B2B and DTC on One Shopify Store: How It Works

Can you run B2B and DTC on one Shopify store?#

Yes. Shopify's own Help Center says "You can use one store for both B2B and direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales, or create a separate B2B-only store" (help.shopify.com, read 2026-10-08), and since April 2, 2026 native B2B has been on every paid plan. The real decision is how different your wholesale buyers are from your consumers, not whether Shopify allows it.

That April change is what moved the question. Shopify's announcement extended its foundational B2B features "to merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, at no extra cost," and said that "for the first time, merchants on every Shopify plan can manage wholesale and DTC from a single platform" (shopify.com/news/b2b-for-all, published 2026-04-02, read 2026-10-08). Before that, a brand below Plus that wanted real wholesale usually ran a second store or a workaround. Now the default question for a brand already selling direct is simpler: one store or two?

The answer depends on three things: how much your wholesale catalog and pricing differ from retail, which Shopify plan you are on, and how much of the wholesale work happens outside the checkout. This post covers all three, with a worked example.

What does Shopify separate for wholesale buyers on a blended store?#

On a blended store, a consumer and a wholesale buyer can land on the same site and see very different things. That separation is built from Shopify's own B2B objects, and they decide whether one store works for you.

These are Shopify's features, not an app's, and per Shopify's B2B features by plan page (read 2026-10-08) they are available on every paid plan:

• Companies and company locations. A wholesale account is a company, and each branch or ship-to is a location under it. This is what lets a regional buyer with six job sites order against one account.
• Catalogs. A catalog controls which products and prices a B2B buyer sees, separate from your retail prices.
• Net payment terms. Approved accounts can check out on terms instead of paying by card at the time of the order.
• Quantity rules. Minimums, maximums and order increments, so a wholesale buyer orders by the case while a consumer can still buy one.
• PO numbers, draft order to invoice, and easy reorders.

Shopify also says you can personalize the buying experience for each B2B customer, including the prices and currencies they see, which products are available, how they pay and receive shipments, and which store content they view (help.shopify.com/en/manual/b2b, read 2026-10-08).

Then comes the plan line, which is where most blended-store plans run into trouble:

• Catalog count. "On the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans, you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets." On Plus, the number of B2B market catalogs is unlimited.
• Customer-level catalogs. On Plus you can assign catalogs directly to specific companies and company locations. Shopify states plainly that "Direct catalog assignment isn't available on the Basic, Grow, or Advanced plans."
• Contextual experiences. "Contextual checkout and storefront customization through Shopify Markets are available on the Advanced and Plus plans."

All three quotes come from the same plan-features page, read 2026-10-08. We go deeper on the first two in Shopify B2B catalog limits by plan.

When does a separate B2B store make more sense?#

One store is the default for most brands now. A second store earns its keep only when the two businesses really are different. Signals that point toward a separate B2B store:

• A different catalog or unit of measure. Wholesale sells cases, pallets or bulk items that a consumer should never see, and the overlap with retail is small.
• More price structures than your plan allows. If you need more than three distinct wholesale price lists and you are not on Plus, a blended store hits the catalog cap fast.
• Branding that should not touch the consumer site. Some brands sell wholesale under a trade identity and want the retail site to stay clean.
• Separate teams and reporting. If an inside sales team owns wholesale end to end and finance wants it measured on its own, a separate store can be simpler to run.

Signals that point toward one store:

• A shared catalog and shared inventory. The same SKUs sell to both channels, and you do not want to keep two copies of every product in sync.
• A brand expanding from DTC into wholesale. The consumer business came first and wholesale is being added on top.
• A small team. One store means one theme, one product feed and one checkout to maintain.
• Pricing that fits inside your plan. Three wholesale price structures or fewer below Plus, or any number on Plus.

If most of your signals land in the second list, start blended. You can always split later. Merging two stores into one is harder.

A worked example: an industrial brand adding 40 wholesale accounts#

Take a brand that makes nitrile work gloves and safety glasses and sells them direct to tradespeople on a Shopify store on the Grow plan. It wants to add 40 wholesale accounts: independent safety supply distributors and a handful of contractors who buy for their crews.

Here is how that maps onto a blended store.

Price structure. Consumers keep paying retail. Wholesale needs two tiers: a standard wholesale price for most accounts and a deeper distributor price for the safety supply houses that resell. That is two B2B catalogs, inside the Grow plan's limit of three active catalogs across all B2B markets.

Ordering rules. Gloves sell to consumers by the box of 100. Wholesale buyers order in cases of 10 boxes. A quantity rule with an increment of 10 on the B2B catalog handles that without touching the retail product page.

Accounts and terms. Each of the 40 accounts becomes a company. The distributor with three warehouses becomes one company with three locations. Approved accounts get Net 30, and new ones start on card until they have a history.

So far, one store works cleanly. Now the pressure points.

The fourth price. The largest contractor negotiates its own price on a 50-case annual commitment. On Grow, there is no direct catalog for one company, and a third catalog spent on a single account leaves no room for a Canadian distributor market the brand is also planning. This is the exact point where brands start pricing Plus, or start keeping one customer's prices in a spreadsheet and fixing orders by hand.

The rest of the work. The wholesale catalog, case quantities and terms all live in Shopify. What does not live there is everything that happens before an order: the contractor's emailed request for a price on 400 cases, the back and forth on that number, and the fact that the contractor's purchasing manager needs a sign-off from the operations director before anything over $5,000 goes out.

What still runs in the inbox either way?#

Choosing one store or two does not change the work that happens around the checkout. Three gaps show up on both setups.

Quotes and negotiation rounds. Shopify draft orders can carry a negotiated custom line price on every plan, so it is wrong to say Shopify cannot handle a negotiated price. What it does not have is an RFQ object and a versioned quote record that keeps the buyer's request, each round of negotiation and a margin check together in one place. That is why so many wholesale quotes still live in email threads and end up retyped into a draft order.

Approvals inside the buying company. Many wholesale buyers cannot just place an order. A site lead can spend up to a limit, and anything over it needs a manager's sign-off. That approval chain belongs to the buyer's company, not to your store, and when the store cannot route it, it happens over email before anyone clicks checkout. We cover how to design those chains in purchase order approval workflows.

Credit exposure across branches. Net terms tell you how long an account has to pay. They do not tell you how much the account owes right now across all of its locations, including orders that have been approved but not yet invoiced. For a distributor with three warehouses all ordering on one account, that number usually lives in a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember to. Our post on net terms at B2B checkout walks through what Shopify handles at checkout and what it leaves to you.

None of these are reasons to run two stores. They are reasons to plan for the work around checkout either way.

Where does Copiara fit?#

Copiara is a Shopify app in early access that adds the wholesale layer for Shopify stores on top of the same store, blended or not. It works through Shopify's own companies, catalogs and payment terms, and Shopify stays the system of record for products, orders and payments.

What Copiara adds is the work above: a quoting desk that keeps the request, every negotiation round and a margin floor on one record, then creates a Shopify draft order with the agreed prices locked; buyer approvals that clear spend limits and approval chains inside the buying company before an order reaches checkout; and credit and AR that tracks live exposure per company, shared or independent across branches, reading payment terms from Shopify rather than writing them. For buyers, the tools are blocks the merchant places on the store, and buyers sign in once with the store's own login. See Copiara's modules for the full list.

Copiara is not yet listed on the Shopify App Store, and no merchant can install or subscribe to it yet.

FAQ: B2B and DTC on one Shopify store#

Do wholesale buyers see retail prices on a blended store? Not when their company is set up with a B2B catalog. Shopify lets you personalize the prices and products each B2B customer sees.

Do I need Shopify Plus to sell wholesale and DTC on one store? No. Core B2B is on every paid plan since April 2, 2026. Plus adds unlimited B2B market catalogs and catalogs assigned directly to a company or location.

Can wholesale accounts check out on net terms on a blended store? Yes. Shopify lists net payment terms among the B2B features available on all plans, so approved accounts can check out on terms while consumers pay as usual.

When should I split into two stores? When the wholesale catalog, pricing or brand is different enough that keeping them together costs more than maintaining a second store.

If you run a wholesale distributor or a brand on Shopify and your wholesale quotes, approvals and credit still live in the inbox, get early access.