Why Your Scope Is Probably Out of Date
Until 2026, a wholesale portal on Shopify meant Plus, a third-party app, or custom code. That is no longer the starting position, and a spec written on the old assumption quietly pays a contractor to rebuild the platform.
- What moved to every plan. Company profiles, buyer contacts, volume pricing, net payment terms, and self-serve ordering, at no extra cost on Basic, Grow, and Advanced.
- What Plus still holds. Unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment to a company, partial payments and deposits, and expansion stores.
- The three-catalog ceiling. Below Plus, you get three catalogs, assigned through Markets rather than to an individual buyer. That line decides more portal architectures than any other.
- What did not change. Shopify still models the order, not the negotiation, the credit decision, or the approval that comes before it.
Rewriting the scope against this list is usually the cheapest hour of the whole project.
Where Native B2B Stops
Use this as page one of the brief. A contractor who cannot say which column a requirement sits in has not read your plan tier.
| Portal requirement | Native in 2026 | What a contractor still builds |
| Company accounts and buyer contacts | On every paid plan | Approval chains Shopify does not model |
| Customer-specific pricing | Catalogs, three below Plus | A fourth tier, or prices pushed from an ERP |
| Net terms and invoicing | Automatic due dates and reminders | Credit limit enforcement at checkout |
| Quote requests | Not native | The whole request and approval workflow |
| A rep ordering for a buyer | Draft orders only | A rep-facing ordering interface |
Two of those five rows are still a genuine build. If a quote treats all five as custom work, you are paying to recreate settings.
The Canadian Items That Belong in the Scope
These rarely appear in a portal brief and always appear in launch week.
- Buyer data handling. Company records, credit terms, and contacts are commercial personal data. PIPEDA applies, and Quebec Law 25 adds consent and disclosure duties if you have buyers there.
- French portal content. A gated portal is still customer-facing. Selling to Quebec businesses means French of equal quality in the catalog, the checkout, and the documents the portal generates.
- Tax on wholesale. Prices are usually shown without tax, and GST, HST, and PST apply at checkout by destination. Confirm exemption certificate handling before launch, not after.
- Dual pricing. Distributors buying in USD need price, rounding, and the freight threshold to agree in both currencies.
None of these is difficult. All of them are expensive when discovered after the portal is live.
What Belongs in the Contract, Not the Brief
A contractor engagement fails on ownership more often than on code.
- Repository and app ownership. The app is created in the Shopify Dev Dashboard and installed on your store. Name who owns the account, the code, and deploy access.
- Plan tier in writing. Custom apps containing Shopify Function APIs install only on Plus. If the quote assumes a Function, the plan is part of the price.
- Handover conditions. Documentation, credentials, and a working deploy from a machine that is not the contractor’s.
- Data processing terms. Where buyer data is stored, who can access it, and what happens to it when the engagement ends.
- A retirement list. The requirements you both agreed not to build, recorded so they are not quietly reintroduced in a change request.
The first and the last items are the ones that decide whether the next contractor starts from your code or from scratch.
Working with Binary Future on a Wholesale Portal
Binary Future is a Shopify Plus Partner agency in Toronto. We usually start a portal project by shortening it: every requirement is mapped against what is native on your plan, then we price only the gap. Provincial tax handling, Quebec bilingual requirements, and buyer data obligations sit inside the scope from the first version.
Where the gap is real, it is normally quote workflow, credit rules, rep-facing ordering, and ERP sync, which is an integration project rather than a portal project.
See our B2B Shopify development and custom Shopify app development for how we build wholesale on Shopify.
