A wholesale buyer emails asking for pricing on 500 units, wants a different rate than what’s on your site, and expects a proper quote back within a day or two, not a generic “add to cart” experience. If you’re running B2B or wholesale through Shopify, this scenario plays out constantly, and a lot of merchants end up handling it in a spreadsheet, a separate quoting tool, or an awkward back-and-forth over email that has nothing to do with the store itself.
The good news is Shopify has genuine native tools for this, and they’ve matured a lot. The less good news is that which tool is right for you depends heavily on whether you’re on standard Shopify or Shopify Plus, and how much of your wholesale business actually needs negotiated pricing versus fixed tiers.
This post covers the three real options, draft orders, Shopify’s native B2B feature (Plus only), and request-a-quote apps, and lays out a practical workflow for handling a custom pricing negotiation from first enquiry through to a converted order, without the process falling apart between your inbox and your store.
Why Standard Product Pages Don’t Handle Custom Wholesale Pricing
Shopify’s product and variant pricing is built for one thing: a fixed price (or a small number of fixed variant prices) shown to every visitor. Native discount codes and automatic discounts can get you fixed-percentage or fixed-amount deals, but they weren’t designed for the kind of negotiation wholesale buyers expect, quantity-based sliding scales, one-off negotiated rates for a specific customer, or pricing that depends on a conversation rather than a rule you can encode in a discount.
That’s the gap request-a-quote workflows exist to fill. The question is which mechanism handles it.
Option 1: Native Draft Orders
Draft orders are Shopify’s built-in tool for building an order manually on behalf of a customer, and they’re available on every Shopify plan, no B2B feature or Plus subscription required.
You’ll find them under Orders > Drafts in the Shopify admin. From there you can:
- Add existing products and variants at their normal price, or override the price on a per-line-item basis
- Add custom line items for things that aren’t in your catalogue, a bespoke bundle, a service fee, a one-off product
- Apply a manual discount to the whole order or to individual lines, either as a percentage or a fixed amount
- Attach the order to an existing customer record or create a new one on the fly
- Add internal notes and tags so your team can track where the negotiation is up to
- Send an invoice directly from the draft order, which emails the customer a secure checkout link where they can pay by card or whatever payment methods you’ve got enabled, no need for them to build the cart themselves
- Set a payment due date, useful for wholesale terms like net 14 or net 30
- Mark it as paid manually if payment happens outside Shopify (bank transfer, purchase order terms)
For most standard-Shopify merchants handling occasional custom quotes, this is genuinely enough. A staff member takes the enquiry, builds a draft order with the negotiated pricing, and sends the invoice link. The buyer gets a proper checkout experience, the order lands correctly in your reporting, and there’s no separate quoting tool to maintain.
The limitation is scale and self-service. Draft orders are a manual, one-at-a-time tool. There’s no customer-facing “request a quote” button that automatically creates a draft, no company-level pricing that persists across orders, and no way for a returning wholesale customer to see their negotiated rate without you rebuilding it each time.
Option 2: Shopify’s Native B2B Feature (Shopify Plus)
If you’re on Shopify Plus, Shopify’s native B2B functionality is a genuinely different tier of tooling, built specifically for wholesale relationships that recur rather than one-off quotes. It centres on a few core objects:
- Company profiles, a company can have multiple contacts (locations, buyers, approvers) under one account, rather than treating every buyer as an isolated customer
- Custom price lists, you can assign a specific company a catalogue-wide or product-specific price list that overrides your standard pricing, so a negotiated rate persists across every future order rather than being rebuilt each time
- Quantity rules and volume pricing, minimum order quantities, order increments, and quantity-break pricing (e.g. 10 percent off at 50 units, 15 percent off at 100) can be set natively per company or per catalogue
- Payment terms, net 30/60/90 style terms can be configured per company, with Shopify handling the invoicing and due dates
- A dedicated B2B storefront experience, logged-in company buyers see their negotiated pricing and terms automatically when they browse, rather than needing a quote every time
Native B2B genuinely reduces the need for one-off quote requests for repeat wholesale customers, because the negotiated pricing lives in the platform once it’s set up. Where it still doesn’t fully replace a quote process is the initial negotiation, a brand-new prospective wholesale buyer still needs a way to say “we’re interested, here’s what we’d want to order, what can you do on price” before you set up their company profile and price list. That first step is still usually an enquiry form, an email, or a request-a-quote app feeding into your sales process.
Option 3: Request-a-Quote Apps
For merchants on standard Shopify (without access to native B2B) who want a proper “request a quote” button on product or cart pages, dedicated apps from the Shopify App Store fill this role. Broadly, they let you:
- Replace or supplement the “Add to cart” button with a “Request a quote” action on selected products or the whole catalogue
- Let customers build a quote cart, submit it with notes, and receive a response through the app
- Some generate a draft order automatically on the backend once a quote is approved, keeping it tied into native Shopify order flow
- Hide pricing entirely for logged-out visitors, which some wholesale-only or trade-only stores need for confidentiality reasons
The trade-off is cost and complexity, you’re adding a paid app and another moving part to maintain, and the quality varies a lot between apps in terms of how cleanly they hand off into an actual Shopify order versus just being a glorified contact form. For merchants who need frequent quote requests but aren’t on Plus (or don’t want to be, given the higher cost tier), this is usually the pragmatic middle ground between manual draft orders and native B2B.
A Practical Workflow: Enquiry to Converted Order
Regardless of which tool you’re using, the underlying process for a custom pricing negotiation looks roughly the same:
- Capture the enquiry properly. Whether it’s a quote app, a wholesale enquiry form, or a straight email, get the essentials up front: products, quantities, delivery location, and timeframe. Vague enquiries waste a full round-trip just clarifying basics.
- Qualify the buyer. Confirm they’re a genuine business (ABN, trade references, or just a quick sanity check on order size) before you spend time on custom pricing, this matters more for B2B than consumer sales, where a tyre-kicker costs you real time.
- Build the pricing. Decide your negotiated rate based on volume, margin floor, and your existing tier structure. If you’re on Plus with company price lists, this is where you’d set or adjust that customer’s list; otherwise this becomes the pricing you’ll enter into a draft order.
- Create the draft order (or quote) with full transparency. Line items, quantities, agreed price per unit, any custom line items or fees, and payment terms clearly stated. Add internal notes so anyone on your team can pick the thread up.
- Send the invoice or quote for confirmation. Draft orders let you send a proper checkout link; quote apps typically notify the buyer to review and approve.
- Follow up on a schedule, not randomly. Wholesale buyers often compare multiple suppliers, a follow-up at day 2 and day 5 converts more than one at day 10.
- Convert and tag. Once paid or confirmed, make sure the order is tagged (wholesale, custom-quote, or by account) so your reporting and any future re-order process can find it easily.
- If it’s a repeat buyer, formalise it. Move them into a proper company profile and price list if you’re on Plus, or save the pricing terms in their customer notes/tags on standard Shopify so the next quote takes minutes, not a full renegotiation.
When to Bring In a Specialist
Draft orders will get a small-to-mid volume of wholesale enquiries handled competently with zero extra cost. Where merchants tend to hit friction is scale, once you’re processing more than a handful of custom quotes a week, juggling pricing tiers across dozens of accounts, or trying to decide whether the jump to Shopify Plus and native B2B actually pays for itself against a quote app plus standard Shopify. That decision genuinely depends on order volume, how much of your business is wholesale versus retail, and how much manual admin your team can absorb before it becomes the bottleneck. If you’re weighing that up, or want your existing quote-to-order workflow properly built out, company profiles, price lists, quantity rules, and the storefront experience that goes with them, that’s the sort of build covered under Shopify wholesale ecommerce solutions, matched to whichever plan tier actually makes sense for your order volume.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I offer custom B2B pricing on standard Shopify without upgrading to Plus?
Yes. Draft orders (Orders > Drafts) let you build a custom-priced order for any customer on any Shopify plan, including per-line price overrides and manual discounts. What you don’t get without Plus is native company profiles, persistent price lists, and a self-service B2B storefront experience, those are Plus-only features.
What’s the actual difference between a draft order and Shopify’s native B2B feature?
A draft order is a one-off manual order your team builds for a single transaction. Native B2B (Shopify Plus) is a persistent system, company profiles, saved price lists, and quantity rules, so a negotiated rate applies automatically to every future order from that buyer without you rebuilding it each time.
Do request-a-quote apps replace the need for draft orders?
Not usually, most quote apps generate a draft order behind the scenes once a quote is approved, so they sit on top of the native feature rather than replacing it. The app handles the customer-facing “request a quote” experience; the draft order still does the actual order-building work.
How do I stop retail customers from seeing my wholesale pricing?
On Shopify Plus, native B2B pricing only shows to logged-in company accounts, so retail visitors never see wholesale rates. On standard Shopify, this typically requires a request-a-quote or wholesale app that can hide pricing for logged-out or non-approved customers, since native Shopify doesn’t have a built-in way to segment pricing visibility by customer type.
How long does it typically take to set up a proper B2B quote workflow on Shopify?
For a straightforward draft-order-based process on standard Shopify, it’s mostly a matter of documenting the workflow and training staff, often a week or two. A full native B2B setup on Plus, with company profiles, price lists, and quantity rules properly configured, is a bigger project and typically takes longer depending on how many pricing tiers and accounts need to be migrated in.
Ready to sort out your wholesale quote process?
If custom pricing negotiations are eating up your team’s time or falling through the cracks between email and Shopify, book a Shopify strategy call and we’ll help you work out whether draft orders, a quote app, or native B2B is the right fit for where your wholesale business actually is right now.
