Wholesale and dealer ordering
We build the side your dealers use, not a consumer store with a discount on it
Then the part that decides whether reps stop taking orders by email.
- B2B setup
- Company accounts
- Price lists
- Net terms
- Bulk ordering
Shopify agency Orange County
Shopify agency Orange County, we build around how you sell, direct, wholesale or both
Design, build, CRO and your wholesale side. One piece or all of it, with a scope, a number and a date in writing first.
- 150+
- Stores built
- $400M+
- Revenue generated
- 8+
- Years on the platform
- 4.9★
- Average client rating
We've built 150+ stores. Here are a few.
Distribution, performance apparel, trade supply. Most sell two ways at once.
Almost every guide to selling wholesale on Shopify is written for a brand that sells direct and is adding dealers.
Round here it's the other way round. The shop accounts are older than the website, and the direct store got built later because everyone was building one.
That changes what you build, and which plan you need. That answer moved in April.
In short
Ecomm Wizards is a Shopify agency Orange County brands hire for design, build, CRO and wholesale. We work on Shopify and Shopify Plus. Most stores we're handed here have a dealer channel attached, so we map yours first.
Your oldest revenue still arrives as a purchase order
Surf, skate, moto, outdoor. The categories this county grew up on sold through shops first, and plenty still take more money that way than direct.
So there are two buyers on your one catalog. One buys a single item at full price on a phone. The other buys four hundred units twice a year, on terms, through a rep.
Same products, different needs. Most stores here were built for one and patched for the other.
Three brands that sell direct and through the trade
Saddleback
- Vertical
- Cycling distribution and wholesale
- What was built
- A Shopify Plus B2B store replacing a wholesale portal, with a credit application and CSV bulk ordering
- Outcome
- +881% B2B sales growth in month one, 9.54% B2B conversion rate
Feetures
- Vertical
- Performance apparel
- What was built
- A theme rebuilt with variant-aware product pages and metafield-driven automation
- Outcome
- +32% add-to-cart rate, +19% average order value
Henchman
- Vertical
- Trade supply and B2B
- What was built
- An Adobe Commerce exit onto Shopify Plus with self-service trade ordering, tiered price books and an ERP
- Outcome
- +58% online revenue, 45% lower platform cost
The plan question changed in April, and the answer is a number you can count
On 2 April 2026 Shopify moved most B2B features off Plus. Company profiles, net terms, volume pricing, ACH and vaulted cards now run on Basic, Grow and Advanced.
So "you need Plus for wholesale" stopped being true this year, and plenty of advice still says it.
What stayed on Plus is narrow enough to test yourself. Unlimited catalogs, assigning one straight to a company or location, deposits and partial payments. Below Plus the cap is three active catalogs across all your B2B markets.
So count your price lists. Three or fewer and the plan isn't your problem. Pricing that differs per dealer, and it is.
Then read the list nobody quotes from. Shopify's docs say a B2B order can't use Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Amazon Pay. No subscriptions, no local delivery, no pickup. And it stops at 500 line items.
That last one is a real ceiling here: a preseason order across a full size run gets close.
On a blended store most of those can't be on for one customer type and off for the other. Which makes the first decision structural: one store, or two.
What we do
Four things we do, and you can take one or all four
You've picked the platform, so the question is which piece. A Shopify agency Orange County engagement should let you buy them separately. Every row below already had customers.
Store design and build
We rebuild the storefront around how the catalog is really bought
- Theme development
- Custom development
- Design systems
- Metafields
Migration and replatforming
We move you off the old platform and bring the trade accounts
- Platform migration
- Price book mapping
- Redirects
- Parallel running
Integrations and the work after launch
We connect the store to the systems already running the business
- ERP and inventory
- Order automation
- Reporting
- Ongoing support
Who we build for here
Three shapes of catalog this county runs on. Each breaks a different part of the wholesale setup, and a proposal should say which you are.
Action sports and moto
Two selling seasons ordered months ahead, against a catalog that isn't finished yet.
What breaks first: Preseason quantities sit in a spreadsheet beside the store, so the site never knows what's committed.
Apparel that sells through shops
Deep size and color runs: a dealer buys a curve, a customer buys one unit.
What breaks first: The run is modeled as consumer variants, so ordering one pack means thirty lines by hand.
Parts and hard goods
Fitment decides what a buyer can order, and getting it wrong means a return, not a refund.
What breaks first: Fitment data lives in the theme instead of metafields, so it never reaches the dealer side.
Three ways to run wholesale beside your direct store
The same eight decisions under each setup, so you can see what each costs before picking. The rows are what goes wrong, not features.
| The decision | Separate B2B store | Gated on your main store | Third-party portal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Index leakage and duplicate catalogOne catalog on two paths. If a gated collection renders to a crawler, trade prices get indexed. | Clean: noindexed second store | The risk lives here | Clean: not your domain |
| Price-list managementThree active catalogs across all B2B markets below Plus. Count yours before this becomes an argument about plans. | Two sets to keep in step | One set, catalogs on top | Two systems and a sync |
| MAP control at store levelNo plan enforces MAP. A store controls who sees which price; the rest is your dealer agreement. | Behind login only | Depends on the gate holding | Never public |
| Account approval and gatingOn every paid plan since April, so no longer a reason to buy Plus. | Company accounts you approve | Same, one login | The portal's own flow |
| Minimums and net termsQuantity rules, price breaks and net terms on every paid plan. Deposits and partial payments stay Plus-only. | Native | Native | Native to the portal |
| MaintenanceGating looks cheapest until the conditional logic spreads and every direct-side change is tested twice. | Two themes, two deploys | One theme, full of conditions | One theme plus an integration |
| What the dealer experiencesOn all three, a B2B order can't use Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Amazon Pay, and stops at 500 lines. | Purpose-built, nothing consumer in it | Familiar, carries consumer furniture | Whatever the portal is |
| Disruption to dealers you already haveDealers are a relationship, not traffic. Whoever quotes this should say how the first order after cutover happens. | New URL and login | Least disruptive | Retraining on somebody else's UI |
Read the first and last rows together and the trade is obvious. Gating is kindest to the dealers you have and hardest to keep clean in search. A separate store inverts it.
The middle rows stopped deciding anything in April. So the questions run: how many price lists, how loud the search risk, how much retraining. The plan falls out of those.
Anyone on your Shopify agency Orange County shortlist should walk these eight rows with you before showing a design.
Four things to settle before anybody quotes you
- How many genuinely different price lists you run. Three or fewer changes the plan you need.
- Whether a logged-out crawler can reach a trade price today. Check before anyone redesigns.
- Your largest preseason order, in line items. The cap is 500.
What eleven brands here actually do
Nine of the eleven run Shopify on the direct side, so this is a real choice for you, not a hypothetical one.
Six expose a dealer channel an outsider can place. Three run a separate B2B store on a subdomain. Two gate a section of the main store. One routes to a third-party portal.
Five expose nothing. Recorded as not observable, not as none: a channel behind a rep leaves no trace.
The separate store is both the most common answer and the dearest to keep. Nobody got there by comparing eight rows.
Your dealer locator, and the markup nobody uses
Seven of the eleven publish a locator. None marks up a single dealer. Three emit their own Organization and nothing else. One emits its own headquarters address, correctly. Three emit nothing. One renders 724 dealer addresses as plain text with nothing describing them.
That looks like an oversight and mostly isn't. The obvious fix is to mark each shop up as a LocalBusiness under your own name, which asserts the shop is you. Google's guidelines say structured data must truly represent the page and must not misrepresent ownership or affiliation.
So list them as text and keep your Organization to yourself. If you do mark dealers up, each is its own named entity, never an address hanging off your brand. We run that rule here, which is why this page carries no address.
What working with us looks like
Several agencies you're comparing us with are down the freeway. We aren't, so here's what we offer.
The dealer list is yours and stays yours
Companies, price lists, terms, the repository. All in your accounts from day one, so nothing is handed back.
We talk to whoever takes the orders today
Usually a rep or a service lead. They know the part nobody wrote down.
Cutovers stay out of your ordering window
Preseason is the worst fortnight of your year to change how orders are placed, so we schedule round it.
Scope, number and date before anyone starts
If one moves, it goes back through a quote before a developer sees it.
What you're probably thinking
“Our reps take the orders and it works. Why put it on the website?”
If it works, keep it. We'd rather say so than sell you a portal.
The question is what your reps spend preseason doing. If it's typing orders somebody already decided on, move that. If it's selling, leave it alone.
“Shopify's B2B isn't a real wholesale platform.”
It wasn't, and for some businesses it still isn't.
What changed is the floor: company accounts, terms, volume pricing and vaulted cards came off Plus in April.
Where it runs out is per-dealer pricing beyond three catalogs, deposits, and quote-to-order. Check those against your list before anyone argues platform.
“Won't opening a portal upset the dealers we've had for years?”
It can, and the ones who've been with you longest are likeliest to mind.
The version that goes badly is a new login appearing unannounced the week orders are due. The one that works gives the same terms, a shorter path and a person to call.
Ask every Shopify agency Orange County shortlist how that first order gets placed.
What it costs and how it runs
Week one is the eight rows above, run against your store, not a questionnaire. Price lists counted, the gate tested logged out, your biggest order measured in line items.
That produces a recommendation with a plan tier attached, and you keep it either way. Then a scope, a number and a date. The build order is price lists, then accounts and terms, then the storefront.
Builds run $5,000 to $50,000 depending on how much is custom, and the assessment alone costs a fraction. Any Shopify agency Orange County quote should price the two apart.
Shopify agency Orange County FAQs
Behind the login, not behind a script. A price hidden with CSS is still in the HTML, and the HTML is what search engines read. Dealer pricing should come from a Shopify catalog a logged-out request never receives. Test yours with no session.
Both work, and the table above is the comparison. One store is cheaper to run and kinder to the dealers you have. Two is cleaner in search. What decides it is how much conditional logic your theme can carry.
It isn't, and that's worth being plain about. No Shopify plan has native MAP enforcement. A store only controls who sees which price, so trade pricing sits behind an approved account and never renders publicly. Enforcement is your dealer agreement, and that belongs with counsel.
Ours is $5,000 to $50,000 for a build, fixed before anyone starts. The wholesale assessment alone costs a fraction, and it's the thing to buy first: it tells you whether the build is worth buying.
No, and several agencies you're comparing us with do. We're remote, working with brands across the US, and we'd rather say so now than in week three. What we bring instead is the table above.
No. Wholesale takes up this page because it's what gets built wrong most expensively here. If you sell direct only, the design, build and conversion work is the same job.
Yes, though nobody here is local. The work is remote anyway: your dealer side gets built and tested, not talked through in a room. We do it for brands across the state.
Next step
Send us a trade URL
You already know whether a dealer can reorder without emailing somebody.
Tell us what your trade side runs on. We'll work the eight rows and hand you the findings:
- What a logged-out request sees of your trade pricing today.
- How many real price lists you have, and which plan that puts you on.
- Which of the three setups fits, and what the other two cost.
It stops at the findings. The build is quoted separately and you can walk away.
No charge, and the write-up is yours either way.
A developer who has built one replies inside a working day.
