B2B on Shopify: Options by Plan and Feature

Shopify B2B options by plan

Shopify B2B is available on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus, but the features available depend on the plan.

Most B2B features—including companies, catalogs, net payment terms, self-serve ordering, and Shopify Flow automations—are available across these plans. The main decision points are not whether you can sell B2B at all, but how you need to assign catalogs, customize checkout, and collect payment.

Basic, Grow, and Advanced allow up to three active catalogs across all B2B markets, and using all three in one market uses that full allowance. Shopify Plus allows an unlimited number of B2B market catalogs. Direct catalog assignment to a specific company or company location, deposits, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment are Plus-only capabilities. Contextual checkout and storefront customization through Shopify Markets are available on Advanced and Plus.

Treat this as a requirements comparison, not a general ranking of plans. If your current setup can support the catalog structure and payment process you actually need, the fact that you sell B2B alone does not establish a reason to upgrade.

What companies and catalogs control

A B2B catalog determines which products and prices B2B customers can access; a company or company location is an entity to which catalogs can be assigned. That distinction matters because catalog design affects both product availability and the prices a buyer sees.

Catalogs can include or exclude specific products, set customer-specific prices, and establish product availability and prices for companies and company locations. A company or location can receive multiple catalogs. Catalogs can also support quantity rules that restrict order quantities and volume pricing that gives a price break when a customer buys a qualifying quantity of a product in the same order.

Before selecting a plan, write down the pricing rules you need in merchant terms: which buyers should see which products, where prices differ, and whether order quantities change the price. Then map each rule to a catalog and to the company or location that should receive it. This helps expose a common design problem early: trying to represent buyer-specific exceptions with market-wide catalog groupings.

If different buyers need different prices, decide whether grouping those buyers into market catalogs is workable or whether each company or location needs a direct assignment. The latter is a plan gate, so establish that requirement before building out catalog logic or estimating implementation work.

Where plan requirements change

The plan differences become clearer when you compare catalog scope, assignment method, payment workflow, and checkout behavior separately. A plan may cover your basic B2B process while missing one specific capability that is important to your operations.

For catalog scope, Basic, Grow, and Advanced support up to three active catalogs across B2B markets, while Shopify Plus supports unlimited B2B market catalogs. Basic, Grow, and Advanced stores must use new Shopify Markets to use B2B catalog features. Direct assignment of a catalog to an individual company or company location for customer-level pricing is available only on Plus.

For payment workflows, deposits, partial payments, and payment requests tied to fulfillment are available only on Plus. For checkout and storefront customization through Markets, the requirement is Advanced or Plus. These are separate gates: a merchant may need a Plus-only payment workflow without needing extensive catalog variation, or need Markets-based customization without needing Plus-only payment capabilities.

Make a short list of non-negotiable requirements and mark each as a catalog, payment, or checkout need. That prevents a broad label such as “more B2B functionality” from driving the decision. It also gives developers a concrete basis for checking configuration and identifying which requirements need a different plan.

Catalog behavior to test before committing

A catalog plan should be tested against the way prices overlap, not just against the number of catalogs you expect to create. Companies and company locations can receive multiple catalogs, so check the combined outcome for each representative buyer rather than reviewing catalogs in isolation.

If multiple catalogs set prices for the same product, the customer sees the lowest price. Include overlapping assignments in your review, especially where a lower price should not apply to a particular buyer. Check product inclusion and exclusion alongside pricing so that the intended assortment is clear as well.

If you plan to schedule catalog changes, account for the type of assignment: rollouts can schedule a status change for a market catalog, but a catalog assigned directly to a company or company location cannot be added to a rollout. That makes the assignment method relevant to both pricing and operational planning.

Before rollout, review representative buyer scenarios with the people responsible for pricing and fulfillment. For each one, verify the intended products, the expected price when assignments overlap, quantity rules, volume pricing, and how a planned catalog change will be managed. Resolve conflicts in the catalog design rather than relying on staff to remember exceptions.

A practical plan-fit check

Use a requirements-first check to choose a Shopify B2B plan: list the capabilities the business needs, map its catalog and payment design, then confirm the plan gates that apply. This is more useful than starting with a plan name and trying to fit the sales process around it.

Start by listing the buyer and pricing cases the store must support. Decide whether market catalogs can represent those cases or whether direct company or location assignments are required. For Basic, Grow, or Advanced, check that the active catalog needs fit within the three-catalog allowance across B2B markets and that the store uses new Shopify Markets for B2B catalog features.

Next, check the payment process for deposits, partial payments, or payment requests tied to fulfillment; if any are required, Plus is the relevant plan option. Separately decide whether contextual checkout and storefront customization through Markets are needed, since those capabilities require Advanced or Plus.

Finally, test the planned setup with sample companies and company locations, including buyers with multiple catalogs and products with overlapping prices. Keep a record of the required capability, the plan gate, the catalog assignment approach, and the test case. This gives merchants and developers a shared checklist for validating the current plan or scoping a change.

Check plan pricing separately from feature access

A feature-fit decision and a plan-cost decision are related, but they are not the same check. First establish whether the required B2B capabilities point to a particular plan; then confirm the commercial terms that apply to the business.

Shopify Plus pricing varies depending on the billing term and billing currency. Shopify also says a variable platform fee may apply to more complex, higher-volume businesses, and that the fee differs for B2B and D2C companies.

Confirm current pricing and any applicable platform fee directly with Shopify before treating a plan comparison as a budget. For a broader decision about whether Plus is justified by the required capabilities, see Do you need Shopify Plus? The features that actually require it. If international selling is part of the setup, review the Shopify Markets setup service as a separate implementation consideration.