Price lists, quotes and net terms for B2B buyers

Shopify B2B is built from four things, and almost every configuration question resolves to which of the four something belongs to.

A company is, in Shopify’s words, the business entity that makes a B2B purchase; it contains locations and contacts. A company location is the branch that actually orders — it carries its own billing and shipping addresses, its tax exemptions, its payment terms and its assigned catalogues. A company contact is a person acting on behalf of the company, and is associated with a retail customer record underneath, which is why a buyer can exist as both a business contact and an ordinary customer. A catalogue determines the products and pricing that customer can access, and the price list is what lives inside it.

The practical consequence is that almost nothing is set on the buyer. Pricing, terms and product availability all hang off the location. A wholesale customer with three branches on different terms and different price bands is three locations under one company, and that is the correct shape rather than a workaround.

A price list overrides default product prices with either fixed prices or a percentage-based adjustment, in a single currency. Choosing between them is the decision that determines how much maintenance the programme costs you for the rest of its life.

Percentage adjustment is a rule: this catalogue is your retail price less a set percentage. It survives every price change you make to the catalogue automatically, because it is derived rather than stored. If your commercial arrangement genuinely is “tier two gets 40% off list”, use it and stop there.

Fixed prices are per variant, and they are the honest answer when the arrangement is not a single percentage — negotiated lines, prices that hold through a retail promotion, a distributor whose pricing bears no fixed relationship to your consumer price. They are also a data set somebody has to maintain. A price list with a few thousand fixed prices is a synchronisation problem, and it is the point at which the prices should be owned by whatever system your commercial team already negotiates in and pushed to Shopify, rather than typed into Shopify twice.

The two can be combined — a percentage baseline with specific fixed overrides — and that is usually the arrangement that survives contact with a real account manager. Decide it deliberately, though, because “mostly a percentage, except for a list nobody has written down” is how a B2B store ends up with prices nobody can explain.

This one is worth putting on a wall. Shopify documents that if there are multiple catalogues and prices for a specific product, the lowest price displays to the customer.

That is a sensible default and a trap in equal measure. It means a promotional catalogue built for a seasonal push, left assigned to a location after the season, quietly becomes that customer’s permanent price. It means a market-level catalogue and a company-level catalogue interact, and the outcome is not “the most specific one wins” — it is the cheapest one. And it means the way to audit B2B pricing is not to read the catalogue you think applies, but to check what a buyer at that location actually sees.

Build the habit early: after any catalogue change, log in as a contact at a representative location and look at the prices. It takes two minutes and it is the only check that reflects the rule as implemented.

They get conflated in briefs constantly, and they solve opposite problems.

Quantity rules constrain how a product may be bought: a minimum, a maximum, and an increment per order. They are how you express “sold in cases of twelve” or “minimum order of fifty units”, and they are enforcement — the buyer cannot construct an order that breaks them. Rules can be defined on the price list itself, or inherited relative to the shop defaults, which means a case size can be a property of the product generally while a specific account carries a different minimum.

Volume pricing rewards scale: tiered pricing that gives a better unit price when the customer buys larger quantities of the same product in a single order. It is an incentive rather than a constraint.

Most wholesale arrangements want both, and want them to agree. A case size of twelve with volume breaks at ten and twenty-five is a specification that will generate support tickets, because the breaks are unreachable. Write the two side by side before configuring either.

Shopify has no separate quoting module, and for most wholesale operations it does not need one — a quote is a draft order that has not been paid. The sales person builds the order in the admin with negotiated line prices, sends it to the buyer, and the buyer pays it. The fixed-date payment term is available on draft orders specifically, which is the mechanism for “due on the first of next month” arrangements agreed case by case.

What you give up is the paperwork around a quote that a dedicated quoting system provides: version history, expiry dates, approval chains, and a document the buyer’s procurement team can file. If your sales cycle involves a buyer circulating a PDF internally for sign-off, that is a real gap and it is worth deciding where it lives — an app, the ERP, or a document generated from the draft order — rather than discovering it after launch.

Worth knowing in the same breath: if any part of your B2B offer is a standing or recurring order, subscriptions and draft orders do not combine. Shopify documents that subscriptions cannot be used with draft orders, so a sales-assisted recurring arrangement needs its own design rather than an assumption that the two features compose.

Shopify’s payment terms are comprehensive on the configuration side. Net 7, 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90 are available, with all periods starting when the order is placed; there is also due on fulfilment, fixed date on draft orders, and immediate payment. Terms can be set for a whole company or per location, with the location overriding the company default, and they can be applied to several companies at once. Through the API the same thing appears as a PaymentTermsTemplate carrying a paymentTermsType — NET, FIXED, RECEIPT, FULFILLMENT — and a dueInDays, assigned through the buyer experience configuration.

The part that surprises merchants is what happens at the end of the term. Shopify does not auto-capture. An order shows as partially paid when a deposit has been captured, payment pending when a deposit came through a manual method awaiting recording, and overdue once the term has expired — and at that point a human charges the saved card or records the bank transfer. The buyer can pay early by logging into their account and choosing Pay now, but nothing happens automatically on day thirty-one.

That is a defensible design, since chasing a business customer is a commercial act rather than a technical one. But it means offering net terms is a commitment to run a receivables process: someone reviews the overdue filter, someone chases, someone decides when to stop shipping. Stores that turn terms on because a large buyer asked, without agreeing who does that work, discover the answer several months later in the aged debt.

Two questions to settle before you enable terms. Where does the credit decision live — who approves a new account for net 60, on what basis, and how does that reach Shopify? And where is the source of truth for what is owed: if finance works in an ERP or an accounting system, the invoice and the receivable need to live there, with Shopify as the order system rather than the ledger.

B2B is no longer a Plus-only proposition, but the ceiling differs in a way that matters. Shopify documents that Basic, Grow and Advanced plans support up to three active catalogues across all B2B markets, while Shopify Plus allows unlimited catalogues assigned directly to companies and locations.

Three catalogues is genuinely enough for a great many wholesale businesses. If your pricing is a small number of tiers — trade, distributor, key accounts — three is the shape of your commercial model, not a compromise. We would rather see a business start there and prove the channel than upgrade on the assumption it will need more.

The point at which the ceiling binds is account-specific pricing: a catalogue per customer, because every account negotiated its own terms. That is a real pattern in some industries and it is the honest trigger for Plus. It is also worth asking whether it is a pattern you want to keep — a hundred individually negotiated price lists is a maintenance burden whichever platform carries it.

A separate wholesale store. It used to be the standard advice and it is now usually the expensive option: two stores means two catalogues of truth, two inventory positions to reconcile, two themes to maintain, and a customer who exists twice. Native B2B exists precisely so one store can serve both audiences.

A bespoke portal in front of Shopify. Occasionally justified — if your buyers place orders from their own purchasing system, the interesting work is an integration, not a front end — but more often it is a response to a gap that turns out to be a configuration question.

And a launch that waits for every account to be modelled. Take your ten largest buyers, configure their companies, locations, catalogues and terms properly, and get them ordering. The eleventh account will teach you something the specification would not have.

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