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How to Set Up Wholesale on Shopify Without Shopify Plus? [2025]
Hi @IMYOURGIRL
For your B2B needs, I recommend the Sami B2B Wholesale Pricing app by Samita. It’s an affordable solution that fits your budget (around $25/month) and offers the following features:
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Custom registration form to approve new customers and control access.
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Hide prices and “Add to Cart” for non-logged-in users.
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Display prices with or without VAT and VAT calculations for domestic and international orders.
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Automatic VAT invoices sent as PDFs after order completion.
It’s a great fit for your store, providing all the B2B features without the need for Shopify Plus. You can find the app in the Shopify App Store, and they also offer good support if needed.
Let me know if you’d like more details or help setting it up!
Best,
Felix
Hey @IMYOURGIRL
We built something that covers most of what you’re describing. Our LevelOps B2B PDF-to-Order app automates this process:
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Customer approval: when a new order comes in, we create a draft order only. If the customer doesn’t already exist, the app won’t create one automatically — this lets you review and approve them first.
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Order automation: converts incoming purchase orders (PDF or email) directly into Shopify draft orders, removing manual data entry.
Pricing: starts at $3 per order, pay-per-use.
Learn more here: https://apps.shopify.com/levelops-email-to-order
I set up customer accounts with tags and made separate collections only visible to tagged users, then used theme edits to hide pricing and buttons for regular visitors. Works pretty well.
Coming at this from the app development side. There’s an important distinction for non-Plus B2B that I don’t see covered in the thread yet.
On Shopify Plus, you get the native B2B features: Companies, Catalogs, Payment Terms. These are first-party and well-integrated.
On standard Shopify plans (Basic/Shopify/Advanced), you don’t have Companies at all. You only have Customers. This means any B2B setup on non-Plus needs to work within the Customer model, using tags and metafields to distinguish wholesale from retail buyers.
For your client’s requirements on a $25/month budget, here’s how I’d think about it:
Registration & Approval. This is the first thing to solve. You need a way for wholesale customers to apply, and for the store owner to approve them before they can access wholesale pricing. Look for apps that use Shopify’s App Proxy architecture rather than theme injection. The difference is that App Proxy apps serve pages on your store’s domain (yourstore.com/apps/register) without touching your theme code. That means no theme conflicts, no speed impact, and no breaking when you update your theme.
Wholesale Pricing. Once a customer is tagged as approved, you need discount logic. On non-Plus, your options are: (a) automatic discounts triggered by customer tags, (b) draft orders with manual pricing, or (c) a wholesale pricing app. The $25 budget limits you here, but some apps offer tag-based wholesale pricing in that range.
VAT Handling. For domestic vs. foreign VAT, Shopify’s built-in tax settings actually handle most of this. The gap is usually on the registration side: collecting VAT/tax IDs during signup and validating them. That’s where your registration form needs to support custom fields beyond just name/email.
The main thing I’d avoid: repurposing a generic form builder for the registration step. Some form builders can create Shopify customers, but you’ll still be stitching together the approval workflow, the tagging logic, and the notification flow across separate tools. Purpose-built B2B registration apps handle that full loop in one place.
Happy to go deeper on any of these pieces if it helps.
Shopify now includes native B2B features, Companies, Catalogs, and Payment Terms, on all plans, not just Plus. So the workarounds discussed in most of this thread (customer tags, metafields, theme hacks for pricing) are no longer the only path for non-Plus merchants.
What you get natively now on any plan:
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Companies — separate entity from Customers, supports multiple locations and contacts
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Payment Terms — Net 30, Net 60, Due on Fulfillment, etc., set per company location
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B2B Catalogs — up to 3 catalogs for wholesale pricing
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Customer account portal — buyers log in, see orders, pay invoices online
This doesn’t make the tag/metafield approach wrong,if you’re already set up that way or need more than 3 catalogs, it still has its place. But for a merchant starting fresh with B2B on a standard plan today, the native Companies setup is the cleaner starting point.
The one thing that’s still limited natively: payment terms are static per company location. Every order from that company gets the same terms. If you need conditional logic (different terms by order size, customer tier, etc.), that’s still a gap in the native feature set.
Hi Kelly, breaking your list into native vs app territory might help since these are really separate problems:
Native B2B (Companies, catalogs, payment terms) is now on every plan, not just Plus, so you can do logged-in-only wholesale pricing without an app at all. What native B2B doesn’t give you is a self-serve application and approval step, so that piece is where you’d look at a customer-registration/approval app, the kind that lets an applicant submit a form and you approve or revoke access by tag.
Gating add-to-cart and prices to approved customers is usually handled by that same access/tag layer (or a small theme tweak keyed off customer tags if you want to avoid another app).
VAT is the part I’d separate out entirely. Inclusive/exclusive display and domestic-only calculation are tax-settings and theme questions more than B2B ones, and PDF VAT invoices are a dedicated invoicing app category (several do exactly the domestic-vs-exempt logic you described).
So realistically you may end up with two cheaper apps (an approval/access one and an invoicing one) rather than one that does everything, which is often how people stay under budget. Happy to go deeper on any one of these if you say which is the priority.
Sometimes the simplest solutions work best. Start with your core requirements, test a few options, and scale your setup as your B2B needs grow.