Selling Wholesale on Shopify: A Guide for Emerging Luxury Brands
At some point in the life of your business, you will have to make the decision whether to sell only to consumers (B2C) or also to other businesses (B2B) like retailers. Or perhaps you could always only sell through your own ecommerce store, but the advantages of combining B2C and B2B are too great to ignore them forever. Just imagine your skincare product being sold in an upscale chain of luxury department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue or your luxury fashion clothing being available through a premier, global online-only luxury fashion retailer such as .NET‑A‑PORTER. Both scenarios would give your brand fantastic exposure, instant validation with consumers and extra revenue. Some brands in luxury start out selling wholesale to other businesses, but chances are, since you are reading this luxury ecommerce blog you have started selling directly to consumers through your ecommerce store first and are now considering adding a B2B store to your ecommerce experience. At least this seems to happen to most of our luxury brand clients at some point, for example they start their fashion or skincare brand setting up a B2C ecommerce store with Shopify, they grow a brand reputation for their business, grow their sales and then also want to sell their emerging brands goods through other sales channels such as a physical retail store or another ecommerce store. Perhaps you went to Paris Fashion Week and took part in TRANOÏ and met a new wholesale client which by the way is a tradeshow which we think all emerging fashion brands should attend at least once.
Blended or Dedicated: Making the Right Choice
James Bond famously orders his martinis shaken, not stirred. In the original novels and throughout the films, he requests this specific method. This ensures the drink is intensely chilled and thoroughly diluted by the ice chips, giving it a cloudy, frosty appearance. Whether you like Martini or not, you have a similar choice to make when it comes to your store and you want to be thoughtful about your decision on what ecommerce experience you can and want to offer to your customers. Sit back, enjoy your Martini and let us walk you through on how to decide between a mixed and dedicated store for your emerging brand.
Shopify gives you exactly two ways to serve both audiences, and the choice between them matters more than most brands realize. The platform is the default choice for most new and emerging brands and what our clients use which is why we will explain the concepts for brands that use Shopify to power their ecommerce stores. Your goal should be to provide a great experience for your regular online shoppers (B2C) and your professional buyers (B2B) at the same time. You want to separate functionality for these two groups in some way, because they do have completely different needs. A regular online shopper wants to experience your brand and buy your products with ease, a professional buyer also needs a seamless experience, but they expect different pricing, volume discounts, custom terms and the ability to reorder in bulk. Your sales executive only has to set them up once in the system and then they can reorder using your new self service portal with ease, but it does require a distinct catalog strategy, access controls, and custom pricing. While there is a cost to understanding the best B2B ecommerce setup, you will quickly earn this back with the hours your sales executives save by not taking orders manually and spending their time with actual sales outreach instead. Understanding Shopify B2B is an essential step towards offering the best self-service experience to professional buyers. Ideally, you would have it in place before you engage buyers from larger brands like Saks Fifth Avenue, because they will expect you to have such systems in place already.
Shopify B2B is included on all Shopify plans, but most plans are limited to 3 catalogs and only Shopify Advanced and Plus plans allow for unlimited catalogs and provide additional B2B features, but in general both blended and dedicated store formats are supported on all plans. That means you can offer B2B functionality to wholesale customers without having to upgrade your plan, but as your B2B customer base grows you will likely have to upgrade to support the needs of professional buyers such as dedicated catalogs and terms only available to specific clients. The numbers of catalogs matter, because this is where you set custom pricing and items available to different groups of customers. These different customer groups could be your direct-to-consumer (DTC) online shoppers, your B2B professional buyers in general, your professional buyers in a specific region or even a single large B2B client. For example, Saks Fifth Avenue likely would have negotiated their own catalog with custom pricing, terms and products.
Let’s briefly explain the difference between the blended and the dedicated store formats in Shopify. A blended format simply means that you can manage both direct-to-consumer (DTC) and B2B sales from a single Shopify admin. The buying experience stays largely the same for both. Therefore, both regular online shoppers and your B2B customers are using the same online store front, but your B2B clients are authenticated prior to seeing B2B pricing and checkout. On the other hand, if you use a dedicated format, you can use two Shopify admins and separate the B2C/DTC from the B2B side of your business. You will have a dashboard for DTC customers, and another one for B2B customers. DTC and B2B operations are distinct, with separate admin interfaces for each. With a dedicated format, the B2B storefront handles wholesale orders only, and only authenticated B2B customers will be able to place orders. A dedicated approach usually makes sense for brands which sell to a lot of different B2B clients and especially when you sell to larger corporate clients with many locations. On a practical note, with a blended format, you are using the same Shopify theme for DTC and B2B. If you want to have a specific theme for your B2B buyer experience, you will need to invest in a dedicated format which will allow you to use a different B2B Shopify theme. Most smaller brands are comfortable using a blended approach with the same theme for B2B and DTC customers.
Which Format Is Right for Your Brand?
The choice between a blended and a dedicated store largely depends on whether your brand prioritizes operational efficiency or a fully customized wholesale experience.
A blended store is typically the best option when the DTC and B2B businesses can share the same product catalog, inventory, branding, and customer experience. Managing both channels from a single admin reduces maintenance, keeps products, inventory, apps, and customer data in sync, and simplifies day-to-day operations while still providing separate reporting and analytics for B2B performance. Practically speaking, it is also a matter of having your ecommerce manager manage one or two stores.
A dedicated store is more appropriate when the wholesale business has distinct requirements that cannot be accommodated within a shared storefront. You might require different branding, themes, pricing strategies, notification templates, payment gateways, or separate inventory management for wholesale customers. This would be a strong indicator that you would benefit from operating independent DTC and B2B stores. While a dedicated approach provides greater flexibility and control over each buyer's experience, it also requires maintaining two separate Shopify admins and managing products, inventory, apps, and customer data independently. It essentially means that only larger teams should use a dedicated format, because it is at least twice the work or even more depending on the scale of your B2B sales operation.
In general you should ask yourself the following questions to decide whether a blended or dedicated store is best for you:
- Does one team manage both DTC and B2B operations?
- Do DTC and B2B orders draw from the same inventory?
- Is branding the same for your DTC and B2B businesses?
If the answer is yes to any of the above, you may want to consider a blended store. If the answer is no, a dedicated format may be right.
Here is a table with a side by side comparison:
Two Real-World Examples
Let’s look at two examples to illustrate when a blended and when a dedicated store is best.
Mandy Cho is the owner of a small independent fashion label based in New York. She is growing fast, but her team is still small. If you were Mandy would you choose a blended or dedicated store for your business?
You have the following information about her operations:
- She has a small ecommerce team consisting of herself and one ecommerce manager
- She works with a freelance frontend developer who can help with small customizations, but primarily wants to keep branding consistent across all customers
- She uses shared inventory for DTC and B2B orders
Mandy’s case is a very good fit for a blended approach, because she only has a small ecommerce team, limited ability to customize her store and she is sharing inventory anyway.
Let’s look at a different case to illustrate how to make the choice between a blended and dedicated format
Charlotte is the Sales Manager at a beauty brand called Skin Beauty. Her company has a very different business:
- They currently only sell B2B, but are considering expanding into selling DTC
- Their expansion strategy would include launching DTC under a different brand name.
- The ability to make advanced B2B customizations out-of-the-box is important
Charlotte needs a dedicated store because her new DTC brand will operate under a different name with a completely different identity. This requires a separate theme, separate branding, and a separate admin. A blended store simply can't accommodate two distinct brand identities.
How Shopify Organizes Your B2B Operations
Shopify gives you a lot of options to set up different products and pricing for different customers and markets. At the heart of it all are companies, whenever you have a new B2B buyer, you create a company for them in your admin dashboard. You can then assign companies to markets and assign catalogs. Markets are used to group similar companies together. For example, you could group together all your North American B2B buyers in a market and assign a catalog which fits the products and pricing which best fits that group of B2B buyers. However, it is best to understand markets as a group or way to group companies together, because you are not limited by geographical characteristics alone. You can group as many companies as you want into markets and decide which companies belong into which markets / groups based on any client characteristics you find suits best to organize your B2B operations.
You can assign different company locations to your companies in Shopify. A location represents different purchasing entities within the same company. The people that are working in each of these stores and can order from you to fill up their inventory are called customers. It’s all a bit confusing for sure, but your B2B client company is called a company, each of those clients' stores are called locations and the store managers would be customers who are actually the people ordering from you. Here is an example to illustrate the terminology that Shopify B2B uses in their admin dashboards. Let’s assume you signed a new contract, it’s a national retailer like Nordstrom. In this case, Nordstrom would be your company in Shopify. Their Chicago, Miami, and Dallas locations would each be a separate location under the company in Shopify. The buyers at each store are your customers, and each location can have its own catalog, so your Chicago buyer might see a cold-weather focused assortment while Miami is focused on warm-weather clothing.
There are many ways to organize your B2B operations, it would take another article to go into more detail, but by making the choice between a blended and a dedicated approach and understanding the basic setup, you have made the first step to expanding your sales channels and increasing your revenue. Setting up Shopify B2B correctly from the start saves significant rework later. If you're ready to add a wholesale channel to your brand, get in touch with the Mata team. We've helped fashion and luxury brands across both blended and dedicated formats.
About The Author
Bastian Lauer is one of the founders of Mata Services. Mata is a company helping brands of all sizes build and maintain their ecommerce websites. We've worked with over 20 ecommerce brands, mostly in fashion, luxury, cosmetics, jewelry, and skincare. We helped our clients build and maintain websites which accumulate 10M visits, over $70M in total sales and half a million orders during a usual year.
