Shopify B2B ecommerce for Canadian brands

Executive summary: Shopify B2B lets a brand sell to wholesale buyers, distributors and trade accounts from the same Shopify platform it uses for retail, with company accounts, buyer-specific price lists, quantity rules and net payment terms built in. For most Canadian brands already on Shopify, or moving from an ageing wholesale portal, it is the fastest way to give business buyers a self-serve ordering experience, provided the plan, ERP connection and catalogue structure are decided before the build starts. This guide explains what Shopify B2B does, how it differs between plans, what it costs to run, how implementation works and how to decide whether it fits your business. Canada Create™ has built and marketed online stores for businesses across Canada and the United States since 2008, and this page reflects how we scope Shopify B2B work for our clients.

What Shopify B2B is and who it is for

Shopify B2B is the set of native wholesale features inside Shopify that let you sell to businesses rather than individual shoppers. Instead of bolting a password-protected page onto a retail store, the platform models the way trade buying actually works: a buyer belongs to a company, that company can have several locations, each location can see its own catalogue and prices, and orders can be placed on account and paid later.

Can Shopify be used for B2B? Yes. Shopify supports business buyers natively, and the most complete feature set sits on Shopify Plus. Brands on other plans can also sell wholesale, with a narrower set of tools or with apps filling the gaps.

The people who get the most from a Shopify B2B store usually fall into three groups:

• Direct-to-consumer brands adding wholesale. You already sell on Shopify and your retail partners are still ordering by email, spreadsheet or phone.
• Manufacturers and distributors replacing a legacy portal. Your current B2B ecommerce solution is expensive to maintain, hard to update and disliked by buyers.
• Wholesalers going online for the first time. Your sales reps take orders by hand and you want buyers to reorder on their own at any hour.

In each case the goal is the same: move repeat orders from inboxes into a self-serve Shopify B2B portal, so your team spends its time on new accounts and larger deals rather than retyping purchase orders.

How Shopify B2B evolved into a native wholesale platform

Shopify began in Ottawa as a platform for small online retailers, and for most of its history wholesale selling was handled with workarounds. Merchants tagged customers, hid prices behind logins, used discount codes as price lists or installed apps that duplicated products for trade buyers.

From the wholesale channel to native B2B

Shopify Plus introduced a separate wholesale channel so Plus merchants could run a password-protected trade storefront. That approach worked for simple price lists but kept wholesale apart from the main store, its themes and its checkout.

Shopify then rebuilt wholesale as native B2B, with companies, locations, catalogues and payment terms living in the core admin rather than in a side channel. The older wholesale channel was retired in favour of this model, and new wholesale work on Shopify is now built on native B2B.

Why the history matters when you plan

Many online guides, Reddit threads and apps still describe the older approach. If your store was set up years ago with tags, hidden collections or a duplicated wholesale catalogue, part of any new project is untangling those workarounds so they do not conflict with native B2B pricing and checkout. Shopify also adds and extends B2B features regularly, so we confirm current plan availability at the start of every project instead of relying on older articles.

Canadian tax, currency and language considerations

Canadian wholesale has requirements that generic Shopify B2B guides written for the United States or United Kingdom rarely cover.

Sales tax exemptions for resellers

Business buyers who resell your products often do not pay provincial sales tax on those purchases, while GST or HST treatment depends on the transaction. Shopify B2B lets you set tax settings at the company location level, which means an exempt reseller in one province and a taxable end user in another can buy from the same store. Your accountant should confirm which exemptions apply; our job is to configure the store so the rules they set are applied consistently and the exemption details are recorded on each account.

Canadian and US dollar pricing

Many Canadian brands sell to trade buyers on both sides of the border. With Shopify Markets and B2B catalogues you can hold separate price lists in Canadian and US dollars rather than relying on automatic currency conversion, which matters when wholesale margins are thin and prices are negotiated.

French-language buyers

If you sell to businesses in Quebec, your storefront, product information and transactional emails may need to be available in French under Quebec’s language rules. Shopify supports multiple languages, and we plan translation of B2B pages, account screens and notifications as part of the build. For legal interpretation of the rules, speak with your own counsel.

Shipping and freight

Wholesale orders are often palletized or shipped by LTL freight, not small parcel. The store needs shipping rules that reflect this, such as freight quotes, minimum order values for free shipping, or pickup from a warehouse, rather than consumer parcel rates.

Shopify B2B vs Shopify Plus B2B

The main difference is depth. Shopify Plus carries the full native B2B feature set, while other plans offer a more limited set of wholesale tools and rely more on apps. The right choice depends on the number of buyers, how complex your pricing is and how much of the process you want automated.

Because Shopify changes plan inclusions over time, we treat this as a starting point and confirm the exact feature list for your plan during discovery. If you have a handful of trade accounts on one price list, a standard plan with a well-chosen app can be enough. If you have tiered pricing, many buyer locations, net terms and an ERP, Shopify Plus is usually the realistic choice.

Blended store or separate wholesale store

One of the first architecture decisions in any Shopify B2B project is whether retail and wholesale buyers share one storefront.

Blended store

A blended store runs B2B and B2C on the same domain. Retail shoppers see retail prices; logged-in business buyers see their company catalogue, quantity rules and payment terms. This keeps one set of products, one theme and one set of content to maintain, which is why it is the default choice for many direct-to-consumer brands adding wholesale.

Separate wholesale store

A separate store, often an expansion store on Shopify Plus, gives wholesale its own domain, theme and navigation. It suits businesses whose wholesale catalogue differs greatly from retail, who sell under a different trade brand, or who want buyers to see a stripped-back ordering interface built for speed.

How we decide

We compare four things: catalogue overlap, how different the buyer journey is, who maintains content, and how inventory is shared. If more than a few products are wholesale only, or the trade buyer never needs lifestyle content, a separate store tends to be cleaner. Otherwise blended usually wins on maintenance.

Shopify B2B features explained

These are the Shopify B2B features we configure most often, and how each one maps to a real wholesale process.

Companies, locations and buyers

A company in Shopify represents the business you sell to. Each company can have several locations, each with its own shipping address, billing address, tax settings and catalogue, and each location can have several buyers with their own logins and permissions. This mirrors how a retail chain or a group of clinics actually buys: head office sets the terms, individual stores place orders.

Catalogues and price lists

A catalogue controls which products a company location can see and what it pays. Prices can be set as a percentage adjustment from retail or as fixed prices for specific products. Tiered wholesale pricing, distributor pricing and contract pricing are all built this way, without duplicating products.

Quantity rules and volume pricing

Quantity rules set minimums, maximums and order increments per product, so a buyer can only order a case of twelve in multiples of twelve. Volume pricing sets lower unit prices at higher quantities. Both are shown on the product page so buyers know the rules before they reach the cart.

Payment terms and checkout

Shopify B2B supports payment terms such as net 30, a fixed due date or payment on fulfillment, alongside credit card payments. Buyers can store cards on file for their company. You can also require orders to be submitted for review as draft orders, so your team can confirm freight or stock before the order is finalized.

Self-serve customer accounts

Buyers log in to see order history, reorder past orders, manage addresses for their locations and pay outstanding invoices. The reorder button is the single feature buyers use most, and it is where most time savings for your inside sales team come from.

Sales rep ordering

Your reps can create orders on behalf of a company from the Shopify admin or point-of-sale, applying that company’s catalogue and terms automatically. This keeps trade show orders and phone orders in the same system as online orders.

ERP, PIM and CRM integration

A Shopify B2B portal is only as reliable as the data flowing into it. For most wholesale businesses, the ERP remains the source of truth for customers, pricing, inventory and invoices.

What usually syncs

• Customers and companies from the ERP into Shopify, including terms and tax status.
• Price lists and contract pricing from the ERP into Shopify catalogues.
• Inventory levels by warehouse into Shopify locations.
• Orders from Shopify back into the ERP for fulfillment and invoicing.
• Invoice and payment status back into the buyer account, where supported.

Common systems and approaches

We regularly scope connections to systems such as NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Acumatica, SAP Business One and Sage. Depending on the system, the connection is made with an existing connector app, an integration platform or a custom app built on Shopify’s APIs. The cheapest connector is not always the cheapest option once you account for the data it cannot map, so we test sample customers, prices and orders before committing.

Product information

Wholesale buyers need specifications, case packs, barcodes, safety data and downloadable spec sheets. If this lives in a PIM or spreadsheet today, we map it into Shopify metafields so it appears on product pages without manual copying.

CRM and lead capture

New wholesale applications should not disappear into an inbox. We set up a trade application form that captures business details and routes each application for approval, then creates the company in Shopify once approved.

Shopify B2B implementation protocol

A well-run Shopify B2B implementation follows the same order every time. Skipping ahead to theme design before pricing and data are settled is the most common reason projects run long.

1. Discovery and requirements

Discovery documents how buyers order today. We review your price structures, payment terms, tax cases, freight rules, ERP data and the buyer types you serve, then confirm the Shopify plan and store architecture.

2. Data model and catalogue design

The data model decides how companies, locations and catalogues are structured. We decide how many catalogues you need, how prices are calculated and which products each buyer group sees, and we clean product data before it moves.

3. Integration build

Integration is built and tested against real records, not sample data. Customers, prices and inventory are synced into a development store first so errors are caught before buyers see them.

4. Storefront and buyer experience

The storefront for business buyers favours speed over browsing. We design quick order lists, bulk add to cart, clear quantity rules, visible stock, account dashboards and reorder flows, built on an Online Store 2.0 theme with performance in mind.

5. Testing with real buyers

User testing with a few friendly accounts finds problems no internal test will. We walk selected buyers through ordering, checkout and account screens, then fix what confuses them.

6. Launch and buyer onboarding

Launch includes inviting buyers, sending clear login instructions, training your team and monitoring the first weeks of orders closely. Buyer onboarding is part of the project, not an afterthought, because a portal nobody logs into saves nobody time.

Migrating a wholesale portal to Shopify

Many businesses come to Shopify B2B from Magento (Adobe Commerce), WooCommerce with wholesale plugins, BigCommerce, or a custom portal built years ago. Migration has its own risks.

What must move

Customer accounts, company structures, price agreements, product data, order history where needed and URLs all need a plan. Buyers expect their negotiated prices to be exactly right on day one, so price mapping gets more testing than anything else.

Protecting search visibility

If your existing store ranks for product or category searches, every old URL needs a redirect to its new equivalent. We map redirects before launch and monitor search performance afterwards as part of our SEO services.

Running both systems briefly

For large buyer bases we often recommend a short overlap period, where the old portal stays read-only while buyers move to the new Shopify B2B store. This avoids a hard cut-over during a busy ordering season.

Shopify B2B pricing and total cost of ownership

What does Shopify B2B cost? The total is made up of four separate parts: the Shopify subscription, payment processing, apps and integrations, and the one-time build. Shopify publishes its plan pricing, including a starting price for Shopify Plus that depends on term length and sales volume, so check Shopify’s current pricing page for the subscription figure.

How much does Shopify take from a $100 sale?

Shopify’s share of a sale depends on your plan, your payment method and where the card was issued. With Shopify Payments you pay a card processing rate plus a small per-transaction amount; with a third-party gateway, most plans also add a separate Shopify transaction fee. Orders paid on net terms by cheque or bank transfer do not carry card fees. For wholesale, where order values are large, the payment mix matters more than the headline rate, so we model it with your real order data.

What drives build cost

Canada Create™ quotes every Shopify B2B project individually. The largest cost drivers are the number of catalogues and pricing rules, the ERP integration and the amount of product data cleanup. A blended store with a handful of price lists and no ERP is a very different project from a multi-brand Plus build with real-time inventory from several warehouses. We separate setup, monthly management and any third-party or ad spend in every proposal so you can see exactly where the money goes.

Measuring return on a B2B store

A Shopify B2B store earns its keep through time saved and orders gained. We agree measures before launch so the result can be judged honestly.

Operational measures

• Share of wholesale orders placed online rather than by email, phone or rep.
• Order entry time saved by your inside sales and customer service team.
• Order error rate, including wrong prices, wrong quantities and wrong addresses.
• Days to payment on invoices once buyers can pay online.

Commercial measures

• Reorder frequency per active account.
• Average order value, especially where volume pricing encourages larger orders.
• New trade applications from search and ads.
• Active buyer rate, meaning invited buyers who actually order online.

We set up reporting in Shopify and Google Analytics so these numbers are visible each month. We do not promise specific results, because they depend on your buyers, your products and how actively your team moves accounts online.

Where Shopify B2B fits best

Shopify B2B suits any business that sells repeat orders of physical products to other businesses. The configuration changes by buyer type.

Consumer brands selling to retailers

Brands in apparel, beauty, food and beverage, and home goods use Shopify B2B to let independent shops and boutiques reorder from a line sheet style storefront with case pack minimums and seasonal catalogues.

Distributors and wholesalers

Distributors with thousands of SKUs need fast search, quick order forms, account-specific pricing and visible stock by warehouse. The priority is ordering speed for buyers who know exactly what they want.

Manufacturers selling to dealers

Manufacturers use dealer catalogues, restricted products by territory and technical documentation on product pages, often with orders submitted for review so the team can confirm lead times.

Suppliers to clinics, offices and trades

Suppliers of consumables to clinics, restaurants, contractors and offices use company locations so each site orders its own supplies while head office controls pricing and approves spend.

Getting buyers to the B2B store

A new wholesale portal serves existing accounts first, but it can also win new ones. Trade buyers search for suppliers the same way consumers search for products.

Search visibility for trade terms

Wholesale and bulk search terms often have less competition than retail terms. Category pages written for trade buyers, a clear wholesale application page and product pages with specifications help you appear when buyers look for suppliers. Our SEO and local SEO teams handle this alongside the build.

Paid search for new accounts

Google Ads campaigns aimed at wholesale queries can send qualified businesses to your trade application page. We measure these by approved applications and first orders, not clicks.

Keeping content and retail sites aligned

If your main brand site runs on WordPress, we can connect it to your Shopify store through our WordPress development team, or keep content and commerce together on Shopify. Our web design team handles the look of both.

Is Shopify B2B worth it?

Shopify B2B is worth it when repeat wholesale orders take up real staff time and your buyers would happily order online if the experience were simple. It is less suited to businesses where every order is a custom quote, configure-to-order products need engineering review, or pricing changes with every deal.

Signs it fits

• Most wholesale orders are reorders of known products.
• Pricing follows rules or contracts that can be written down.
• You already use Shopify for retail, or your current platform is costly to maintain.
• Your ERP can share customer, price and inventory data.

Signs to pause

• Pricing is negotiated order by order with no pattern.
• Product data is incomplete or scattered across files.
• No one on your team will own buyer onboarding.

Is Shopify still worth it in 2026?

For most small and mid-sized brands, Shopify remains a strong choice because of its hosting, security updates, checkout and app ecosystem, and because its B2B features keep expanding. The platform suits businesses that want to spend their effort on selling rather than maintaining servers. Very complex quoting or manufacturing workflows can still point to other platforms, and we will tell you if that is your situation. If you are comparing options such as Wix B2B ecommerce, WooCommerce or a custom build, our ecommerce website team can set out the trade-offs for your catalogue.

Your next step with Canada Create™

Canada Create™ has built websites and online stores for businesses across Canada and the United States for more than 18 years. We are a BBB Accredited Business with an A+ rating, Our sales and support line is open 24/7*.

A Shopify B2B project with us starts with a short conversation about how your buyers order today, which systems you use and what you want the store to change. From there we send a written proposal that separates the build, monthly management and any third-party or advertising costs. Request a proposal below and you will have it within one business day.