How to Set Up a Shopify Wholesale Store Without Shopify Plus
A Step-by-Step Guide for Brands That Want to Sell Wholesale, Without the Enterprise Price Tag
If you're a growing brand looking to sell wholesale through Shopify, you might assume that you need to upgrade to Shopify Plus to unlock features like custom price lists, net payment terms, or gated access. But the truth is, you don’t need Shopify Plus to launch a professional, efficient wholesale store with Shopify.
This guide walks you through how to set up a fully functional wholesale store on Shopify, without the Plus plan, using apps, workarounds, and best practices that thousands of brands rely on today.
Why Brands Are Selling Wholesale on Shopify
Shopify has become the go-to platform for DTC brands, but more and more brands are selling Omnichannel and, thus expanding into wholesale. Given this, they are looking for ways to manage both channels in one ecosystem.
Selling wholesale via Shopify allows you to:
Control your brand experience
Eliminate distributor margin erosion
Own your wholesale customer data
Streamline operations for DTC and wholesale all with a single backend
However, Shopify’s default wholesale features are limited, unless you’re paying for Shopify Plus, which comes at a price tag over over $2,000 a month. With that being said, Shopify Plus does offer some powerful B2B features, including:
Custom pricing per buyer
B2B portals with account logins
Net terms and purchase order support
Tiered pricing
Advanced automation workflows
However, for many small-to-midsize brands these features are overkill. If your goal is to let retailers easily reorder or shop wholesale, you can achieve this at a fraction of the cost.
What You’ll Need: Tech Stack for Wholesale on Non-Plus Shopify
Here’s a lean stack that lets you run wholesale on Shopify without subscribing to Shopify Plus:
| Need | Tool / Approach |
|---|---|
| Gated wholesale store | Create a separate Shopify store (via a subdomain) or download one of the many “B2B” focused apps within the Shopify App store |
| Wholesale pricing | Discounted pricing via apps (e.g. Wholesale Club, B2B Handsfree, or manually with discount codes) |
| Reorder automation | Vanik, a tool that nudges retailers to reorder without the need for brands to login to portals |
| Inventory sync | Shopify’s built-in inventory management |
| Net terms or invoicing | Leverage Shopify’s native invoicing via Vanik |
Step-by-Step: How to Launch Your Wholesale Store Without Shopify Plus
Are you excited about the prospect of launching a Shopify wholesale store? We are too! Follow the below steps to begin to plan out and launch your Shopify store for wholesale.
Step 1: Decide how you want to set-up your Shopify stores:
Add a wholesale "extension" onto your existing Shopify store. You can create separate wholesale products and collections and hide them from your main site, or you can leverage an app like Locksmith to hide wholesale pages unless a customer is logged in.
This may be a good place to start if you’re just starting to build out your wholesale business on Shopify.
Launch a separate wholesale store. Create a second Shopify store just for wholesale customers. This will allow you to have a cleaner experience on the back-end, not mixing up your DTC and wholesale customers and products. However, on the flip side, creating a new store creates more overhead.
Step 2: Set Up Wholesale-Only Products or Pricing
As briefly mentioned above, you’ll need to offer retailers different pricing than your DTC site. Oftentimes, wholesale pricing is 50% less than your DTC pricing. And you are able to adjust the pricing of your products through Shopify a few ways:
Using discount codes (this will be a manual process and is not scalable)
Creating duplicate wholesale-only products with lower prices and ensure that they are “hidden” from your website
Using an app like:
Vanik to apply discounts automatically to retailers
Step 3: Gate the Experience
Use a password-protected store or app to ensure only approved buyers can view or buy wholesale products. You don’t want to have DTC customers getting access to your wholesale prices because they’ll get access to discounted products.
Some tools to consider to implement to gate the experience include:
Shopify’s built-in password protection
Customer tags (within Shopify) to restrict access to wholesale customers only
Locksmith which is an app on the Shopify App Store that allows you to restrict access to your store to certain customers
Step 4: Make Ordering Frictionless for Retailers
Once retailers are into your wholesale program, you want reordering to be fast and intuitive. Many retailers won’t log in or manually reorder without prompting. That’s where tools like Vanik come in, it sends smart reorder emails that let retailers buy in 2 clicks, no portal logins required.
Vanik seamlessly plugs into your Shopify store to supplement and augment the data that’s already in your store to remove friction and help brands generate more money and save time. Shopify brands like Spoonful Overnight Oats are seeing reorders 2x faster and saving 20+ hours a month since they started using Vanik.
Step 5: Handle Payments and Terms
Most small brands don’t offer net payment terms to retailers. But if you do, Vanik makes it easy for you to select the payment terms that you’d like to offer retailers on an individual retailer level. If you’d like to require brands to pay up front, you can do that and Vanik will require the retailer to pay for the order before it is sent out for fulfillment.
Setting up a Shopify wholesale site may seem overwhelming, but we promise that given how easy Shopify is to operate, you’ll be able to get up and running in no time. Four key recommendations, coming out of this guide include:
Start lightweight. You don’t need to over-engineer your wholesale setup from day one. Start by adding wholesale to your “regular” Shopify store and expand out from there.
Make it easy for buyers. Retailers are busy, don’t force them to remember passwords or log in to portals.
Nudge at the right time. Tools like Vanik automate reordering nudges so you don’t rely on reps or generic email blasts trying to get retailers to place reorders.
Use automation where possible. Tagging customers, triggering reorder flows, and syncing inventory can all be automated.
You don’t need Shopify Plus to succeed in wholesale. With a smart tool stack and a frictionless buyer experience that you can deliver through Vanik whether you have Shopify Plus or not, you can grow your wholesale revenue dramatically.
And once you have your Shopify wholesale store set-up, Vanik helps brands grow wholesale revenue by nudging buyers to reorder at the right time—no portals, no logins. If you’d like to learn more about Vanik, set-up time to chat with us here.
