B2B Wholesale on Shopify: A Guide for Beauty and Wellness Brands

B2B Wholesale on Shopify: A Guide for Beauty and Wellness Brands

Most beauty brands don't plan for wholesale. They start DTC, grow a customer base, and then one day a boutique or spa reaches out asking about wholesale pricing. Suddenly there's a decision: handle it manually (spreadsheets, emails, PDF catalogs) or build something real.

The manual approach works until it doesn't. At 5 wholesale accounts, you can manage it in your inbox. At 50, you can't.

Shopify has invested meaningfully in B2B infrastructure over the last two years. For beauty and wellness brands on Shopify Plus, there's a legitimate path to running DTC and wholesale in the same store, with separate experiences, pricing, and ordering flows. This guide covers what that looks like and where the real tradeoffs are.

The Two Models: Separate Store vs. Unified Store

Before getting into the mechanics, there's a structural decision to make.

Separate B2B store: Run your wholesale operation on a different Shopify instance. This is the traditional approach. Wholesale buyers get a password-protected subdomain (wholesale.yourstore.com). They see wholesale pricing, MOQ requirements, and a catalog that may differ from your DTC catalog.

Unified B2B store (Shopify Plus): Shopify's B2B features (launched in 2022, meaningfully expanded since) allow you to run company accounts, customer-specific pricing, net payment terms, and order minimums within a single Shopify store. Wholesale buyers log in and see their contracted pricing automatically.

For brands under $5M in wholesale revenue, the unified store approach is usually the right call. Fewer systems to maintain, one inventory pool, consistent order data.

For brands with complex wholesale needs, regional distributor tiers, or dramatically different catalog structures, a separate store still makes sense.

Setting Up Shopify B2B: The Core Components

Company Accounts

Shopify B2B organizes wholesale customers into "companies" rather than individual accounts. A company can have multiple contacts, multiple ship-to locations, and a centralized credit limit.