The wholesale features that went free while nobody was looking

A client of ours is moving into corporate and wholesale accounts. The next phase of their build asked for login-gated wholesale pricing, private ordering for corporate customers and the option of paying on account. When the project was scoped earlier in the year, that combination pointed at either a Shopify Plus upgrade or a decent amount of custom build, because that’s where those features lived.

What we found

Before pricing the phase, we checked what the platform ships today rather than relying on what was true when the project started. In April, Shopify moved its core B2B features onto the standard plans. Company profiles, catalogues with customer-specific pricing, volume pricing and payment terms are all now included on Basic, Grow and Advanced, capped at three active catalogues. Nearly everything the client had asked for had quietly become configuration.

So the custom build shrank before it was ever quoted. What remains to build is the part genuinely specific to this business, and the parts the platform now covers get set up rather than written.

What to take from it

Shopify ships changes constantly, and estimates rot faster than people think. A quote written from what the platform could do last quarter can have you paying custom-build money for things now included in your plan. Whoever prices your work should be checking what’s native today before estimating a line of code, and it’s fair to ask them directly what the platform already covers.