Shopify B2B Without Shopify Plus: What You Can and Can't Do in 2026

Published 2026-09-11 · by the QuoteFox team

Shopify's native B2B features have become genuinely powerful — but most of them sit behind the Shopify Plus paywall. If you're running a wholesale or B2B operation on a standard Shopify plan, you need a clear-eyed view of what you can actually build, where the platform stops short, and how to fill those gaps without paying Plus-level fees. This guide gives you exactly that.

Shopify B2B Without Shopify Plus: Understanding the Landscape in 2026

Shopify's native "B2B on Shopify" suite — company profiles, customer-specific price lists, payment terms, and purchase orders — is exclusively available on Shopify Plus. That's the blunt reality. But "Plus only" doesn't mean "impossible on standard plans." It means you're building your B2B stack differently, using a combination of Shopify's core features and third-party apps.

The good news: the app ecosystem has matured significantly. Merchants on Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plans can replicate a surprisingly large portion of the B2B experience. The gaps that remain are real, but they're knowable — and you can plan around them.

What You Can Do on Standard Shopify Plans

Customer Segmentation and Wholesale Pricing

Shopify's core customer account system lets you tag customers manually or automatically. You can then use those tags to:

• Show or hide specific products or collections
• Apply automatic discounts at checkout using Shopify's discount engine
• Gate wholesale sections behind a login using theme customisation or apps

Percentage-off discounts work reasonably well for simple tiered pricing (e.g. "wholesale customers get 30% off everything"). Where it gets messy is customer-specific or product-specific pricing, which requires either manual discount codes or an app.

Manual Draft Orders

Draft orders are available on all Shopify plans and are genuinely useful for B2B. You can create an order manually, adjust line-item prices, add custom line items, set a payment due date, and send the invoice directly to the customer. For lower-volume wholesale businesses — say, under 50 orders a month — this workflow is completely viable.

Payment Terms on Draft Orders

Standard Shopify plans do support basic payment terms on draft orders (Net 15, Net 30, Net 60, etc.). This is often overlooked. You can issue an invoice, set a due date, and mark it paid when payment arrives. It's manual, but it works.

Custom Storefronts and Headless

If you have development resources, the Storefront API is available on all plans. You can build a completely custom B2B buying experience and handle pricing logic in your own code. This is powerful but expensive in development time — realistically an option for merchants with in-house developers or significant agency budgets.

What You Can't Do Without Shopify Plus

Native Company Profiles

The company profile system — where a single buyer account can represent an entire company with multiple locations, contacts, and permissions — is Plus-only. On standard plans, each buyer is an individual customer record. If your B2B buyers need multiple contacts per account, you'll need an app or a workaround.

Customer-Specific Price Lists

Shopify Plus's price lists let you set exact prices (not just percentages) per customer or company. This is the feature wholesale merchants miss most. On standard plans, you're limited to percentage discounts or fixed-amount discounts applied broadly. Precise per-SKU pricing per customer requires a third-party pricing app.

Checkout Customisation

Checkout extensibility — custom fields, custom logic, payment method filtering — is largely Plus-only. If you need to collect a PO number at checkout, show payment terms during the checkout flow, or restrict payment methods by customer type, you'll hit walls on standard plans.

B2B APIs

The dedicated B2B APIs (for companies, locations, catalogs, and payment terms) are Plus-only. Third-party apps that want to interact with those objects can only do so if the merchant is on Plus. Apps serving non-Plus merchants work around this using customer tags, metafields, and draft orders.

Feature Comparison: Standard Plans vs. Shopify Plus

Where Apps Fill the Gap

The honest reality for non-Plus merchants is that a two or three-app stack can cover most practical B2B needs. Here's how merchants typically approach it:

• Wholesale pricing: Apps like Wholesale Pricing Discount or Simplee Wholesale handle tiered, customer-specific, or volume-based pricing using customer tags and metafields — no Plus required.
• Quote requests and negotiation: This is one of the most common B2B requirements that has no native Shopify equivalent at any plan level. Apps handle the full quote-to-order workflow. For example, QuoteFox lets merchants accept quote requests from buyers, negotiate prices, and convert accepted quotes directly into draft orders with net payment terms — all without leaving the Shopify admin. It's designed specifically for B2B and wholesale stores on any plan.
• Wholesale registration and gating: Apps like Wholesale Club or Locksmith handle login-gated wholesale stores and customer approval flows.
• Net terms and invoicing: Some merchants use apps like Invoicify or Charge Me Later for more structured net terms invoicing beyond Shopify's built-in draft order payment terms.

The trade-off is coordination overhead. A three-app stack means three sets of settings, three potential conflict points, and three subscriptions. It works, but it's not as seamless as a purpose-built native system.

When Does Plus Actually Make Sense?

Shopify Plus starts at around $2,300/month (as of 2026, on the revenue-based tier structure). That's meaningful money. It typically makes sense when:

• You have a high volume of B2B customers who each need individual pricing — managing this via apps becomes operationally painful above a certain scale
• You need multiple contacts per company account to be a first-class feature, not a workaround
• Checkout customisation is a hard requirement (e.g. mandatory PO number field, payment method logic)
• Your B2B revenue justifies the platform cost — in many cases, merchants crossing $1–2M in annual B2B revenue find the operational efficiency of Plus worth the price

If you're below that threshold, a well-chosen app stack on a standard plan is almost certainly the right call.

Practical Recommendations by Business Size

Early-stage wholesale (fewer than 20 B2B customers)

Use manual draft orders, customer tags for discount automation, and a simple quote request app. Keep overhead low. You don't need Plus.

Growing wholesale (20–200 B2B customers)

This is where a structured app stack earns its keep. Add a wholesale pricing app for tiered pricing, a quote management tool for negotiation workflows, and a registration/gating app if you have a mixed B2C/B2B store. Still no need for Plus in most cases.

Established B2B (200+ customers, complex pricing)

Start evaluating Plus seriously. The operational cost of maintaining complex pricing across multiple apps, combined with the limitations around company accounts and checkout, often tips the ROI calculation toward the native suite.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I offer net payment terms without Shopify Plus?

Yes. Shopify's draft order system supports payment terms (Net 15, 30, 60, etc.) on all plans. You create the draft order, set a payment due date, and send the invoice to your buyer. It's a manual process, but it's fully functional. Apps can add more structure and automation to this workflow if needed.

Can I do customer-specific pricing without Shopify Plus?

Not natively. Shopify's price list feature — which lets you set exact per-SKU prices per customer or company — is Plus-only. On standard plans, you need a third-party wholesale pricing app. These apps typically use customer tags and metafields to replicate the functionality, and they work well for most use cases.

Is quote request functionality available on Shopify without Plus?

There's no native quote request feature on any Shopify plan, including Plus. This is an app-territory feature across the board. Merchants who need request-for-quote (RFQ) functionality, price negotiation, or formal quote approval workflows will need an app regardless of their plan level.

What's the main thing you lose by not being on Shopify Plus for B2B?

The biggest practical loss is company profiles (one company, multiple buyer contacts with permissions) and native price lists (exact pricing per customer, not just percentages). Both can be approximated with apps, but the native implementation is more seamless and scales better. Checkout customisation is the other significant gap — adding a mandatory PO number field at checkout, for instance, isn't properly achievable without Plus.