Shopify wholesale app or native B2B, now B2B is on every plan

Shopify made its native B2B features available on plans below Plus. The changelog entry is dated 2 April 2026 and lists what non-Plus merchants get: "up to 3 active B2B catalogs (assigned via Markets), company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing, ACH payments (U.S. only), and vaulted credit cards". Shopify’s own announcement says that "for the first time, merchants on every Shopify plan can manage wholesale and DTC from a single platform with no plugins or patchwork".

The same two sources are equally clear about what stayed behind the Plus paywall: "unlimited catalogs for customer-specific pricing, direct catalog assignment to companies and locations, partial payments, and deposits". Those four things are not a rounding error for a distributor, and the first two are the same limitation stated twice.

The practical effect is that every non-Plus wholesaler running a third-party wholesale app, a password-protected second store, or a tag-and-discount workaround is now re-deciding something they settled years ago. Both sources were read on 20 August 2026.

A Shopify B2B catalogue is the object that carries prices for a set of buyers. Shopify’s own documentation states that "on the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets", and that the Plus plan "offers an unlimited number of catalogs and direct assignment to companies and locations". Below Plus, catalogues attach at the market level, not to the company.

Now map that onto how an ERP actually holds price. In Acumatica, negotiated prices live against a customer or a price classA price class is a label on a customer account that decides which set of prices they see. Acumatica and most ERPs use price classes so a seller can maintain one price list for a whole tier of customers instead of one per account., and the connector moves them across through the Price List entity. In Cin7 Core, price tiers do a similar job. If you have five customer price classes, you need five catalogues, and below Plus you have three. There is no clever mapping that fixes this: the ceiling is on active catalogues, not on the number of prices inside one.

So the honest test is a single number. Count the distinct price groups your ERP resolves for your B2B customers today. If the answer is one, two or three, native B2B below Plus fits and you should stop paying for anything else. If it is four or more, you are choosing between Plus, a wholesale app that carries its own pricing, or per-customer prices computed elsewhere and pushed in.

Four situations, and the first one is the common one.

You have more than three price groups and you are not moving to Plus. A wholesale app that holds its own price rules is not constrained by Shopify’s catalogue count, because it is not using catalogues. That is the entire reason those apps still exist after 2 April 2026.

Your B2B buyers and your retail buyers are the same people on the same accounts. Shopify B2B separates a company from a customer, and the separation is the product. If your wholesale relationship is really a discount level on a normal account, an app that applies pricing to a tagged customer is a closer fit than a company structure you will not use.

You depend on a behaviour the app does and Shopify does not. Order forms with a whole catalogue on one page, per-customer product visibility below Plus, or a bespoke approval step. Check each one specifically rather than assuming, because Shopify has been shipping into this space steadily and an app’s differentiator from 2024 may be product now.

You are inside three months of a hard date. Rebuilding a working wholesale setup is a project, and the app is already running.

Customer logins, first and worst. Shopify’s documentation states plainly that "B2B customers can’t use legacy customer accounts" and that you "must activate customer accounts to allow B2B customers to login". If your wholesale app or your second store runs on classic accounts, every buyer is signing in a different way after the move. And you cannot carry their passwords: Shopify says "because passwords are encrypted outside of Shopify, you can’t migrate customer passwords from another online store using a CSV", so you invite customers to create new ones.

That is not a technical footnote. It is the single biggest adoption risk in this migration, because a buyer who cannot log in phones your order desk, and after two calls they stop trying. Plan the invitation sequence and the fallback before you plan the theme.

The second thing that breaks is anywhere the app was the source of truthThe source of truth is the system that gets to be right when two systems disagree. For price, stock and customer terms in an ERP-run business, that is almost always the ERP. for price. If the app holds your wholesale prices and you switch to catalogues, those prices now have to come from somewhere: your ERP, a spreadsheet, or a person. Decide which before you uninstall anything, because an uninstalled app takes its price rules with it.

Third, a second store carries its own order history, its own customer records and its own URLs. Merging two stores into one is a data project with a redirect map attached, and it is genuinely harder than moving off an app on a single store.

If your wholesale app is working, your price groups outnumber three, and you have no plan to move to Shopify Plus, the change on 2 April 2026 does not apply to you. Read the changelog entry, note that it happened, and go back to work. There is no deadline attached to this one, which makes it different from every other page in this collection.

The merchants who should move are narrower than the amount of writing on this subject suggests: a non-Plus wholesaler paying an app subscription to reproduce company profiles, payment terms and volume pricing that Shopify now ships, with three or fewer price groups. For them this is a straight cost removal with a login migration attached.

If you are running an ERP behind the store, the count of price groups is the only question worth answering first, and your ERP already knows the answer. Pull the list of price classes or price tiers that resolve for your B2B customers and count the distinct ones. That single number decides Plus, native, or app, and it takes an afternoon.