For years, adding a wholesale channel meant one of two things: a clunky spreadsheet sent by email, or a second Shopify store with its own subscription, inventory sync, and operational headache. Most DTC brands looked at that and decided the juice was not worth the squeeze. That calculation has changed.
In April 2026, Shopify extended its native B2B features to every merchant on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, at no extra cost. Company profiles, custom pricing catalogs, volume discounts, and Net 30 payment terms, all from inside your existing admin. No second store. No third-party wholesale app. One back end, two revenue channels.
Why Wholesale Makes Financial Sense Right Now
DTC brands are facing a structural problem. CAC is up 40 to 60% since 2023. CPMs on Meta keep climbing. Every brand in your category is chasing the same customer on the same platforms at the same time. Adding a wholesale channel does not just give you a new revenue stream. It shifts the economics of how you grow.
Here is the number most people do not think about. Wholesale contribution margin on a well-run CPG brand typically lands between 25 and 37%. DTC contribution margin after you subtract ad spend, shipping, and fulfilment typically lands between 20 and 30%. That means, for many brands, a wholesale order is actually more profitable per unit than a paid DTC order.
You are selling at a lower price per unit. But you have zero acquisition cost, higher order values, and, with Shopify's reorder tools, the data shows B2B buyers reorder 4.1x more frequently than single-channel DTC customers. The economics work. Especially for consumable products.
A wholesale order has no ad spend attached to it. When you are paying 60 to 80 GBP to acquire a DTC customer and your contribution margin is 22%, the maths are brutal. A gym buying 200 units per month at your trade price, with no CAC, often performs better on a per-order basis than your best Meta campaign.
What Shopify B2B Actually Gives You in 2026
These are the five features that matter for DTC brands adding a wholesale channel. Shopify Plus unlocks more, but you can build a functional wholesale operation on any plan from Basic upward.
Company Profiles
Every wholesale buyer gets a company profile in your admin. You can assign multiple contacts to the same company (a buyer, a finance contact, a store manager), set spend limits per contact, and see all orders under a single account. This replaces the spreadsheet entirely. Shopify's AI assistant Sidekick can parse an email or a business card photo and auto-generate the company profile, which removes the manual data entry that made wholesale feel like a part-time admin job.
From the buyer's side, they log in to a dedicated B2B portal on your store. They see their own pricing, their past orders, and their outstanding invoices. No more PDFs sent by email.
Custom Catalogs with Tiered Pricing
On Basic through Advanced plans, you can create up to three custom catalogs. Each catalog can show a different product selection and a different price list. A gym buyer might see your 12-unit minimum packs at a 40% trade discount. A spa buyer might see a curated selection of your premium SKUs at 35% off. A distributor might see a fully custom price list that never appears anywhere else in your store.
Retail customers browsing your DTC store never see wholesale prices. The catalog logic is locked behind the B2B login, so there is no risk of a retail customer seeing trade pricing and demanding a match.
Volume Discounts and Quantity Rules
Set minimum order quantities per SKU, tiered volume discounts that activate at specific thresholds, and case pack requirements. This protects your fulfilment economics by ensuring wholesale orders are worth processing. A supplement brand that sets a 6-unit MOQ and a 5% discount at 12 units automatically trains buyers to order in the quantities that work for the brand, not just for the buyer.
Payment Terms
Net 15, Net 30, or custom windows. Instead of requiring immediate card payment, wholesale buyers get an invoice they pay within an agreed timeframe. The Winter 2026 update also introduced store credit for companies, so you can issue credit to a specific account rather than an individual email address.
This matters because most wholesale buyers will not engage if they have to pay at checkout like a retail customer. Net 30 is the standard in trade. Without it, you are not competing seriously for wholesale accounts.
Vaulted Cards and Self-Serve Reorders
B2B buyers can vault a payment method to their account and reorder without re-entering card details. Combined with Shopify's order drafts feature (where you send a pre-populated order to a buyer for one-click approval), reordering becomes frictionless. This is where the 33% increase in self-serve orders comes from. You are removing the friction that would otherwise require a sales rep call to complete.
How to Set Up Shopify B2B in Two Weeks
The configuration itself is not complex. Most brands overthink it and stall. Here is what a focused two-week rollout looks like.
Define your wholesale offer before touching the admin
Decide on your price tiers, minimum order quantities, and which products you are making available to wholesale buyers before you open Shopify. Most brands make the mistake of figuring this out inside the setup wizard and end up with a half-built configuration. Know your trade pricing structure (typically 40 to 50% of RRP for small wholesale, 25 to 35% for distributors), your MOQs per SKU, and which products you want to hold back from wholesale entirely.
Create your first company profile and catalog with a real account
Start with one wholesale buyer, a retailer or stockist you already have a relationship with. Use that to build and test your first catalog, set up their company profile, send them a login, and walk through the buyer experience with someone real. Do not try to onboard 20 accounts before you have tested the flow end to end with one.
Set up payment terms and test checkout fully
Enable Net 30 for your test account and run a test order through the B2B checkout. Confirm invoices generate correctly, payment terms show up as expected, and order confirmations go to the right contacts. Check that the order appears correctly in your admin and does not interfere with your standard DTC fulfilment workflow.
Build a dedicated B2B onboarding flow in Klaviyo
Create a separate email flow for new wholesale accounts. It should be three to four emails: a welcome email with their login and catalog link, a product guide written for wholesale buyers (different from your consumer-facing content), a reorder reminder at day 45 based on typical stock cycle, and a quarterly account review prompt. Tag B2B contacts separately in Klaviyo from the moment you set up your first wholesale account.
The Mistakes Brands Make When They Add Wholesale
Running one P&L for both channels
DTC and wholesale have fundamentally different cost structures. DTC has high acquisition cost and variable shipping per order. Wholesale has none of that but needs account management time and has longer cash conversion cycles due to payment terms. If you mix them into one budget with one set of KPIs, you will convince yourself one channel is underperforming when both might actually be healthy.
Setting wholesale prices that leave no room for distribution
If a distributor wants your product, they will need to make 30 to 50% on top of your trade price to resell to retailers. If your trade price is already so tight that there is no room, you have locked yourself out of the distribution model. Build in a distributor tier from day one, even if you are not using one yet.
Sending B2B buyers the same Klaviyo flows as DTC customers
A gym buyer who reorders 200 units per month does not need your abandoned cart sequence. They do not need your win-back flow. They need a reorder reminder, a new product announcement, and an account review email twice a year. Segment your B2B contacts out of your DTC flows in Klaviyo using company tags the moment you set up your first wholesale account.
Treating the B2B channel as passive once it is live
Wholesale scales because you work the accounts. Quarterly check-ins, new product introductions, volume incentive offers at the end of each quarter, and a system for identifying accounts that have not reordered in 60 days before they quietly churn. The 4.1x reorder frequency stat assumes you are running the channel properly. Set up the automation in Klaviyo and build the review cadence into your calendar.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A wellness supplement brand I work with built their business almost entirely on Meta ads, spending around 40k GBP per month to generate 140k in revenue. Contribution margin was 23%. Good business on paper, thin in practice, and completely dependent on one channel.
We set up Shopify B2B, identified 30 gyms and health food stores they already had informal relationships with, and onboarded them as wholesale accounts over eight weeks. Net 30 terms, two pricing tiers, and a Klaviyo reorder flow built specifically for the B2B segment.
Six months in, wholesale accounted for 28% of total revenue. Contribution margin on those wholesale orders was 31%. They cut Meta spend on their lowest-performing acquisition campaigns by 15% and replaced that revenue with B2B orders that cost nothing to acquire beyond the initial account setup time.
The DTC channel did not shrink. The wholesale channel added margin they had not had before. And the B2B data, specifically which products gyms ordered most, gave them a clear signal for their next product launch. One channel built the other.
The brands that win the next few years will not be the ones who spent the most on Meta. They will be the ones who built multiple channels, each with its own economics, and owned the customer relationship in every format that relationship could take.
Inside the system
How we build this for brands
Opening a wholesale channel usually stalls on outreach. For brands we run agents trained on the brand's story and category data that find the right retail buyers and initiate the first contact, with a second layer that personalises every follow-up so it never reads like a blast.
The pipeline is tracked automatically, and where it fits we invite buyers to small in-person moments, tastings and experiences, that close relationships faster than email ever will. The B2B setup, pricing, and flows behind it are built and deployed by the same system. Part of this runs live for portfolio brands today; the full build is what we deploy when we take a brand on.
Growth Audit
Find Out If B2B Is the Right Next Channel for Your Brand
I will look at your product economics, your existing customer relationships, and your Shopify setup, and tell you whether a wholesale channel makes sense right now and what it would take to build one. No pitch deck. No theory. Just the numbers and what to do about them.
Book Your AuditFrequently asked questions
What is Shopify B2B and who can use it in 2026?
Shopify B2B is a native set of wholesale features built into the Shopify admin. As of April 2026, Shopify extended these features to all merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans at no extra cost. Features include company profiles, up to three custom catalogs with tailored pricing, volume discounts, payment terms, and vaulted credit cards. Shopify Plus unlocks unlimited catalogs and advanced customisation.
What is the difference between Shopify B2B and a separate wholesale store?
A separate wholesale store requires a second Shopify subscription, duplicate inventory management, and separate email flows. Shopify B2B runs from within your existing store. Wholesale buyers get a separate login with their own pricing and payment terms, but you manage everything from one admin. No second subscription, no sync issues, no doubled operational overhead.
Do wholesale margins make sense for DTC CPG brands?
Wholesale contribution margin for CPG brands typically lands at 25-37%, which often beats DTC contribution margin of 20-30% once you factor in ad spend, shipping, and fulfilment. Wholesale has zero acquisition cost. The economics are strongest for consumable products with reorder potential, where a single account relationship generates recurring revenue without any paid media.
How long does it take to set up Shopify B2B?
A standard configuration including up to three custom catalogs and payment terms typically takes two to four weeks. The core setup can be done in under a week. The additional time is for building out your catalog structure, testing the buyer experience, and setting up your B2B onboarding flow in Klaviyo before you start onboarding wholesale accounts at scale.
What types of DTC brands benefit most from adding Shopify B2B?
Shopify B2B makes the most commercial sense for brands with consumable or replenishable products (supplements, skincare, food and drink, cleaning products), brands selling into hospitality, gyms, spas, or independent retail, and brands looking to reduce their dependence on paid media. If your product is replenishable and you already have buyers who place informal orders by email or phone, B2B is worth formalising.
About the author
Caner Veli built Liquiproof from zero to 3,000+ global retailers in under 6 years. He now helps DTC and CPG brands fix broken growth engines and scale 2x-15x in 90 days.