Shopify unifies B2B and DTC

A lot of brands used to run retail and wholesale like two different shops in the same building: one front door for consumers, one side door for business buyers, and a lot of spreadsheet work in between. On April 2, 2026, Shopify said merchants on every Shopify plan can now manage both from a single platform instead of stitching together plugins and manual workflows. (shopify.com) That sounds small until you look at what “different buyers” actually means. A consumer might buy one candle at full price, while a retailer might buy 200 candles with payment due in 30 days, tax exemptions, and a catalog nobody else can see. (shopify.com) Shopify’s answer is what it calls a blended store. That is one Shopify store and one admin used for both direct-to-consumer sales and business-to-business orders, instead of splitting wholesale into a separate site. (shopify.com) The reason merchants kept splitting the two is that wholesale usually breaks the normal online-store rules. Business buyers need company profiles, multiple approved buyers at one account, custom price lists, larger order quantities, and payment terms that look more like invoicing than checkout. (shopify.com) Before this push, Shopify itself described the problem pretty plainly: merchants were locking parts of their store, managing wholesale pricing in separate systems, and processing orders manually. That meant inventory, customer data, and order history could drift out of sync because retail and wholesale were being run in parallel. (shopify.com) Shopify has been building toward this for years. It introduced native business-to-business features for Shopify Plus in 2022, then kept adding catalogs, company accounts, and blended-store tools, but the April 2026 change moved those capabilities down to every Shopify plan instead of keeping them mainly in the enterprise tier. (shopify.com 1) (shopify.com 2) The company is also betting that wholesale is too big to leave to bolt-on software. In the same announcement, Shopify said the global business-to-business ecommerce market is worth $36 trillion, which is why a merchant selling direct today may want wholesale built in before a distributor or retailer asks for it. (shopify.com) Once both buyer types live in one system, the store can change who sees what without changing the whole website. Shopify’s business-to-business tools let merchants assign customer-specific catalogs, pricing, payment terms, tax exemptions, and order settings to particular companies and locations. (shopify.com) That changes the competitive baseline for commerce software. If a merchant can run retail and wholesale in one admin, with one inventory pool and one storefront, then separate wholesale portals start to look less like a feature and more like technical debt. (shopify.com 1) (shopify.com 2) Shopify is not saying every seller should use one storefront for everything. Its own documentation still tells merchants to choose between a blended store and a dedicated business-to-business store based on how different their catalogs, branding, and operations are. (shopify.com) But the direction is clear: one product catalog can now feed two kinds of checkout logic. For merchants, that means wholesale stops being a second system they add later and starts becoming another mode inside the same commerce stack. (shopify.com)