Shopify B2B is good, it is included on every paid plan, and for most people asking "how do I sell wholesale on Shopify" it is the answer. Start there.
This guide is about the one case it does not cover, and about not buying an app for a job Shopify already does for free.
What Shopify B2B actually gives you
Company accounts with named buyers and locations. Catalogues with their own price lists and product selections, assigned per company. Payment terms and purchase order numbers at checkout. Draft orders, tax exemptions, self-serve ordering for buyers who log in.
Per Shopify's own documentation this is available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus at no extra cost, with some of the more advanced controls (more catalogues, a dedicated B2B storefront, stored cards, deposits) reserved for the higher plans. It stopped being a Plus-only feature in 2026, which is recent enough that a lot of advice still says otherwise, including an earlier version of our own wholesale guide.
If you need different prices for different buyers, this is the tool. No gating app does that, ours included. A lock decides who may buy; it does not decide what they pay.
The case it does not cover
Shopify B2B assumes you know who your buyers are.
A company account exists because somebody created it. A catalogue is assigned to a company that is already in your admin. The model starts from an established relationship and makes ordering efficient, which is exactly right for a trade business with an existing book.
It is not built for the step before that: a stranger arriving on your storefront who wants access and has to ask for it.
That gap looks like this in practice:
- A buyer finds a trade-only range through search and has no way to express interest except your contact form.
- Somebody fills in that form at 11pm. You read it the next morning, decide, create a company, assign a catalogue, and email them. Every one of those steps is manual and every one is a place the enquiry dies.
- You have no record of what they were looking at when they decided to ask, which is the most useful thing about the enquiry.
- The trade range is either invisible to search, so nobody finds it, or fully visible with prices on it.
None of that is a flaw in B2B. It is a different problem: recruitment rather than fulfilment, and the two want different tools.
The honest decision
Use Shopify B2B alone if your trade buyers are people you already deal with, you need per-company pricing, and new accounts arrive by phone, email or a sales conversation. This is most established wholesale businesses, and adding a gating app to it would be paying for a door you do not need.
Use gating alone if you have a trade-only range rather than trade pricing, products retail customers should not buy at all, and the work is deciding who gets in. Nobody needs a different price; they need permission. This is the case gating actually solves.
Use both if you have per-company pricing and a steady flow of strangers asking for access. The gate handles the front of the funnel: a public, indexable trade range, a request form where the buy button was, an approval queue with rules. B2B handles everything after you say yes. Approving somebody can write a Shopify customer tag, which your segments and flows can act on.
Use neither if you have four trade customers. Tag their accounts, edit the theme, and spend the money on something else.
The question that settles it
Not "do I sell wholesale". Everyone reading this sells wholesale.
The question is: how do new trade buyers reach you, and how many of them are there?
If the answer is "through relationships, and a handful a year", B2B is the whole answer and the rest of this site is not for you. If it is "they find us, and we lose most of them somewhere between the enquiry and the account", that gap is real, it is measurable, and it is the thing a gate is for.
If you are not sure, count last month: how many people asked for trade access, how many you had to chase for details, and how many you never replied to. That last number is the one that decides it.
What we would set up
Assuming both, with B2B running the accounts and a gate running the front door:
- The trade range public and indexed, with prices and buy buttons hidden. Nobody finds a hidden collection, and a trade buyer searching for a product you stock is the cheapest lead you will ever get.
- A request form where the buy button was, capturing which product they were looking at.
- Auto-approve rules for the ones you would always say yes to, matched on email domain, a supplied VAT number or a country, and the rest by hand.
- On approval, a customer tag so Shopify's own B2B tooling and segments take over from there.
- Draft orders for the awkward middle, where the price is a negotiation rather than a list.
Auto-approve rules, the demand report and interest-list-to-draft-order are on Starter; the locks, request form, codes and tags are on every plan including the free one.
And if you read all that and concluded Shopify B2B on its own does what you need, good. That was the more likely outcome, and it costs you nothing.