Wholesale Software: 6 Best Platforms for B2B Selling in 2026

A wholesale buyer ordering 400 units of one SKU moves through your store differently than someone buying a single candle. They know their price; you know their price. Their saved reorder list and their net-30 terms should be waiting whenever they log in, whether at noon or midnight.

New research from Truvio found 88% of B2B companies now take orders online. Those ecommerce channels bring in 52% of B2B revenue, and businesses that moved to ecommerce grew sales 40% past their old numbers.

What is wholesale software?

Wholesale software is the storefront, pricing, and ordering layer for selling to other businesses. With this solution, the buyer is a known account with a negotiated rate, a credit line, and a reorder they run on a schedule.

While retail ecommerce usually treats every visitor as an anonymous buyer who pays a flat manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), wholesale software is centered around identity and B2B relationships. The tool digitizes friction-heavy administrative tasks like verifying credit limits, checking contract-specific price lists, or processing complex matrix orders.

ERP, commerce, or both?

There are three ways wholesale tools approach problems, and where they started tells you what they do well.

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)-first systems grow out of the back office. They're built to run inventory, accounting, and fulfillment, and the storefront comes second.
• Commerce-first systems start at the storefront. The catalog, the account-specific pricing, and the self-serve checkout are the product; the back office connects through integrations to your ERP and accounting tools. 
• Unified systems run both from one place. A price edit or a stock change shows up on the storefront and in the books at the same time.

Most likely, you already have a warehouse and an accounting system. Often, that's not what's missing.

Take Brooklinen. They sold sheets directly to consumers on Shopify for years. Meanwhile, their wholesale side, including hospitality buyers and hotels ordering linens by the crate, ran offline. The warehouse and accounting already worked. 

There was just no storefront where a wholesale buyer could place an order on their own. "We weren't customer-forward with this process. We were order-forward," said Nicolas Lukac, the brand's director of emerging channels.

So Brooklinen added a second store for B2B inside the same Shopify admin they already ran for DTC. Now, the team that used to key in those orders spends 80% of their time working with customers, and a hospitality group filing its monthly reorder gets the same experience it would on the consumer site.

“We spend more time understanding our customers and less on manual inputs. This allows us to provide exceptional experiences for our DTC, B2B customers, and retail customers alike,” says Nicolas.

The key features to look for in wholesale software

The features below map to Gartner's 2025 “Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce”, report which grades platforms on functional depth. 

Gartner scores eight capabilities; we've pulled the five that apply to whether a platform can carry wholesale, and translated each into questions buyers ask. 

Is B2B support native?

Gartner scores B2B support as its own capability, separate from core commerce. This includes company-account hierarchies, buyer roles and approvals, quote management, contract pricing, and payment terms. 

Shopify B2B models it natively, in three layers: 

• A company, which is the parent organization 
• The company’s locations, each carrying its own tax ID, ship-to address, payment terms, and pricing
• The customers who buy on behalf of each location 

B2B pricing runs through catalogs assigned to those companies and locations. A buyer logs in and sees their assortment at their price, automatically.

Can it support complex business models?

Gartner calls this the “Complex Business Models” use case in its 2025 report.

Here are some scenarios you can run by vendors to see how if their platform is prepared to handle complex work scenarios:

Shopify supports expansion stores, wherein one admin can run multiple markets from a single core store, or spin up free expansion stores when workflows diverge. 

For example, SaturdayClub, a Singapore-based fashion label, had already outgrown their first ecommerce platform. The team duplicated their core store with Shopify Plus Expansion Stores, and everything sped up. In late 2023, they rolled out four new sites in under five months and, within six months, were live in nine markets.

“Planning SaturdayClub’s go-to-market strategy has become so much faster and more efficient with Shopify. We can now enter new markets within one to two weeks,” says Damien Cheng, business development manager.

You also get unlimited catalogs and can assign custom assortments and price lists to each company and each location. Plus, every B2B location stores its own ship-to address, tax registration, and default payment terms, so invoices stay compliant out of the box.

Can it scale with AI-driven automation?

As Gartner notes, businesses now “require more intelligence and automation to scale commerce,” so native AI is a prerequisite for a modern wholesale distribution business. 

The platform should spot when a buyer is about to run out of stock and surface a draft PO before they even log in. If a B2B cart stalls, an automated nudge should fire without human involvement. Further, orders over a threshold should auto-trigger approval, fraud checks, or region-specific tax rules.

Here’s what built-in automation looks like in a B2B storefront on Shopify:

• A new company submits the B2B request form, and Shopify Flow fires an email to your sales rep and auto-creates the company record.
• As soon as a contact gains the right permission, an access-invite email goes out so the buyer can log in and self-serve right away.
• You can optionally purge DTC customers who never get linked to a company after three days; keeping your customer relationship management (CRM) clean without manual checks.

Each one of these workflows and more ships as a prebuilt template with Shopify Flow.

Alternatively, Sidekick can generate the B2B workflow for you. Open Shopify Flow, click the Sidekick icon, type “Tag customers as VIP when an order is over $20,000,” and the AI assembles the trigger-condition-action chain in seconds.

Can it plug straight into, and grow with, your existing stack?

Gartner says that digital-commerce leaders should shortlist vendors based on composability. The platform should connect to the systems you already use and let you swap parts later without a replatform. 

Shopify meets that bar with an API layer that exposes more than 200 object types through GraphQL and REST. That means product, price, inventory, and order data stay in sync across every channel. Your developers can also inject custom logic via Shopify Functions, which runs inline on Shopify’s infrastructure instead of forking core code.

If you’d rather buy than build, the Shopify App Store lists over 16,000 vetted connectors and extensions. These cover everything from NetSuite and SAP integrations to EDI hubs and AI merchandising tools.

Take the €25 million fashion brand Bobo Choses. They migrated from Magento to Shopify, and their tech team slashed time spent fixing integrations from 80% of their labor to 10%, then linked three physical stores to the same API backbone. 

“Shopify allowed us to stop wasting time resolving technical incidents. Instead, we are operating much more efficiently and finding new ways to grow the business and deliver world-class shopping experiences to our customers,” says Saül Aleu, chief technology officer.

Can it keep inventory and fulfillment in sync everywhere you sell?

Gartner’s 2025 “Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce” scores vendors on how well they support unified retail commerce, which is the ability to show one truth for stock, orders, and customers across stores, warehouses, and channels.

On Shopify, every location, be it your warehouse, a third-party logistics (3PL) facility, or a retail store, carries its own real-time stock count. When a sale happens online or at the POS, the platform adjusts inventory everywhere at once. 

The same back end routes each order to the best-placed location automatically, so a wholesale pallet ships from the warehouse while a consumer’s click-and-collect order reserves the last two units in a nearby store. 

Manhattan Associates’ 2026 "Unified Commerce Benchmark" found that retailers who successfully unify their operations drive up to 8% in revenue growth and achieve 1.5 times the conversion. 

Glassware brand Simon Pearce, for example, collapsed three disconnected systems into one on Shopify. They flipped inventory accuracy from syncing once a day to real-time, and ended the POS outages that used to stall peak-season trade.

"It's one update that hits all channels, which gives the team more confidence about where a product can be found, whether it's in a specific store or warehouse or anywhere else," says Kyle Tuttle, director of technical products. 

Gartner named Shopify a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce, ranking it highest for Ability to Execute. Shopify also ranks first for AI-enabled commerce use cases.

What is the best wholesaling software?

Typically, wholesale software is either an ERP system that’s bolted into a storefront or a storefront that’s bolted onto a B2B system. There aren't many built to do both natively, which is why Shopify tops the list.

1. Shopify

Best for: Modern brands that want B2B buyers and DTC shoppers using the same storefront and inventory pool.

Shopify sits at the very front of your stack. The platform owns every buyer touchpoint and then pushes confirmed orders, inventory adjustments, and customer data downstream through its REST Admin APIs or certified connectors. Your ERP, warehouse management system (WMS), electronic data interchange (EDI) hub, and business intelligence (BI) tools stay exactly where they are; Shopify simply feeds them real-time data instead of you running a separate wholesale storefront.

Shopify’s native B2B layer means you can create company and location records, then give each one its own catalog, price list, payment terms, and shipping rules. A buyer who logs in sees only the products and prices assigned to them.

A dedicated B2B checkout plus a self-serve buyer portal let accounts reorder and track orders on their own.

Furniture brand Industry West moved their trade business off Magento onto Shopify, running B2B and DTC from one platform with company-grouped catalogs and quantity-tier pricing. They reported a 90% lift in trade-account web order revenue and a 20% lift in average order value (AOV).

Possible limitations: B2B now runs on every Shopify plan, but the heavier wholesale capabilities stay on Plus, including unlimited catalogs, direct catalog assignment to specific companies and locations, deposits, and partial payments.

2. NetSuite

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise distributors or manufacturers whose operations already run on NetSuite ERP.

Where Shopify sits at the front of your stack and feeds data backward, NetSuite starts at the back and reaches forward. SuiteCommerce runs on the same database as NetSuite ERP, so an order placed in the buyer portal becomes a NetSuite sales order on the spot, with inventory and pricing read straight from the system of record.

SuiteCommerce isn't the only way to put a storefront on NetSuite, though. If you want to keep NetSuite as the ERP but run a more flexible front end, Shopify connects to it through the NetSuite ERP Connector in the Shopify App Store.

You get real-time inventory and contract pricing straight from ERP tables; native multi-subsidiary, multi-tax, and multi-currency support; and built-in quote-to-order approvals and punch-out catalog options for procurement portals.

Possible limitations: SuiteCommerce storefronts are harder to shape than Shopify's. Meaningful customization runs through SuiteCommerce Advanced, which needs developers fluent in SuiteScript and NetSuite's data model.

3. Microsoft Dynamics 365

Best for: Those operating Dynamics 365 for finance and supply chain management who want commerce as an extension.

A lot like NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Commerce starts at the back. This is the storefront layer of Microsoft's finance and operations family, extending supply chain management and finance outward to a buyer-facing site. 

On the B2B side, organizations onboard as business partners through a registration-and-approval flow, then sit inside customer hierarchies that decide which B2B catalog each one sees and what it pays. 

Microsoft also has a first-party Shopify connector built with Shopify. It's preinstalled for free and syncs products, inventory, orders, customers, and payouts both ways.

Possible limitations: You can designate only one user or customer record as an administrator user, and you can change that role only in Commerce headquarters with no support for self-service capabilities.

4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Best for: Salesforce CRM-using enterprises that want B2B buyers to see the same customer, contract, and activity data their account teams see every day.

B2B Commerce is one cloud in a CRM-centered suite alongside Sales, Service, Marketing, and Data Cloud, all on the Salesforce Platform. For a company already on Salesforce, it's a layer you switch on inside the CRM.

You get a native link to CRM for real-time contract pricing and negotiated terms; Einstein AI for personalized product recommendations and search; approval workflows, quotes, and punch-out catalogs built in; and multi-site, multi-currency, and multi-tax support handled at platform level.

Possible limitations: The setup is expensive and often complex. Reviewers on G2 and Gartner Peer Insights point to a steep learning curve, implementation that needs specialist help, and a cost that's hard to justify for a smaller business.

5. Infor CloudSuite Distribution (ICD)

Best for: Distributors who already use Infor CSD and want buyers to order with the same inventory, price, and rebate data their back office uses.

Infor starts at the back, like NetSuite and Dynamics. While those are general-purpose ERPs, CloudSuite Distribution is industry-specific.

The optional Infor Rhythm for Commerce storefront surfaces that data to buyers in real time, so no middleware sync jobs are needed. Rhythm covers ERP-driven customer-specific pricing, restricted catalogs, product information management (PIM), real-time inventory, and self-service account and order management.

CloudSuite Distribution is one of the few ERPs built around distribution rather than adapted to it, which is why wholesale distribution companies may reach for it over a general-purpose suite. Infor supports running Shopify, too; it's a partner in Shopify's Global ERP Program, so a distributor can keep CSD as the ERP and put Shopify on the front end.

Possible limitations: The storefront is the soft spot. Independent reviewers like ERP Research rate Infor's native ecommerce as basic, with advanced requirements needing add-ons or third-party integrations. 

6. Epicor Prophet 21

Best for: Distribution companies already using Prophet 21 as their ERP and looking for a buyer portal that pulls live stock, contract pricing, and rebates from the same database.

P21 stays the system of record for products, customers, pricing, and stock. Epicor Commerce Connect (ECC) turns those tables into a buyer-facing B2B storefront and self-service portal, so orders, availability, and invoices are written straight back to the ERP.

For B2B, it covers negotiated price lists, volume discounts, contract pricing, and catalogs restricted by customer or group; live ERP-sourced inventory; and an authenticated self-service portal where buyers track orders, view invoices and statements, manage returns, reorder, and request quotes. 

P21 is TEC-certified for wholesale distribution and rates strongly on inventory, purchasing, and warehouse management.

Possible limitations:ERP Research rates the commerce module as moderate; solid for most mid-market needs, but not a leading storefront. The implementation cost alone can run up to $500,000.

Why modern brands are replacing legacy wholesale portals—and choosing Shopify

A clear indication Canadian food service equipment brand Russell Hendrix had outgrown their wholesale platform was that their own sales reps didn't use it.

A storefront built for how B2B customers buy today

Russell Hendrix had spent a decade customizing their ecommerce platform, until they found every new feature meant another development project. The portal built to grow wholesale had become the thing everyone worked around instead.

"The search capabilities were not great, and the user experience was outdated. We knew that we needed to modernize and upgrade," says CEO Stan Dabic.

Then they moved to Shopify B2B, and within 12 months, online order volume rose 43%, revenue increased 24%, and those same reps were processing orders five times faster than in the ERP.

"The feedback's been overwhelmingly positive. Our customers are used to sites that match what they get as consumers when it comes to convenience, ease, and speed, and that's what we're delivering," says Stan.

Native B2B capabilities

Gesswein also knows the cost of a legacy wholesale portal. The precision-tool maker, in business since 1914, ran their B2B on a fragile ERP connector that kept breaking sync, while quoting and reordering ran on plugins that never quite held together. 

"We spent many hours fixing sync issues and could not offer our B2B customers an exceptional user experience," says CEO Greg Gesswein. 

After rebuilding on Shopify's native B2B, Gesswein grew transactions 101% year over year and site traffic increased 225%, with double-digit revenue growth. They also began shipping new features in days rather than months.

A blended store for B2B and DTC

When wholesale and DTC share a catalog, an inventory pool, and an admin, the work only needs to happen once. The Somewhere Co.’s old wholesale portal, the team says, "looked really dated" and made stock management a chore. So they moved their wholesale site onto Shopify alongside their DTC store.

And when they later expanded their catalog by 50%, the team published 220-plus new SKUs in five minutes, a job that used to take over an hour, one listing at a time. Their average B2B order time fell 33%, and the time to update listings dropped 91%.

“With B2B on Shopify, we’re able to make the categories really clear and provide an experience akin to what our customers are used to when they’re online shopping,” says Letitia Devin, wholesale admin and marketing support.