B2B Wholesale Launch: From Zero to £500k in 12 Months

A successful D2C skincare brand had been receiving wholesale enquiries from independent retailers and salons for two years. They'd been turning them down because they had no infrastructure to handle wholesale pricing, trade accounts, or minimum order quantities. With Shopify Plus, we built them a fully featured B2B wholesale channel as a dedicated expansion store — sharing the same product catalogue but with a completely different buying experience.

The B2B Requirements

• Trade account application and approval flow.
• Tiered pricing based on customer group (Stockist, Salon Partner, Distributor).
• Minimum order quantities enforced at product and order level.
• Net 30 payment terms for approved accounts.
• Custom order forms for reorders — eliminating the need to browse collections.
• Volume discount calculator visible on product pages.

Technical Build

We built the B2B store on a Shopify Plus expansion store, keeping it separate from the D2C storefront to avoid pricing leakage and brand confusion. Pricing tiers were managed using customer tags and Shopify Scripts applied at checkout. The trade account application was built as a custom form feeding into a Shopify Flow approval workflow, with approved accounts automatically assigned to the correct pricing tier.

The Order Form Experience

B2B buyers don't shop like consumers. They know what they want, they want to reorder quickly, and they don't need to browse. We built a custom order form page — essentially a spreadsheet-style product list with quantity inputs — that allowed trade customers to build a complete order in under two minutes. This single feature was cited in every post-launch customer interview as the reason they preferred our client over competitors.

“Our trade customers tell us it's the easiest wholesale portal they use. That's a real competitive advantage — it keeps them coming back.”

Results in Year One

• £512,000 in wholesale revenue in the first 12 months.
• 248 approved trade accounts by month 12.
• Average wholesale order value of £840.
• Net 30 default payment terms with 94% on-time payment rate.
• B2B channel now accounts for 28% of total brand revenue.