B2B Discounts & Market-specific Pricing

Technical Q&A
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1

Hi,

Our store dispatches orders from two warehouses: our main HQ, and a 3PL that serves all customers within a specific region.

This specific region served by the 3PL is configured as a Market within Shopify. We are going to set an automatic Price Increase Adjustment of 10% on the Market to cover the cost of moving goods from our main HQ to the 3PL (transport, import duties etc.), and also the 3PL’s fees.

If a B2B customer is located within the region that is served by the 3PL, their orders are dispatched from the 3PL to avoid import duties and tax complications.

However, if the B2B customer is buying products that are in a catalogue with an automated discount (for example, 10%) as opposed to fixed prices, Shopify is calculating the discount based on the product’s base price, not the region-specific price for the Market that the B2B customer is located within.

For example:

Product A has a base RRP of £100. For customers in the specific region defined in Shopify Markets, the RRP is £110 (automated 10% price increase as specified within Shopify Markets).

When a B2B customer from within the Market orders with their 10% discount, they should be paying £99 (i.e. £110 Market price minus their 10% discount). However, Shopify is ignoring the Market price and calculates the B2B price based on the default product price. Therefore, this B2B customer will end up paying £90, which means that we are left out of pocket for the costs we are trying to cover with the Market-specific automated price increase.

So far, we have tried to combat this by manually setting fixed prices within a region-specific B2B catalogue (i.e. 10% Discount for Region X), with the prices based on manually calculated Market prices minus discount %. However, we have over 7000 SKUs, so this is incredibly time consuming. It also doesn’t factor in exchange rate fluctuations etc., which Shopify’s automated Markets pricing takes into account.

We only appear to have two options:

Continue manually setting discounted prices within the B2B catalogue for this particular Market

or

Set reduced discount percentages for B2B customers within this Market, with the hope that this roughly balances out the lack of increased RRP. However, I’m not sure how this would be displayed to B2B customers when they are placing their orders (i.e. will the ‘strike through’ price be the default RRP, leading them to believe they are receiving a small discount percentage, or will the ‘strike through’ price be the RRP for their Market?).

TLDR: Shopify’s current flow for calculating B2B pricing is:

Product’s default RRP → Customer’s B2B discount

Whereas, I believe it should be:

Product’s RRP for customer’s Market → Customer’s B2B discount

I’m very keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

2

Yeah, you’re not crazy this is a real limitation in Shopify’s current B2B + Markets setup, and you’ve described it perfectly.

Right now Shopify always applies B2B discounts to the base product price, before any Market adjustments. So even though the Market price is shown correctly for normal customers, the B2B discount logic just ignores it. A lot of people with multi-warehouse / regional pricing setups have hit this exact wall.

A few honest thoughts / workarounds I’ve seen others use:

  1. Fixed price lists for B2B + Market
    This is basically what you’re already doing. It’s the only fully accurate method today, but yeah… with 7,000 SKUs it’s painful and doesn’t play nicely with FX updates.

  2. Accept the logic and rebalance the discount
    Some merchants reduce the B2B discount % for that Market so the final price roughly lands where it should. Not ideal, but it avoids manual pricing. The downside is exactly what you mentioned the “compare at” price B2B buyers see can feel misleading.

  3. Separate B2B catalog per region (if volumes justify it)
    A few stores actually duplicate products/catalogs for specific B2B regions so pricing is clean and predictable. It adds admin overhead, but avoids margin leakage.

  4. Shopify Functions / custom app (longer-term fix)
    This is the only way to truly get the logic you want:

    Market price → then apply B2B discount
    But it requires dev work and usually only makes sense once the lost margin justifies the cost.

Short version: you’re not missing a setting Shopify just doesn’t yet chain Markets pricing into B2B discounts the way it logically should. Hopefully they fix this natively, because your use case (regional 3PL + B2B) is super common.

3

Hey ali303, what you’re running into here is a hard limit of Shopify.

I did several experiments with catalogs and discount combinations last month, and here are some of the undocumented rules I found:

  • Catalogs don’t stack on top of each other
  • B2B catalogs always override Market catalogs (even if the Market catalog would offer a higher discount)

The most straightforward option you have is to use actual discounts for your B2B 10% off, rather than catalogs. Catalogs aren’t really “discounts” in Shopify; instead, they’re part of the pricing system (which is separate from discounting). But keep in mind that B2B customers can’t use discounts by default, and that you need Shopify support to manually enable that option for you.

Hope this helps,

Tobe - developer of Regios Discounts (4.7 stars, 123 reviews, Built for Shopify)