What is B2B? Meaning, examples, and how it works on Shopify

Two types of Shopify merchants tend to search "what is B2B." The first is building a new business and weighing whether to sell to consumers, to other businesses, or both. The second already runs a DTC store and keeps getting the same signal: wholesale inquiries sitting in the inbox, bulk reorder requests, or a revenue ceiling that a new sales channel could break through.

The timing matters here. In April 2026, Shopify opened its native B2B features to all plans, not just Shopify Plus. Company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing, and B2B catalogs are now available to merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced. That removed the biggest barrier for small and mid-sized stores that wanted to sell wholesale but couldn't justify a Plus subscription to do it. If you've been waiting for the right moment to explore B2B, the platform just made that decision a lot easier.

The market backs it up too. Global B2B ecommerce is projected to hit $36.16 trillion in 2026, growing at 14.5% a year. That's several times larger than B2C.

This guide is for both audiences. If you're new to B2B, it starts with the fundamentals: what the term means, who B2B customers actually are, and how the transactions work. If you're already selling DTC and exploring wholesale, it covers what changes when you add a B2B channel, the challenges you'll run into, and how to set it up on Shopify without building a second store.

B2B stands for business-to-business. The meaning of B2B is pretty straightforward: it describes any commercial transaction where one business sells to another business, instead of selling directly to an individual consumer. The full form of B2B is simply "business-to-business."

Selling a candle to a shopper through your online store? That's B2C (business-to-consumer). Selling 500 candles to a boutique chain that plans to resell them? That's B2B.

In eCommerce, B2B covers everything from wholesale product orders to SaaS subscriptions to service contracts between companies. If the buyer is a business and the seller is a business, it's a B2B transaction. That's the B2B business meaning in its simplest form.

You'll run into a few related acronyms along the way:

• B2C: business-to-consumer. Selling directly to shoppers.
• B2B2C: business-to-business-to-consumer. Manufacturers sell through retailers to reach shoppers.
• DTC: direct-to-consumer. A subset of B2C where the brand skips retailers entirely.
• B2G: business-to-government. Selling to public sector buyers.

B2B is bigger than most people realize:

• The global B2B ecommerce market hit around $32 trillion in 2025
• It's forecast to reach $36.16 trillion in 2026, a 14.5% compound annual growth rate
• Some analysts project it to climb to $61.66 trillion by 2031

The B2B industry dwarfs B2C in total transaction volume, and B2B trade continues to shift online faster than most merchants expect. We're not talking about a niche here. We're talking about the larger part of how commerce actually works.

The easiest way to understand how B2B works is to compare the purchasing process on each side.

B2C purchasing process:

1. Shopper sees a product (ad, social, search)
2. Browses your store, checks the product
3. Adds to cart and pays, usually in the same session or within days
4. Done. Maybe they come back, maybe they don't.

The purchasing journey in B2B eCommerce

B2B purchasing process (the B2B customer journey):

1. A business identifies a need (e.g., "we need a supplier for wholesale candles")
2. A team researches vendors, often 3 to 5 options, sometimes more
3. Multiple stakeholders weigh in: procurement, finance, operations, and sometimes IT
4. Samples, quotes, or demos are requested
5. Pricing and payment terms get negotiated (Net 30, volume discounts, contract length)
6. The deal closes. Onboarding and first order shipped. Sometimes sellers even need to split the order into multiple shipments due to extremely large quantities.
7. Reorders become recurring. The relationship is ongoing, not one-and-done.

The purchasing journey in B2C eCommerce

Here's how the two models compare side by side:

Notice the gap. B2C is a sprint: discover, decide, buy. B2B is a marathon: research, evaluate, negotiate, commit, then reorder for months or years. That difference shapes everything. How you price, how you market, how you support, and how your store needs to work.

B2B customers aren't individuals scrolling at 11 pm deciding whether to treat themselves. They're buying committees: groups of people who weigh in before anyone clicks "buy."

A typical B2B purchase involves procurement, operations, finance, owners, and IT (for software). Each person asks different questions:

• Finance wants to know if it fits the budget
• Ops wants to know if it'll actually work day-to-day
• IT wants to know how it integrates

For enterprises at a large scale, there are even levels of buyers. Junior buyers might only have permission to request quotes, while senior buyers can actually make an agreement with sellers. The deal only closes when the group agrees.

That's why B2B sales cycles run long. Months on average, not minutes.

Four main categories of B2B buyers (sometimes called B2B users in SaaS contexts) show up across industries:

• Producers: manufacturers buying raw materials, parts, or components they'll turn into finished products.
• Resellers: wholesalers, distributors, and retailers buying goods to sell on.
• Institutions: hospitals, schools, universities, nonprofits.
• Governments: public sector buyers, from local councils to national agencies.

What they all have in common is that they care about reliability, pricing stability, volume discounts, payment terms (Net 30, 60, or 90), dedicated account support, and long-term relationships. These aren't impulse buyers.

Today's buyers do a lot of the work themselves before a sales rep is ever involved. We can call it "B2B self-service." Recent research found that 83% of B2B buyers define their needs before contacting a vendor, and 94% now use AI tools in their research process. By the time a buyer reaches out, they usually know what they want. Your job is to confirm the fit and remove friction, not to sell from scratch.

B2B isn't one model. It's a family of them. Here are the types of B2B businesses you'll run into most, with examples of how each works in practice.

Produces goods and sells them to wholesalers, retailers, or other manufacturers. A shoe brand producing 10,000 pairs and shipping them to a boutique chain is a textbook example. The B2B products here are the shoes themselves, sold in bulk. The boutiques mark them up and sell to consumers. That first transaction, manufacturer to boutique, is B2B.

Another layer: a textile mill sells fabric to a clothing brand. The brand sews the fabric into a jacket. The jacket gets sold to a shopper. Two layers of commerce. The first is B2B, the second is B2C.

Joor as a leading platform, connecting over 14,000 brands across 150 countries.

Buys in bulk from manufacturers and resells to retailers or smaller businesses. A coffee wholesaler selling 50kg of beans every week to 20 cafes across the city is a classic B2B vs B2C example: each cafe reorder is B2B. The latte you buy from the cafe afterward is B2C. Same product, different buyer, different transaction type.

Home Armenia imports and distributes coffee beans for over 60 years.

Subscription software built for businesses. Shopify is a textbook B2B company. It doesn't sell products to shoppers. It sells the software that powers stores. The same goes for Klaviyo, HubSpot, Slack, and pretty much every app in the Shopify App Store, Qikify included. The customer is a business, the product is software, and the billing is recurring.

Is Shopify B2B or B2C? It's B2B. Shopify's customers are merchants, not shoppers.

Agencies, consultancies, freelancers, professional services. A marketing agency running ads for a DTC brand is B2B. So is the law firm that wrote their terms of service. Accounting firms, design studios, logistics providers, consultants. All B2B. The product is expertise, not a physical thing.

Platforms that connect business buyers with business sellers. Alibaba, Amazon Business, and Faire are the biggest names. B2B marketplaces are one of the fastest-growing B2B ecommerce channels, expanding at close to 14% CAGR.

Much of B2B international trade flows through these platforms. A clothing brand in the US sourcing fabric from a mill in Vietnam, or a European retailer ordering electronics from a manufacturer in Shenzhen. B2B trade across borders makes up a massive share of global commerce.

Brands that sell to both businesses and consumers through the same store. This used to be awkward to run, but it's become increasingly common on Shopify. It's probably the B2B business model most merchants reading this will end up in.

Most people recognize the big names across these models: Shopify, Salesforce, Intel, Alibaba, Amazon Business, HubSpot, and Xero. What's worth noticing is how many everyday businesses quietly run on B2B transactions most shoppers never see.

Wholesale vs B2B: what's the difference? Wholesale is a type of B2B, not a synonym. All wholesale is B2B, but not all B2B is wholesale. Wholesale means selling products in bulk to resellers who mark them up and sell to consumers. B2B is the broader category that also includes SaaS, services, raw materials, and any other business-to-business transaction.

Learn more: Shopify wholesale: A practical guide to B2B setup and management

The meaning of B2B sales is different from what most people picture. It's not a single transaction. It's a process, and often a long one. Here's the B2B sales process broken into four broad steps:

Find and qualify. Lead generation through SEO, content, LinkedIn, events, or referrals. Then checking whether the lead has the need, budget, and authority to buy.

Discover and propose. A call or demo to understand the buyer's actual problem, followed by a custom quote.

Negotiate and close. Price, payment terms, delivery, contract length. Then signatures and onboarding.

Grow the account. Reorders, upsells, renewals. This is where B2B profitability really happens. Most of the money comes after the first sale, not from it.

A dedicated guide on B2B sales tactics is coming. This piece is just the shape of the process.

If you're already selling DTC and considering adding a wholesale channel, the shift isn't just "bigger orders." It's a different operating system.

In DTC, your store is built around individual shoppers who browse, add to cart, and pay. In B2B, you're serving a purchasing workflow that touches every part of your store:

• Company accounts need to be registered and approved
• Catalogs need to be gated by customer group
• Quotes need to go back and forth before a price is locked
• Finance needs to handle credit limits, net terms, and invoices

Your store has to support all of that without breaking the consumer experience running alongside it.

That's the core change. You're not just selling to a different audience. You're building (or buying) the infrastructure to match how business buyers actually purchase. Here's how that plays out:

Your pricing model flips. DTC is one price, publicly listed. B2B is tiered: different customers get different rates based on volume, relationship, and negotiation. You need a system that handles account-specific pricing and custom catalogs without exposing wholesale rates to your retail shoppers.

Order frequency becomes predictable. DTC revenue spikes and dips with launches, ads, and seasons. B2B accounts reorder on a schedule: weekly, monthly, quarterly. That predictability makes forecasting and inventory planning way easier.

Relationships replace transactions. A DTC customer might buy once and vanish. A B2B account sticks around for months or years. That means your retention rate climbs, your customer lifetime value goes up, and your acquisition cost per dollar of revenue drops. But it also means you need account management infrastructure: company profiles, buyer permissions, and order history per account.

Payment and finance get more involved. DTC customers pay at checkout. B2B buyers expect Net 30, Net 60, or even Net 90. That means you're floating inventory costs while waiting to get paid. Beyond payment terms, you may need credit limit management, ledger tracking, and invoice generation. Your cash flow and finance operations need to absorb that shift.

Quoting becomes part of the sales flow. DTC doesn't have a negotiation step. B2B often does. Buyers request quotes, you respond with custom pricing, and the deal closes inside a portal or over email. If you're handling this manually, it's manageable at 5 accounts. At 50 or 500, you need a system that automates quote requests, approvals, and conversions to orders.

Marketing shifts from emotion to ROI. DTC marketing is lifestyle-driven: brand stories, social proof, influencer content. B2B marketing is evidence-driven: bulk pricing tables, case studies, ROI calculators, and product specs that help a procurement team justify the purchase internally.

Buyers arrive informed. DTC shoppers often discover your brand for the first time through an ad. B2B buyers have usually done their homework. They've compared vendors, read reviews, and defined their requirements before they ever reach out. By the time a B2B buyer contacts you, they're close to a decision. Your job is to confirm the fit, not pitch from zero.

The challenges look different depending on where you're starting from. A merchant building a B2B business from scratch faces different problems than one adding wholesale to an existing DTC store. Here's how each path breaks down.

If you're building a B2B operation from zero, the challenge isn't just learning how B2B works. It's building everything at once with no existing customer base to fund the ramp-up.

Finding your first accounts takes time. You don't have brand recognition or referrals yet. B2B buyers research vendors thoroughly, and a new business with no reviews, no case studies, and no track record has to work harder to earn trust. Expect to invest heavily in outreach, content, and relationship-building before the first real orders come in.

You're building infrastructure before revenue. A B2B store needs company account registration, approval workflows, tiered pricing, B2B payment terms, and order management all set up before your first wholesale buyer can place an order. That's a real upfront investment in tools, apps, and configuration when cash flow is still at zero.

Cash flow is tight from day one. B2B buyers expect net payment terms (Net 30, 60, or even 90). If you're starting fresh, you may be buying inventory, paying for apps, and covering operational costs weeks or months before any revenue actually lands. Without existing DTC revenue to cushion that gap, cash management is critical.

Pricing strategy has no baseline. DTC merchants expanding into B2B can benchmark wholesale pricing against their existing retail margins. Starting from scratch, you're setting both. Getting tiered pricing wrong early, either too thin or too generous, can lock you into unprofitable relationships that are hard to renegotiate later.

If you already run a DTC store and you're adding a B2B channel, the good news is you have revenue, customers, and a working storefront. The bad news? Your store, your operations, and your team are all built for a different kind of buyer.

Your store needs to serve two audiences at once. Retail shoppers see public pricing. Wholesale buyers need gated access with account-specific rates. Running both from the same Shopify store requires proper segmentation: company accounts, custom catalogs, and buyer-group pricing that doesn't leak into your consumer storefront. Get this wrong and your retail customers see wholesale prices, or your wholesale buyers can't find their catalog at all.

Operations that worked for DTC may not scale for B2B. Picking and packing 200 individual orders is a different workflow than fulfilling 15 bulk orders with custom shipping requirements, purchase order references, and invoice documentation. The systems that run your DTC fulfillment (apps, 3PLs, support tools) may need to be extended or replaced for B2B.

Your team needs different skills. DTC support is reactive: answer tickets, process returns, handle complaints. B2B account management is proactive: onboarding new accounts, negotiating pricing, managing credit, following up on reorders. You may need to hire or retrain for a skillset your current team doesn't have.

Net terms change your cash flow rhythm. If you're used to getting paid at checkout, switching to Net 30/60 for wholesale accounts creates a gap between when you ship and when you get paid. Your DTC revenue can buffer this at first, but as B2B grows, you need a real plan for managing receivables.

On top of whatever path you're on, there's a challenge that applies to everyone.

B2B buyers now expect a self-service experience that feels like consumer ecommerce. They want to:

• Log in and see their account-specific pricing
• Browse a gated catalog with only their approved products
• Place reorders and track shipments on their own
• Do all of this without emailing a sales rep or filling out a PDF order form

(Source: Duos B2B Self-service) Example of how B2B users can manage their members' access

That shift has accelerated fast. The old model of B2B selling (email a rep, get a PDF quote, phone in your order) is being replaced by self-service portals, instant quote engines, and online account management. Merchants who still run B2B through spreadsheets and email threads are losing accounts to competitors who have a proper self-service setup.

The good news: the tools are catching up. Shopify's native B2B features now cover company accounts, payment terms, and catalogs on every plan. And apps like Duos B2B Self-Service fill the remaining gaps, adding quote management, credit tracking, and a full wholesale portal to your existing store. But we'll get to the full Shopify setup in a moment.

If you're running a Shopify store, here's the part worth paying attention to. Shopify now supports B2B features on every plan, not just Shopify Plus. That wasn't true a couple of years ago, and it changes the math for small and mid-sized merchants looking for a B2B ecommerce platform they can actually afford to start on.

Shopify's B2B system is built around companies and company locations. Each company can have multiple locations, and each location gets its own catalogs, payment terms, tax settings, and shipping addresses. When a B2B buyer logs in, they choose their location and see only the pricing and products assigned to them.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Company profiles and customer accounts. You set up wholesale buyers as companies with locations, contacts, and permission levels. Buyers with "location admin" access can place orders, view order history, and submit returns on their own.
• Catalogs and custom pricing. You create catalogs with specific products and pricing, then assign them to groups of companies (via Markets) or directly to individual company locations (Plus only). Up to 25 catalogs per location.
• Net payment terms. Set Net 15, 30, 60, or 90 per company location. Shopify tracks due dates and lets you sort and collect payments as they come due.
• B2B checkout. When a logged-in B2B customer hits checkout, their company info, payment terms, and shipping details auto-populate. You can also require orders to be submitted as drafts for manual review before processing.
• Store setup options. You can run a blended store (B2B and DTC from the same storefront) or a dedicated B2B store (separate storefront, B2B only). Most merchants starting out go blended.

What differs by Shopify plan:

Most B2B features are available on all plans. The key limits on non-Plus plans: a max of 3 active catalog assignments across your B2B markets, no direct catalog assignment to individual companies, and no partial payments or deposits. For stores with a handful of wholesale accounts and a simple pricing structure, that's plenty to get started.

Learn more: Shopify B2B for all plans

The biggest shift: you don't need a separate store to sell B2B. Apps like Duos B2B Self-Service add a full wholesale portal to your existing Shopify storefront:

• Same catalog, different pricing rules
• One admin to manage both B2B and B2C
• Retail customers see your regular store
• Wholesale customers log in and see their custom pricing, account-specific catalog, and reorder history

What makes Duos different from most B2B apps: it's built directly on Shopify's native B2B system, not around it. That means it works with Shopify's company accounts, catalogs, and payment terms out of the box, with no conflicts or workarounds. Everything stays inside the Shopify ecosystem: orders, customers, inventory, analytics. No separate platform to sync, no data living in two places.

Duos takes what Shopify provides natively and extends it to cover the use cases Shopify doesn't handle yet: quote requests, credit management, bulk ordering via CSV or SKU, shopping lists with approval flows, and a full self-service portal your B2B buyers can actually use without contacting your team. For stores with unique requirements, Qikify also offers custom app development to build workflows that off-the-shelf solutions can't cover.

Running B2B and B2C on the same store used to be a headache. It's now the default.

The full setup walkthrough, how to actually build, configure, and launch a B2B channel on Shopify, is a dedicated guide in this series.

Selling B2B is becoming both more accessible and more demanding at the same time. More accessible because platforms like Shopify have opened native B2B features to every plan, the tools to manage company accounts, catalogs, and payment terms are no longer locked behind enterprise pricing. More demanding because B2B buyers in 2026 expect self-service portals, instant quoting, and the same frictionless experience they get as consumers. The bar for "good enough" keeps rising.

If you're starting fresh, the infrastructure cost is lower than it's ever been, but you still need to build trust, nail your pricing, and set up systems before the first order lands. If you're expanding from DTC, you have the advantage of existing revenue and brand recognition, but your store, operations, and team all need to adapt to a buyer who purchases differently than a retail shopper.

Either way, you now know the fundamentals: what B2B means, who the buyers are, how the sales process works, what changes operationally, and what Shopify offers natively. The next step is to pick one path and start small. Set up a few company accounts, create a test catalog with wholesale pricing, and see if the demand you've been sensing actually converts into orders.

Ready to try it?

Duos B2B Self-Service gives your business customers their own login, pricing, and self-service reordering, built right into your existing Shopify store. No second storefront, no custom dev work.

Try Duos B2B free on your Shopify store →