Sell wholesale without the phone calls

Less custom software than most people expect. On Shopify the portal is company accounts, buyer roles, customer-specific price lists, net terms, and a reorder flow, most of which is configuration rather than code. The build work sits at the edges: pricing rules your ERP owns, catalog visibility per customer, and the sync that keeps both sides honest. A typical B2B portal is a scoped implementation measured in weeks, not a ground-up platform project.

For most manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, yes, and the reason is boring: you get wholesale and retail on one catalog, one inventory pool, and one admin instead of running two systems that disagree. Where Shopify struggles is deeply conditional pricing, complex quote-to-order workflows, and configurable products with dependent options. We will tell you which side of that line your catalog falls on before you commit, because the honest answer sometimes is that your ERP should stay the pricing brain and Shopify should just present it.

For native Shopify B2B, yes. Company accounts, price lists, and net terms are Plus features. If you are not on Plus and do not want to move, the alternative is an app like SparkLayer on a standard plan, which covers most wholesale requirements at a lower platform cost. We will tell you honestly which side of that line you fall on, because the Plus upgrade only pays for itself at a certain order volume.

Yes, and it is usually the right call because you share one catalog, one inventory pool, and one admin. Buyers log in and see their pricing; retail customers see retail pricing. The complexity is in tax handling, shipping rules, and making sure wholesale pricing can never leak to a retail session. That is solvable but it needs deliberate configuration rather than defaults.

We sync the credit limit and current balance from the ERP into the storefront so checkout can enforce it. A buyer over their limit gets stopped at checkout with a clear message rather than placing an order that finance later cancels. The sync direction matters: the ERP stays the system of record for credit, and Shopify reads from it rather than trying to own it.

Define complicated. Volume breaks, per-company pricing, contract pricing, and currency variation are all normal and handled. Where it gets harder is pricing that depends on real-time calculation in the ERP, for example freight-inclusive pricing that changes by destination and weight. That case needs a live pricing call at cart time, which we can build, but it is a different scope than loading price lists.

The opposite, if it is set up right. Reps get a view of their accounts, can place orders on behalf of a buyer, and see order history in one place instead of their own inbox. The concern behind this question is usually commission, so we make sure rep attribution is recorded on portal orders too. Self-serve reordering typically moves reps from data entry to actual selling rather than removing them.

Build is typically four to six weeks. Adoption is the harder half, and it depends on migration rather than technology. What works is loading each buyer their order history first, so their first login shows something familiar they can reorder in one click, then onboarding accounts in waves rather than emailing the whole book at once. Expect meaningful adoption over one to two ordering cycles, not the first week.