Wholesale buyers do not shop like retail customers, and their invoicing expectations are different in almost every way: company accounts instead of individual profiles, net terms instead of instant payment, and consolidated statements instead of one invoice per order. This guide covers the full setup, end to end, from configuring accounts through to deciding whether you actually need Shopify Plus to run it properly, or whether a standard plan with the right invoicing app already gets you most of the way there.
Wholesale Invoicing vs. Retail Invoicing
A retail invoice confirms a single transaction paid immediately by an individual. A wholesale invoice represents a business-to-business transaction that may be paid weeks later, referenced against a purchase order, and billed to a company rather than a person acting purely on their own behalf.
What Changes When Your Buyer Is a Business
Wholesale invoicing needs to account for negotiated pricing tiers, purchase order references, payment terms, and often tax exemption status, none of which apply to a typical retail order placed by an individual consumer paying immediately by card. Getting any of these wrong is a common reason repeat wholesale orders stall after a promising first sale that seemed to go smoothly at the time. Our guide on invoice versus receipt distinctions covers the document-level differences in more depth, including why a receipt alone is never sufficient for a genuine wholesale transaction expecting proper documentation.
Setting Up Company Accounts and Locations
Shopify’s B2B features let you group buyers under a company profile with one or more locations, each with its own pricing, terms, and contacts authorized to place orders on the company’s behalf rather than as individuals.
Set up a company account for each wholesale buyer, assign the correct location details, and confirm which contacts within that company are authorized to place orders and at what approval level if the buyer’s own internal process requires layered sign-off before an order is finalized. This structure is what everything else in this guide builds on top of, so it is worth getting right from the start rather than adding structure retroactively once several accounts are already active and harder to reorganize cleanly.
For buyers with multiple physical locations ordering independently, setting up each as its own location under the same company profile keeps pricing and terms consistent while still allowing separate shipping addresses and separate order histories per site, which most multi-location wholesale buyers expect as standard practice.
Configuring Net Payment Terms
Net terms let a wholesale buyer receive goods and pay later, on a schedule agreed in advance rather than at the moment of checkout the way a typical retail order works from start to finish.
Net 30/60/90 and Due-on-Fulfillment
Shopify supports net 15, 30, 45, 60, and 90 day terms, along with due-on-fulfillment, configured at the company location level so different buyers can carry different terms based on what was individually negotiated with each one during the original sales conversation. Once assigned, the buyer sees their agreed term as a payment option at checkout, and no payment is collected until the invoice comes due according to that schedule rather than immediately at the point of sale. Our related guide on net invoicing and payment terms for wholesale covers this configuration step by step, including how to decide which term length fits a given buyer relationship and their typical payment behavior.
New wholesale relationships often start on shorter terms, net 15 rather than net 60, with the option to extend once a track record of on-time payment has been established. This graduated approach protects your own cash flow during the early, less certain stage of a buyer relationship while still leaving room to offer more favorable terms as trust builds over successive orders.
Generating Compliant Wholesale Invoices
Once terms and company accounts are in place, the invoice itself needs to reflect the agreement correctly, or the entire setup effort up to this point does not actually translate into a usable document once it reaches the buyer.
PO Numbers, Tax Exemption, and Wholesale Pricing
A wholesale invoice should display the buyer’s PO reference clearly, apply their negotiated pricing tier rather than standard retail pricing, and reflect tax-exempt status where a valid exemption certificate or VAT number is on file with your records. InvoiceForge pulls this information directly from the order and company location data, so nothing needs to be entered manually per invoice, reducing the chance of a typo or an outdated price sneaking onto a document a buyer’s finance team is about to review closely before approving payment. Our guide on adding PO numbers to Shopify invoices covers that specific field in detail, and international buyers often need currency handled correctly too, covered in our multi-currency invoicing guide.
It is worth periodically auditing a sample of recent wholesale invoices against the actual negotiated terms on file for each account. Pricing agreements drift over time as sales conversations evolve, and catching a mismatch during a routine check is considerably less awkward than having a buyer catch it first on an invoice they were about to pay.
Consolidating Multiple Orders Into One Statement
Wholesale buyers placing frequent orders often prefer one monthly statement over a dozen separate invoices arriving throughout the month, each requiring its own separate approval step on their end.
Monthly Billing for Recurring Wholesale Buyers
Consolidated billing groups a company’s orders within a defined period into a single invoice or statement, which reduces the administrative burden on the buyer’s accounts payable team and can shorten your own payment cycle since there is one approval to chase instead of many separate ones scattered across the month at different times. This works best when a company account is locked to a single currency, since orders across multiple currencies cannot be cleanly consolidated into one clear statement without introducing confusing conversion math into a document that is supposed to simplify the buyer’s review process, not complicate it further.
Consolidated statements also give you a natural moment to flag any outstanding balances from earlier in the period, rather than relying entirely on separate reminder emails to carry that message. A single monthly document that clearly shows current charges alongside anything still unpaid from a prior cycle tends to get faster attention than a string of individual reminders arriving throughout the month.
Standard Plan vs. Shopify Plus: What You Actually Need
Native Shopify B2B features like company accounts and net terms are Shopify Plus capabilities, which raises a fair question for stores not yet on that plan and wondering whether wholesale is even accessible to them at their current stage.
Running Wholesale Without Native B2B Features
Stores on a standard Shopify plan can still run a functional wholesale operation using draft orders, customer tags for pricing, and an invoicing app that supports PO numbers, net terms language, and tax exemption manually where Shopify’s own native tools do not cover it at that plan level. This is more hands-on than native Shopify Plus B2B, but it is a legitimate way to validate wholesale demand before committing to a Plus-level plan and its associated cost, especially for a store still testing whether wholesale is worth building out as a full second channel alongside its existing retail business.
Many stores that eventually move to Shopify Plus for its native B2B features started exactly this way, running a manual wholesale process long enough to prove out demand and refine their pricing and terms before investing in the higher-tier plan. Treating the standard-plan approach as a genuine pilot, rather than a permanent compromise, keeps the decision about when to upgrade grounded in actual order volume rather than a guess made before any real wholesale revenue existed.
Once a buyer disputes a wholesale invoice or needs a correction, our guide on handling invoice disputes and corrections for B2B customers and on setting up automatic reminders for unpaid invoices cover the next steps in maintaining that wholesale relationship over the long run, well beyond the initial setup covered here.
Wholesale invoicing done right is what makes buyers trust that your operation can handle their volume, not just their first order placed somewhat cautiously to test the relationship before committing to anything larger. InvoiceForge supports PO numbers, net terms, tax exemption, and multi-currency invoicing on any Shopify plan, standard or Plus, without requiring the higher-tier plan just to get compliant documentation in place from day one.