Shopify Moves Deeper Into Wholesale Territory
Shopify has been building out its B2B commerce features at a pace that is starting to look less like product iteration and more like a deliberate land grab – and the company sitting most directly in its path is BigCommerce.
What Shopify Has Built and Why It Matters Now
For years, B2B and wholesale commerce was considered a separate discipline from direct-to-consumer retail. The buying flows are different – net payment terms, volume pricing tiers, company accounts with multiple buyers, purchase order workflows. Most consumer-facing platforms treated these requirements as edge cases, leaving BigCommerce to carve out a reputation as the platform that could handle both retail and wholesale without forcing merchants to build complex workarounds.
Shopify’s B2B suite, which the company began rolling out more seriously in 2022 and has continued expanding since, now covers much of that same ground. Merchants can set custom price lists by customer segment, offer net payment terms like Net 30 and Net 60, create company profiles with multiple contacts and permission levels, and process draft orders with purchase order references. These are not cosmetic additions – they are the structural features that wholesale buyers require before they will even consider placing an order through a platform.
The pace of iteration has not slowed. Shopify has continued adding features including quantity rules, minimum order requirements, and volume pricing discounts that apply automatically without requiring custom code or third-party apps. That last point matters more than it might appear. A merchant on a competing platform often patches together wholesale functionality through a stack of paid apps, each of which introduces its own maintenance overhead and failure points. Shopify’s native approach consolidates that into a single environment, which reduces both cost and operational complexity for wholesale operators.
What Shopify also brings to this fight is infrastructure scale. Its checkout performance, logistics network through Shopify Fulfillment, and payment processing through Shopify Payments give wholesale merchants a cohesive back-end that BigCommerce has historically struggled to match in terms of vertical integration. A buyer placing a large wholesale order needs confidence that the transaction will process cleanly and that inventory data is accurate. Shopify’s unified data model makes that easier to guarantee.
BigCommerce’s Position and Where the Pressure Is Highest
BigCommerce built its wholesale credibility on flexibility. Its open API architecture and native multi-storefront capability attracted mid-market and enterprise merchants who needed to run a consumer site and a wholesale portal from the same back-end without duplicating product catalogs or inventory management. For a certain type of merchant – typically a manufacturer or distributor with complex customer segmentation – that architecture was genuinely difficult to replicate elsewhere.
That advantage is narrowing. Shopify’s headless commerce options and its Hydrogen framework for custom storefronts have given technically capable merchants a path to building the same kind of separated front-end experiences that BigCommerce offered more out of the box. The developer ecosystem around Shopify is also considerably larger, which means the talent available to build and maintain custom B2B implementations skews toward Shopify simply because that is where most agency and freelance expertise is concentrated.
BigCommerce has also faced a persistent challenge in perception. The company has positioned itself as the enterprise alternative for merchants who find Shopify too consumer-focused or too restrictive in its opinionated approach to checkout. That positioning was more defensible three years ago than it is today. Shopify’s wholesale features now appear in its core plans rather than behind enterprise pricing walls, which removes a cost-based reason for smaller wholesale operations to look elsewhere.
The mid-market segment – businesses doing roughly $1 million to $50 million in annual wholesale volume – is where the competitive pressure is most direct. These are merchants large enough to care about wholesale-specific functionality but not so large that they require fully custom ERP integrations that would favor a more open platform by default. Shopify’s current B2B feature set maps well onto this segment’s needs, and its brand recognition gives it a sales cycle advantage that BigCommerce has to actively work against in every deal.
BigCommerce’s publicly reported financials have shown slower revenue growth than Shopify over the past several quarters, and the company has gone through leadership changes and cost restructuring. None of that directly proves a causal link to Shopify’s B2B push, but the timing is not coincidental. Merchants evaluating platforms for wholesale buildouts are increasingly arriving at Shopify first rather than treating it as the consumer-only option and looking elsewhere for wholesale capability.
What Wholesale Merchants Are Actually Choosing
The practical calculus for a merchant evaluating both platforms today comes down to complexity tolerance and integration requirements. If a business is already running its retail operations on Shopify, the incremental cost and effort of adding a B2B channel through the same platform is low. That inertia effect is powerful – merchants do not switch platforms casually, and Shopify’s existing retail penetration means a large population of potential wholesale operators is already inside its ecosystem, one feature unlock away from going live.
BigCommerce is not disappearing from this conversation. Its strength in open integrations and its relationships with ERP vendors like NetSuite and SAP still appeal to larger operations where wholesale is one node in a more complex fulfillment and accounting chain. But the window in which BigCommerce could claim wholesale functionality as a clear differentiator is effectively closed – and Shopify showed it could move fast enough to close it without making a single headline acquisition.
