For years, the answer to "can I run wholesale on Shopify without Plus" was a flat no. Company accounts, custom pricing, net terms — all of it lived behind a Plus contract that started around $2,300 a month. That's no longer true, and the shift is recent enough that most of what you'll find searching for this question hasn't caught up yet.
What changed, and when
In April 2026, Shopify moved its core native B2B object model — companies, company locations, catalogs, price lists, payment terms — onto every paid plan tier: Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. Before that, merchants on standard plans who wanted a wholesale channel had exactly two options: pay for a Plus contract, or cobble together wholesale behavior using apps and customer tags, which usually meant compromises on pricing logic, account structure, or checkout experience.
After the change, a standard-plan merchant gets company profiles with multiple buyers per account, customer-specific catalogs and pricing, net payment terms, purchase order numbers, self-serve buyer ordering, quick order lists, and Shopify Flow automation — the actual functional core of running a wholesale channel — without the Plus price tag.
So what does Plus still actually add?
This isn't "Plus is now pointless" — it's a narrower, more specific list than it used to be. What's still genuinely Plus-only:
- Unlimited pricing catalogs — standard plans have a cap; if you're running dozens of customer-specific price lists, that ceiling matters.
- A dedicated B2B storefront with its own domain — useful if wholesale buyers need a visually and structurally separate experience from your DTC storefront.
- Vaulted credit card storage and deposit/partial payment workflows for buyer accounts.
- The full Shopify Functions suite — payment customization, delivery customization, and cart-transform functions still require Plus. Basic discount-type Functions are available on every plan now, so it's specifically that deeper checkout logic that's still gated, not Functions as a whole.
If your wholesale operation doesn't need any of those specific things, Plus isn't required to run B2B anymore — full stop. The decision that used to be "do we need wholesale, therefore do we need Plus" has split into two separate questions.
A wholesale channel that used to imply a $2,300/month platform commitment can now start on a plan you may already be paying for.
Where merchants still get stuck
The gap that most comparison content skips: a mid-sized wholesale operation with, say, three pricing tiers and forty buyer accounts often doesn't need any of the Plus-exclusive features — but might still hit a wall the native B2B tools don't cover at all, on either plan tier. Formal RFQ and quote negotiation, multi-stage approval chains, requisition lists, PunchOut, real-time ERP-driven pricing — none of that is native to Shopify's B2B model regardless of plan. That's a targeted app or a piece of custom integration work, not a Plus upgrade.
In other words: the platform-tier decision and the "do we have a procurement complexity problem" decision are separate questions now, and conflating them is how merchants end up either overpaying for Plus features they'll never touch, or under-building a wholesale workflow that can't actually handle how their buyers order.
What we'd actually tell a client
Don't default to Plus because that's what wholesale "used to require." Map your actual requirements against the list above first. If nothing on it applies to you, a standard-plan build with native B2B — or native B2B plus a scoped custom integration for whatever specific gap remains — is very likely the more honest recommendation, even though it's the smaller invoice.