Shopify B2B Pricing in 2026: What's Free on Every Plan, What Still Needs Plus

Shopify made a move in April 2026 that most wholesale operators still haven’t fully priced in: core B2B features became free on every plan. If the last article you read about Shopify wholesale predates April 2, it’s wrong now. Here’s the current map, verified July 28, 2026, and the wall that’s still standing.

What every Shopify plan includes now

Since April 2, 2026, Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans include native B2B at no extra cost:

• Up to 3 active B2B catalogs (a catalog = a price list shown to a buyer group)
• Company profiles with locations and buyer permissions
• Payment terms (net 30 and friends)
• Volume pricing and quantity rules
• Vaulted credit cards and ACH payments (US)

That’s a real wholesale starter kit, and for a business with a handful of accounts on similar terms, it may be all you ever need. Full stop, no upsell. Test it before you spend money on anything else, including us.

What still requires Plus, and what Plus costs

The advanced layer stays gated:

Shopify Plus runs $2,300/mo on a 3-year term, $2,500/mo on 1-year: $27,600 to $30,000 per year, every year, before apps. Higher-volume merchants shift to a variable platform fee tied to revenue. Last verified 2026-07-28.

Where the 3-catalog wall actually hits

Three catalogs sounds workable until you map real accounts onto it. A brand distributor sells to resorts, independent pro shops, and regional chains, each on negotiated terms, some with brand-specific restrictions. Three catalogs forces all of that into three buckets. Every account that doesn’t fit its bucket becomes a manual workaround: draft orders, spreadsheet price checks, “let me fix that invoice.”

One Canadian brand distributor put it to us plainly: they’d just launched their D2C store, needed their wholesale accounts served from the same inventory, counted their catalogs, and hit the ceiling immediately. Their read of the upgrade path: “We’re not about to go to the $3,500-a-month level to get the full B2B portal.” (Their number included the apps they’d need on top of Plus; the base subscription alone is $2,300 to $2,500.)

That’s the gap in one quote. The free tier caps out fast for a real distribution book, and the next rung costs more than many young wholesale businesses spend on rent.

The third option Shopify doesn’t sell

Between “3 catalogs” and “$27,600 a year” there’s a build: a custom wholesale portal on top of your standard Shopify plan.

The shape we build: Shopify keeps doing what it’s good at, selling D2C. The portal handles what Plus would have charged for, per-account catalogs and pricing with no cap, rep order entry, payment terms, and brand-level channel rules (a multi-brand distributor often carries lines it can’t sell D2C; the portal shows accounts everything while the store shows only what’s licensed). Underneath both sits one owned inventory pool, connected through Shopify’s API, so a webstore sale and a 96-piece resort order decrement the same count. We covered that architecture in detail in our guide to running wholesale and D2C on one inventory pool.

The math is the same rent-vs-own comparison we run for every software category: Plus is $27,600+ per year forever; a portal build is a one-time project (ours start at $25,000 flat, owned outright, no per-seat or per-account fees). If Plus’s other features (checkout extensibility, higher API limits, launch environments) matter to your roadmap, buy Plus. If you’re buying it for unlimited catalogs, run the comparison first.

The decision shortcut

• A few accounts, similar terms: the free tier is genuinely enough. Use your 3 catalogs and spend nothing.
• Growing account list, negotiated pricing, reps in the field: you’ll outgrow 3 catalogs. Price the portal build against year one of Plus before defaulting to the subscription.
• High-volume, complex checkout needs beyond B2B: Plus earns its fee on more than catalogs; buy it for the whole bundle or not at all.

We build these portals and the inventory systems under them: that’s the disclosure and the credential in one sentence, and it’s why this post can be specific. If you’re staring at the catalog cap, our inventory-systems page shows what a build includes, or book a discovery call. If your three catalogs cover it, we’ll say so in the first ten minutes.