Plenty of CPG brands were built on wholesale. Distributors, grocery, specialty retail, and buyer relationships did the heavy lifting, and the direct-to-consumer store became an afterthought: a place that exists, gets a little traffic, and never gets real attention.
A recent Shopify change makes that a more expensive gap than it used to be. Native B2B is no longer limited to Shopify Plus, which means a wholesale-first brand can run a real wholesale channel and a serious DTC storefront on the same platform without an enterprise upgrade as the price of entry.
The real question is not whether Shopify supports wholesale. It does. The question is how much of the DTC opportunity you are leaving on the table, and what you actually need to run both sides well.
Quick Answer
Shopify runs DTC and wholesale for a CPG brand on one store, and as of 2026 native B2B no longer requires Shopify Plus. B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans, with companies, per-company catalogs, net payment terms, quantity rules, and volume pricing available across all four. Shopify Plus adds capacity and complexity: unlimited B2B catalogs, direct catalog assignment to companies and locations, and advanced payment features. The limitation that matters most for CPG is that B2B orders do not support subscriptions or accelerated checkouts such as Shop Pay, so wholesale replenishment and consumer subscriptions have to be designed separately.
What the Shopify B2B Update Means for Wholesale Brands
The biggest recent change is that Shopify B2B is no longer a Plus-only feature. Native B2B now runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus, so a wholesale-first CPG brand can add a company-based wholesale channel without upgrading to Plus first. Core functionality, including companies, company locations, catalogs with custom price lists, net payment terms, quantity rules, and volume pricing, is available across all four plans.
For a wholesale brand that has been treating DTC as a side project, this lowers the barrier in a real way. You can bring both channels onto one store, prove the DTC side, and move up to Plus only when the wholesale operation gets complex enough to need it. The old assumption that "wholesale means Shopify Plus" is out of date, and building your architecture around it now leads to paying for an enterprise plan before the business actually requires one.
Why Wholesale-First CPG Brands Should Scale DTC
Wholesale is very good at distribution, and it is not built to give you a direct relationship with the person consuming your product. DTC is where a CPG brand owns the storefront, the checkout, the customer account, the email capture, and the entire post-purchase journey. That is the gap worth closing, and it delivers three things wholesale alone cannot.
First, you own the customer relationship. A consumer who buys directly becomes part of your own customer database, which gives your team a foundation for retention, replenishment, launches, and research. Retail and distribution partners can share some sell-through data, but DTC gives the brand a direct first-party channel to the consumer instead of relying on the retailer to own that relationship. Tools such as Klaviyo turn that first-party data into automated retention, which is the point of our guide to why your Shopify store is the ceiling on your Klaviyo ROI.
Second, DTC is a controlled environment for testing. New products, bundles, subscription offers, positioning, pricing, and promotions can be tested with consumers directly before you ask a retail buyer for shelf space. Third, CPG has a structural advantage most ecommerce categories lack: people consume the product, which creates a natural second purchase. For consumables, the DTC store should be designed around the full arc from first order to repeat purchase to subscription, not just the first conversion.
How Shopify B2B Works for a CPG Brand
Shopify B2B structures wholesale customers as companies, with company locations and buyers attached to those locations, and then controls the products, pricing, quantities, and payment terms each one receives. The model runs company, then company location, then buyer, then catalog, then pricing, then order, and all of it lives in the same admin as your DTC orders.
In practice, companies let you attach several buyers and shipping locations to one retail account, so a chain with a dozen stores orders under one roof. Catalogs assign a specific product selection and price list to a company or location, which is how a distributor sees wholesale pricing a consumer never does. Quantity rules enforce case packs and minimums, so a buyer cannot order three units of something that ships by the dozen. Payment terms let you offer net 30 or net 60 with draft orders for invoicing, which is how wholesale actually pays. None of that requires a third-party app.
Shopify B2B Features by Plan
The misconception to remove from any Shopify architecture conversation is that wholesale equals Shopify Plus. It no longer does. Here is how the B2B feature set breaks down across the plans:
| Shopify B2B feature | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Companies and company locations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| B2B catalogs and price lists | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Net payment terms | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quantity rules and volume pricing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Active B2B catalogs | Up to 3 | Up to 3 | Up to 3 | Unlimited |
| Direct catalog assignment to companies and locations | No | No | No | Yes |
| Deposits, partial payments, payment requests per fulfillment | No | No | No | Yes |
| Contextual storefront and checkout by market | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Basic, Grow, and Advanced can run up to three active catalogs across all their B2B markets, while Plus supports unlimited catalogs and lets you assign a catalog directly to a specific company or company location. Advanced and Plus also support contextual storefront and checkout customization through Shopify Markets.
When Does a CPG Brand Actually Need Shopify Plus?
The useful question is not whether you are big enough for Shopify Plus, but whether you need what Plus adds. Plus becomes worth evaluating when your wholesale operation has enough pricing and operational complexity that the lower plans start forcing workarounds. The specific triggers are concrete: you need more than three active B2B catalogs, you need to assign catalogs directly to individual companies and locations, you need advanced B2B payment features like deposits and partial payments, or you need contextual storefront experiences per market beyond what Advanced covers.
Plus also earns its place when the business needs enterprise capabilities outside B2B, such as deeper checkout customization, organization-level administration, expansion stores, or more involved international requirements. The principle is simple: do not move to Plus because you are a CPG brand, move to Plus because your operation needs Plus. If the real problem is a low-converting DTC storefront, a plan upgrade will not fix it. Our breakdown of what a Shopify Plus agency does covers the rest of that enterprise layer.
The B2B Limitations to Design Around
Two B2B limitations matter enough for CPG brands to design around from the start. The first is that Shopify B2B does not support subscriptions, which is significant because replenishment is often central to a CPG model. A consumer wanting one box every 30 days and a wholesale buyer wanting 20 cases every two weeks sound similar commercially, but inside Shopify they are different workflows. Your DTC subscription program runs through a compatible subscription solution, while wholesale replenishment relies on standing orders, buyer reordering, draft orders, or an ERP process, so the two have to be planned separately.
The second is that B2B does not support accelerated checkouts, including Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay. A blended store therefore has two checkout profiles with different needs. Consumers want fast mobile checkout, Shop Pay, subscriptions, and promotional offers. Wholesale buyers want net terms, purchase orders, company-level permissions, case-pack quantities, and easy reordering. B2B also requires new customer accounts and is not compatible with legacy accounts, so a brand still on legacy accounts has migration work before any of this turns on. A good blended-store build keeps those two experiences distinct while one Shopify store manages both.
One Store or Two?
Most CPG brands should start with a single blended store running DTC and B2B together, because it shares one product catalog, one inventory pool, one admin, and native B2B in one ecosystem. That keeps platform complexity low and is the right starting point for the majority of growing brands. The trade-off is more careful storefront logic and disciplined pricing and merchandising so the two audiences do not collide.
A separate B2B store makes more sense when wholesale is operationally heavy on its own: hundreds of accounts, highly individualized pricing, complex ERP requirements, different product assortments, international wholesale, or sales-rep-driven ordering. Either way, wholesale pricing must never leak into the consumer experience. B2B catalogs control which products and prices a buyer can access, so the information architecture has to answer which products are DTC-only, which are wholesale-only, which appear in both, and what a wholesale buyer sees if they land on the consumer storefront. That is commerce architecture, not a development detail, and it is the same pattern behind brands outgrowing their Shopify theme.
What It Costs to Build
There are two separate costs: the Shopify platform fee and the build. Shopify Plus currently starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year term or $2,500 per month on a one-year term for standard configurations, with a variable platform fee possible for higher-volume businesses. That fee is billed by Shopify and is separate from designing and developing the storefront.
For the build itself, Liquid Lemon uses a fixed-price model: a custom Shopify Plus storefront that runs DTC and wholesale together is $12,500, delivered in a 30-day sprint. As a market comparison, full-service Shopify Plus agency engagements commonly run in the $50,000 to $250,000 range over several months once you add heavy strategy, UX, ERP integrations, migrations, and a large project-management layer. That is an industry range rather than a Shopify-published figure. The right comparison is not $12,500 against $150,000, it is what the project actually includes and whether your business needs all of it. Our guide to how much a Shopify Plus agency costs breaks that down.
What Comes Next
The strongest Shopify move for a wholesale-first CPG brand is not replacing wholesale, it is building the DTC engine alongside it so each channel does what it is good at. Wholesale gives you distribution and scale, and DTC gives you a customer relationship you control and a place to test products, offers, and retention. Shopify now gives you the infrastructure to run much of that on one platform, at a plan level that fits where the business actually is.
Liquid Lemon builds custom Shopify storefronts specifically for DTC and CPG brands, with work that includes Olipop, Hero Cosmetics, and Bite. If your wholesale business already works and your DTC storefront is not keeping up, that is the part worth fixing. For more on the market, see our comparison of the best Shopify Plus agencies for CPG brands, and where storefront conversion is the constraint, our guide to Shopify design mistakes killing your conversion rate.
Bring your existing store, your wholesale requirements, and your current retention setup, and we will tell you what Shopify handles natively and where you actually need custom development. Book a strategy call to start.
Start Your Sprint now with Liquid Lemon.
Written by Andrew Zam, Co-founder of Liquid Lemon, a Shopify / Shopify Plus design + development studio for DTC brands.
