How to Sell Wholesale on Shopify: A B2B Playbook for Sales Reps

Selling wholesale is a different game from selling to consumers. Your buyers order in volume, expect negotiated pricing, pay on terms rather than upfront, and often place orders through a sales rep instead of a checkout page. If you’re running a Shopify store and want to add — or fix — a wholesale channel, this playbook walks through how B2B actually works on Shopify, and where the native tools stop short for teams with reps in the field.

Why retail workflows break for wholesale buyers

The direct-to-consumer flow — browse, add to cart, pay now — assumes an individual shopper buying a few items at list price. Wholesale buyers break every one of those assumptions:

• They buy at custom prices, often tiered by volume or negotiated per account.
• They expect to pay on net terms (net 30, net 60), not upfront.
• They order many SKUs at once, and hate clicking through product pages one at a time.
• They’re frequently a company with multiple contacts and locations, not a single email address.
• They often order through a sales rep over the phone, by email, or at a trade show.

Trying to serve those buyers with a standard storefront leads to discount-code sprawl, spreadsheet pricing, and reps who can’t actually place orders without workarounds.

What Shopify B2B gives you natively

Shopify’s native B2B toolset is designed around these needs. The core building blocks:

• Company profiles. Instead of individual customer records, you create business-level accounts. Each company can have multiple locations and contacts, each with assigned roles and permissions — mirroring how organizations actually buy.
• Price lists. Offer customer-specific pricing across your catalog without discount codes, including tiered pricing based on order volume. Each list maps to specific companies or product ranges, so margins stay protected.
• Payment terms. Replace upfront-only payment with net 15/30/60 or due-on-fulfillment. Terms show at checkout and are tracked in the admin, which streamlines invoicing and accounts receivable.
• Draft orders. A rep can build a draft order on a customer’s behalf, apply the correct price list and terms, and send it to the buyer for payment or approval.
• Bulk order forms. Buyers enter many SKUs and quantities on a single screen instead of browsing product-by-product.

Plan note: The full native B2B toolset is a Shopify Plus feature. If you’re on a lower plan, you’ll either need to upgrade or use a third-party wholesale app to get custom pricing and terms.

The gap: your sales reps

Here’s where many wholesale operations get stuck. Native draft orders let a rep build an order — but they don’t give reps a dedicated place to work. In practice, sales teams need to:

• Browse the B2B catalog as the assigned company sees it (right prices, right products).
• Build carts and create quotes for specific customers, then send them as PDFs or email.
• Have those quotes sync back into Shopify as draft orders so nothing lives outside your system.
• Track commissions automatically when those orders complete.

Giving reps admin access isn’t the answer — it’s too much power and too much friction. This is exactly the gap Mify Field B2B fills: a dedicated sales-rep portal that sits on top of your Shopify B2B catalog. Reps browse assigned companies’ catalogs, build carts, and create quotes on behalf of customers — and those quotes flow straight into Shopify as draft orders, so your existing fulfillment and accounting workflow stays intact. Reps can download a PDF quote or email it directly from the portal, and commissions are tracked automatically when orders complete.

A step-by-step setup

1. Enable B2B in your Shopify admin (Settings → Wholesale and B2B on Plus).
2. Create company profiles for each wholesale customer, with their contacts and locations.
3. Build price lists — customer-specific or tiered by volume — and assign them to companies.
4. Configure payment terms (net 30, net 60, etc.) per company.
5. Set inventory and fulfillment priorities so trade orders don’t cannibalize retail stock unexpectedly.
6. Give your reps a portal so they can quote and order on behalf of customers without touching the admin.
7. Pilot with a few accounts — test bulk order forms, draft-order approvals, and the quote-to-order flow before rolling out widely.

Wholesale pricing models to consider

Model	Best for	How to set it up
Flat wholesale % off	Simple catalogs, uniform margins	One price list at, say, 40% off retail
Volume tiers	Buyers who scale orders	Quantity breaks within a price list
Account-specific	Negotiated key accounts	A dedicated price list per company
Quote-based	Custom or configured orders	Rep builds a draft order / quote per deal

Most maturing wholesale operations end up using a mix — standard tiers for the long tail of accounts, and quote-based pricing for their biggest negotiated deals.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Shopify Plus to sell wholesale? For the native B2B toolset (company profiles, price lists, terms), yes. On lower plans you can approximate wholesale with third-party apps, tagged customers, and draft orders, but it’s more manual.

Can sales reps place orders for customers? Yes — natively via draft orders, and far more efficiently through a dedicated rep portal that keeps reps out of your admin while still syncing everything back to Shopify.

Can I run wholesale and retail from the same store? Yes. Shopify B2B is designed to run alongside your DTC channel on the same store, sharing one catalog and inventory.

The takeaway

Shopify has closed most of the gap between running a store and running a wholesale operation — company accounts, custom pricing, and net terms are all first-class now. The piece that’s easy to overlook is your sales team: reps need a place to quote and order on behalf of customers without living in the admin.

If field or inside sales is part of how you sell wholesale, explore Mify Field B2B — it turns Shopify B2B into a workspace your reps can actually sell from.