Shopify B2B, honestly: what's built in, and what still isn't.

Yes, and natively. Shopify has a built-in B2B feature set: you create a company for each buying business, add its locations and contacts, attach a catalog with its own wholesale prices and quantity rules, and let buyers check out on net terms. Since April 2026 that runs on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans as well as Plus. What it does not do is fix the product data your retail and wholesale audiences share — the missing dimensions, the description that forked, the wholesale field parked somewhere a feed can read it. That layer is what Apimio works on, underneath Shopify's B2B rather than instead of it.

B2B on Shopify is Shopify's own wholesale mode. Instead of selling to individual customers, you sell to companies: each company has locations, and each location has its own contacts, payment terms and assigned catalog. That catalog carries wholesale prices, quantity price breaks and rules such as case-pack increments. Buyers sign in to a customer account, see their prices, and check out on net terms or with a stored card. All of it is Shopify's feature and documented in Shopify's own B2B manual. Apimio sits behind it as the product catalog those prices attach to — one record per product feeding both your storefront and your trade catalog.

There is no separate charge for B2B — it comes with your Shopify plan, so the cost is the plan. As published on shopify.com/pricing on 2026-08-28: Basic $25/month, Grow $65/month, Advanced $399/month, and Plus from $2,300/month on monthly billing in USD, with annual billing lower on the first three. The limit worth planning around is catalogs: Basic, Grow and Advanced allow up to 3 active B2B catalogs, while Plus is unlimited. Anything you add sits on top of that — a wholesale app runs roughly $25 to $300 a month, and Apimio starts at $199/month for the catalog layer.

It depends which half of the problem you have. For wholesale ordering mechanics on top of Shopify's native B2B — a sales-rep ordering portal, quoting, registration and approval forms, or more price lists than the native catalog limit allows — SparkLayer B2B & Wholesale and Wholesale Pricing Discount B2B are two of the most-installed answers on the Shopify App Store, and neither requires Plus (both listings checked 2026-08-28). For the catalog underneath — one product record serving retail and wholesale, a quality gate before anything publishes, and buyer-facing portals and line sheets — that is Apimio. Plenty of brands run Shopify B2B plus one of each.

No. Shopify opened B2B to the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans in April 2026. Companies, company locations, catalogs with wholesale prices, quantity rules and price breaks, net terms, purchase-order numbers and B2B checkout are all available without Plus. What Plus adds is scale and edge cases: unlimited active catalogs instead of three, catalogs assigned directly to a company location, deposit requirements, partial payments, and storefront and checkout contextualization (Shopify's help center, checked 2026-08-28). Apimio behaves identically on any Shopify plan — it installs from the Shopify App Store and has no opinion about which plan you are on.

Shopify B2B is the platform's own commerce layer: companies, catalogs, terms and checkout, included in your Shopify plan. A wholesale app adds ordering behavior the native flow does not cover — a rep portal, quoting, approval workflows, or more price lists than three active catalogs allow. Neither one manages the product information itself. If descriptions have forked between audiences, dimensions are missing, or your line sheet is a PDF someone rebuilds every season, the fix is upstream of both. That is where Apimio works. The three layers stack rather than replace each other, and most brands eventually need two of them.

Not through Shopify's native B2B. The buyer portal begins once a company account exists, which is the right model for established accounts and the wrong one for a prospect you met at a trade show. Apimio's Trade Portal gives a buyer a branded, guest-access space showing the assortment you selected, and Line Sheets publishes either a public buyer link or an email-gated PDF that captures the downloader as a lead. Line Sheets is on every plan; Trade Portal is an add-on on any plan. Apimio never takes the order — when the buyer is ready to buy, they order through Shopify or through your wholesale app.

The reliable answer is to stop storing wholesale data anywhere a feed can reach. In Apimio, wholesale price, minimum order quantity, case pack and lead time are an internal attribute class that is excluded by architecture from every Shopify sync path and every channel feed — not a checkbox somebody can forget. If you keep those values in Shopify metafields instead, audit each feed's field mapping before every publish, because a feed tool exports whatever field you point it at. Hosted channel feeds with pre-publish diagnostics are on Apimio's Advanced and Enterprise plans.

That is the whole reason to put a catalog layer underneath. In Apimio one record per product carries every variant, image, metafield and translation, plus the internal wholesale fields; your Shopify store publishes from it, your B2B catalog prices attach to it, and Trade Portal and Line Sheets are built from it. A correction happens once and lands everywhere. Per-store overrides cover the places where retail and trade genuinely need different copy or visibility, and Quality Guard scores the record before either audience sees it. Multi-store sync is on the Advanced and Enterprise plans.

Apimio's Advanced PIM plan at $399/month, because that is where the Image Library, multi-store sync and hosted channel feeds live. Line Sheets is on every plan, and Trade Portal is an add-on on any plan. The Basic PIM plan at $199/month covers one Shopify store and 10,000 SKUs with Catalog Hub, Store Health and Publish Gate — enough if your only problem today is catalog quality rather than buyer-facing assets. Enterprise PIM starts from $999/month with custom limits. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and the full breakdown is at /pricing.