buyers should generally get better terms than someone placing a small one off order.

Forgetting to test payment terms. It’s easy to set up net 30 terms and forget to actually verify how invoicing and payment collection will work afterward. Make sure your internal process for following up on unpaid invoices is just as solid as your Shopify setup.

Not training your team. If you have staff handling order fulfillment, make sure they understand that B2B orders might have different shipping addresses, quantities, and payment arrangements compared to regular retail orders.

Setting Up B2B With Pakistani Wholesale Buyers in Mind

If most of your wholesale clients are based here in Pakistan, a few extra considerations are worth keeping in mind during setup.

Pricing in PKR works without any issues inside your price lists, so there’s no need to worry about currency complications for local B2B buyers.

For shipping, if you’re already working with local courier services for retail orders, you can extend those same integrations to your wholesale orders, or set up separate shipping rules entirely since bulk wholesale shipments often need different handling than individual retail packages.

For payment terms, many local wholesale relationships already run on informal trust based credit arrangements, so offering net terms through Shopify Plus is less of a leap and more of a natural digital upgrade to how business is already being done.

What Happens After Setup

Once your B2B channel is live, your work isn’t quite finished. You’ll want to keep an eye on how your wholesale buyers are actually using the system. Are they placing orders through the self-service portal, or are some of them still reaching out directly? Are your quantity rules working the way you expected, or are buyers finding them too restrictive or too loose?

Treat your first few weeks of B2B activity as a soft launch. Small adjustments to catalogs, pricing, or minimum quantities are completely normal as you learn how your specific buyers actually behave once given a self-service option.

Final Thoughts

Setting up B2B on Shopify Plus isn’t complicated once you understand the building blocks: companies, contacts, price lists, catalogs, quantity rules, and payment terms. Each piece plays a specific role, and once they’re all connected properly, you end up with a wholesale channel that runs smoothly alongside your regular storefront without requiring a separate platform or a mountain of manual work.

If you want help planning out your company structure, building your catalogs, or setting up pricing tiers that actually make sense for your wholesale buyers, that’s exactly the kind of setup TheScriptFlow can help you put together from start to finish.