Shopify made B2B a toggle. The operations are what break. Here are the SOPs to write before your first wholesale order ships.
Shopify turned wholesale into a toggle. In April 2026 it pushed native B2B features to every merchant, so adding a wholesale channel now takes an afternoon of clicking: company accounts, price lists, catalogs, net terms. The setup is not the hard part. The operations are.
Here is what nobody tells you when you bolt wholesale onto a direct-to-consumer store. You are not adding a sales channel. You are adding a second operating model. Different pricing, different fulfillment, different payment timing, different returns, all running through the same team and the same inventory pool. Without documented process, the two models collide.
The collisions are specific and expensive. A buyer's 4,000-unit purchase order jumps the DTC queue during your busiest week. A retailer finds your product 20 percent cheaper on your own site than the price they paid. An account manager promises net-30 terms that nobody told fulfillment or finance about. None of these are pricing problems. They are process problems.
The brands that add wholesale cleanly write the process down before the first order, not after the first fire. Below are the seven SOPs to document first, the decision each one forces you to make, and exactly where it breaks when you skip it.
Write SOPs 1, 3, and 4 first: approval, the fulfillment split, and inventory allocation. Those three cause the most expensive failures when wholesale and DTC share a single store.
DTC and wholesale are opposite shapes of demand. DTC is high-volume and low-value per order, paid instantly, and reasonably predictable day to day. Wholesale is low-volume and high-value per order, paid weeks later on terms, and lumpy: nothing for three weeks, then a single PO larger than a normal DTC day. Point both at the same inventory and the same fulfillment team and they fight for the same resources.
The usual failure points, in roughly the order brands hit them:
These processes drift faster than any others in the business, for one reason. Wholesale almost always starts as a founder-run side channel. The first few accounts get handled personally, in DMs and spreadsheets, and the knowledge never gets written down. Then you hire an account manager and hand them nothing. That gap between how the work is actually done and what is documented is SOP drift, and wholesale is where it does the most damage because the orders are large and the buyers have real bargaining power.
The mechanics on Shopify are straightforward: a buyer requests access through a B2B application form, you review it, and on approval you create the company account, assign a catalog and payment terms, and invite the buyer to set up their login. The SOP is not the clicking. It is the review standard you apply before you assign anyone a wholesale catalog.
Decide your approval bar in writing and apply it every time:
Approving anyone who fills out the form. The fastest way to wreck your DTC pricing is to hand a wholesale catalog to a reseller who dumps your product on a marketplace at a discount. Vet the account before you assign it a price list, not after the complaints start.
Before you set a single wholesale price, lock your recommended retail price across every SKU. Wholesale pricing is built as a discount off that anchor, so if the anchor is inconsistent your whole ladder is. A common structure is a standard wholesale price around half of RRP, with better tiers at higher volume. Write the ladder down and write the minimum opening order alongside it.
Then write the part most brands forget: the minimum advertised price policy and how you enforce it. A MAP only works if someone checks it on a cadence and there is a defined consequence for breaking it.
You set a MAP, a retailer quietly sells under it, and you find out 60 days later from a DTC customer asking why your own site is more expensive. The SOP needs a monitoring cadence and an enforcement ladder: warning, then suspension of terms, then termination. Without the ladder, the policy is decoration.
Wholesale orders are picked, packed, and shipped differently from DTC. They ship in case packs rather than single units, sometimes on pallets rather than parcels. Larger retailers send routing guides that dictate label placement, packing slips, carton counts, and advance shipment notices, and they often want the order on their carrier account, not yours. Lead times are measured in days, not the same-day urgency of a DTC order.
The queue is the real trap. A wholesale PO is one order line but 400 units. Drop it into the same queue as your DTC orders and it either starves your DTC pickers for a day or sits untouched because no one owns it. The SOP defines who picks wholesale, when, and against what despatch SLA. A 48-hour despatch standard is a reasonable internal default; big-box retailers will dictate their own window and charge you back when you miss it.
Set the routing logic that keeps high-volume wholesale POs from colliding with DTC orders in the same queue.
Batch and rate-shop wholesale orders as a group without slowing your DTC despatch.
Miss a routing-guide requirement (wrong label position, late shipment notice, wrong carton quantity) and large retailers deduct the penalty automatically from your invoice. Document the routing guide per account and check the order against it before it leaves the building.
One inventory pool, two demand patterns. A single purchase order can wipe out the stock you needed for a DTC campaign that goes live the same week. The SOP has to make the allocation decision explicit before it happens: do you hold a buffer reserved for DTC, or do you commit stock to wholesale and accept the DTC stockout risk? There is no universal right answer, but there is a wrong one, which is deciding ad hoc under pressure.
Two rules keep this sane. Carry enough cover on your top sellers before you accept wholesale commitments against them, eight weeks on your top 20 percent of SKUs is a defensible floor. And make sure a wholesale order decrements available-to-sell in real time, so the count DTC sells against is the truth.
Keep one accurate count when two channels draw down the same physical stock.
Avoid overselling when bundles and wholesale case packs share the same components.
Wholesale and DTC both sell the last 200 units because the two channels were not sharing a live count. Now you are choosing who to disappoint: a retailer holding a PO, or 50 DTC customers holding order confirmations. Both remember it.
DTC is paid the instant the order is placed. Wholesale is paid in 30 or 60 days. That gap is a financing decision dressed up as a payment setting: you ship now, get paid later, and carry the cash difference yourself. The SOP decides who earns that privilege and how you collect.
Offering net-30 to a brand-new account with no credit check makes you an unsecured lender to a stranger. First orders are prepaid or card. Terms are earned, with a limit, in writing.
Wholesale returns do not look like DTC returns. Retailers file shortage claims (they counted 388 of the 400 units on the PO), damage claims for transit losses, and requests for return authorization on unsold or defective stock. The SOP sets the claim window, the proof you require (packing counts, photos, carrier records), and who has authority to issue a credit versus a replacement.
Receive, inspect, and reconcile wholesale returns and shortage claims at the warehouse.
Handle transit damage with the proof and timelines that retailer claims require.
Reconciliation is the quiet half of this SOP. A wholesale credit memo against an open invoice is a different accounting motion than a DTC refund to a card. Decide how credits are recorded and who signs off, or your finance close turns into a forensic exercise every month.
Your line sheet, your Shopify catalog, and your buyer-facing price list are living documents, and they fall out of sync the moment a SKU is discontinued, a price changes, or a minimum shifts. The version a buyer ordered from in March is not the one you are shipping in September. This is SOP drift in its purest form: the document says one thing, reality says another, and a buyer places a real order against a stale price.
Fix it the way you fix any drift. Assign one owner, set a review cadence (monthly, plus any time a price changes), and keep a single source of truth. Every price or assortment change updates the line sheet, the Shopify catalog, and the buyer PDF in the same motion, not whenever someone remembers.
When these seven are written down, your first wholesale hire inherits a system instead of a folklore. The channel scales on process, not on you personally answering every buyer DM.
Most of these SOPs are screen-driven. You configure them inside Shopify, your 3PL portal, and your accounting tool, and the steps that matter are the clicks, the settings, and the exact fields. The fastest way to turn a process you already run into an SOP your team can follow is to record yourself doing it once.
ReccordSOP turns a screen recording into a step-by-step SOP with timestamped screenshots, and flags drift when the underlying tool, price, or policy changes underneath it. Record your wholesale approval flow or your fulfillment split once, and you have a document your next hire can actually use. Generate your first SOP free at reccordsop.com.
Usually no. Shopify's native B2B features let you run wholesale and DTC from one store using company accounts, separate price lists, and catalogs. The setup is the easy part. The work is documenting the operations that differ between the two channels: approval, fulfillment, inventory allocation, payment terms, and returns.
At minimum: business verification (resale certificate or tax ID and a real storefront), a channel policy covering where they can resell and whether marketplaces are allowed, and a minimum opening order. Vet the account before you assign it a wholesale catalog, because the most common pricing damage comes from approving resellers who undercut your own site.
Give wholesale its own lane. Define who picks wholesale orders, when, and against what despatch SLA, and use order routing so a large PO does not drop into the DTC queue and starve it. Document each retailer's routing guide, because non-compliance triggers automatic chargebacks from large accounts.
Start with prepaid or card for new accounts and make net terms something accounts earn after several clean, on-time orders. Every account on terms should have a written credit limit, ACH set up for automatic reconciliation, and a defined dunning sequence for late invoices. Net terms are short-term financing you extend, so treat them like credit.
A line sheet is the one-page (usually front and back) summary buyers order from: products, wholesale prices, minimums, and terms. Update it on a set cadence (monthly at least) and any time a price or assortment changes, and keep the line sheet, your Shopify catalog, and the buyer PDF in sync. Stale line sheets cause buyers to order against prices you no longer offer.
I built ReccordSOP after watching too many DTC ops teams lose months to undocumented workflows. These SOPs are battle-tested with Shopify operators running $1M to $50M brands.
Last reviewed June 29, 2026
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