Building Shopify B2B themes and portals.

How themes detect a wholesale buyer, gate content, render quantity rules and volume pricing, and wire sign-in. And where the theme stops and the portal begins.

Search for a Shopify B2B theme and you get listicles ranking theme names. That answers the wrong question. On Shopify, B2B pricing, quantity rules, and catalogs live in the platform, not the theme: price lists resolve through any theme's normal price outputs once a buyer signs in, because variant.price, variant.quantity_rule, and variant.quantity_price_breaks all return values in the current customer context. What a theme decides is presentation: who sees prices, how volume terms display, where buyers sign in, and what a company contact sees that a retail visitor does not.

This chapter covers the four jobs of Shopify B2B theme development: detecting the buyer in Liquid, gating B2B-only content, rendering quantity rules and volume pricing, and wiring login entry points. It closes with the line where a theme stops and a B2B portal begins.

Which Shopify theme is best for B2B?

Trade is Shopify's B2B-optimized free theme. It ships with a quick order list, quantity rule display, volume pricing, and customer account requests prebuilt, and it hides pricing from users who are not logged in. Shopify's B2B customization docs name Trade and Horizon as the specialized themes for dedicated B2B stores.

You do not need Trade, or any dedicated wholesale theme, to run B2B. Free Shopify themes at version 11.0.0 or later display quantity rules, volume pricing, and the quick order list automatically. Older and custom themes support all of it too; they just need the manual Liquid and JavaScript covered below.

One clarification for plan shoppers: B2B itself is not Plus-exclusive. Volume pricing and quantity rules work in themes on every plan that supports B2B. The plan differences sit elsewhere: Basic, Grow, and Advanced stores get up to 3 active B2B catalogs across all B2B markets, while Plus gets unlimited catalogs and can assign them directly to company locations, with a ceiling of 25 catalogs per location.

How does Liquid detect a B2B buyer?

Shopify exposes B2B state to themes through the customer, company, and company_location objects:

• customer.b2b? returns true when the logged-in customer is a verified B2B customer (a company contact). This is the canonical check for rendering B2B-only content.
• customer.current_company returns the company the customer is purchasing for; customer.current_location returns the currently selected company location.
• customer.company_available_locations returns every location the customer can buy for, with customer.company_available_locations_count alongside it.
• The company object exposes name, id, external_id, its available locations, and metafields, so company-level data can drive theme content.
• The company_location object exposes name, shipping_address, tax_registration_id, metafields, a current? flag, and url_to_set_as_current, a URL that switches the buyer's active purchasing location.

Those last two properties are everything you need for a location picker. This snippet is adapted from Shopify's documented reference implementation:

{% if customer.b2b? %}
  <div>
    <h2>Welcome, {{ customer.name }} from {{ customer.current_company.name }}</h2>
    <p>You are purchasing for the {{ customer.current_location.name }} location.</p>
    {% if customer.company_available_locations.size > 1 %}
      <h3>Select a different location:</h3>
      <ul>
        {% for location in customer.company_available_locations %}
          {% unless location.current? %}
            <li>
              <a href="{{ location.url_to_set_as_current }}">{{ location.name }}</a>
            </li>
          {% endunless %}
        {% endfor %}
      </ul>
    {% endif %}
  </div>
{% endif %}

One Liquid constraint to remember when a buyer has many locations: for loops render at most 50 iterations, so paginate larger location arrays.

How do you build B2B-only content patterns?

The workhorse pattern for wholesale storefronts hides prices and purchase CTAs from anyone who is not a signed-in B2B buyer, and offers sign-in instead. Shopify documents this exact approach:

{%- if customer.b2b? -%}
  {{ product.selected_or_first_available_variant.price | money }}
{%- else -%}
  <a href="{{ routes.account_login_url }}">Log in to see the price</a>
{%- endif -%}

Dedicated B2B stores extend the same conditional to the header cart icon, add-to-cart buttons, and other CTAs. Content can also target a specific company or location:

{% if customer.current_company.name == 'Shopify' %}
  <h3>Delivery and installation included.</h3>
{% endif %}

Two implementation notes. First, Shopify recommends adding B2B logic through Custom Liquid sections and blocks rather than editing theme files directly, which keeps Theme Store themes eligible for automatic upgrades. Second, on Shopify Plus there is a no-code alternative: the theme editor's Shopify B2B context lets you override section and block settings, visibility, and ordering for B2B buyers without touching Liquid. Overrides break inheritance from the store default until reset, and in contexts with custom section ordering, sections added later to the default are not inherited automatically; configure them per context.

How do you display quantity rules and volume pricing?

Quantity rules and volume pricing are set on B2B catalogs, not in the theme. The theme's job is display. variant.quantity_rule returns the rule for the current buyer with three properties: min (default 1), max (nil if unset), and increment (default 1). Shopify enforces rule integrity at creation: the increment must divide both the minimum and the maximum, and the minimum cannot exceed the maximum.

{% assign rule = product.selected_or_first_available_variant.quantity_rule %}
{% if rule.min > 1 or rule.increment > 1 or rule.max %}
  <p class="quantity-rule">
    Minimum {{ rule.min }}
    {%- if rule.max %} · Maximum {{ rule.max }}{% endif %}
    {%- if rule.increment > 1 %} · Sold in increments of {{ rule.increment }}{% endif %}
  </p>
{% endif %}

Volume pricing renders from variant.quantity_price_breaks, an array of break objects with minimum_quantity and price in the buyer's presentment currency. variant.quantity_price_breaks_configured? tells you whether any breaks exist in the current context, which makes a clean guard for a price-break table:

{% assign v = product.selected_or_first_available_variant %}
{% if v.quantity_price_breaks_configured? %}
  <table class="volume-pricing">
    <caption>Volume pricing</caption>
    <tr><th>Quantity</th><th>Price each</th></tr>
    <tr><td>{{ v.quantity_rule.min }}+</td><td>{{ v.price | money }}</td></tr>
    {% for break in v.quantity_price_breaks %}
      <tr><td>{{ break.minimum_quantity }}+</td><td>{{ break.price | money }}</td></tr>
    {% endfor %}
  </table>
{% endif %}

Because both objects resolve in the current customer context, logged-out visitors and D2C customers never see catalog-specific pricing; no extra gating is required around the price outputs themselves. For bulk ordering surfaces built on these objects, including the quick order list, see quick order lists and bulk buying.

Where do B2B buyers sign in?

B2B requires new customer accounts. Buyers sign in with the email attached to a company location plus a one-time code sent to that email; there are no passwords, and legacy customer accounts cannot be used for B2B customers or orders. After sign-in, a buyer with one location goes straight to the store; a buyer with several must pick a company location before adding to cart.

Themes wire the entry points through the routes object:

• routes.account_login_url sends the customer to sign-in, then to their order index.
• routes.storefront_login_url signs the customer in, then returns them to the storefront page they came from. Use this on gated product pages.
• routes.account_url links directly to the customer account, and shop.customer_accounts_enabled guards the whole block. The customer_login_link filter generates a ready-made sign-in anchor.

{%- if shop.customer_accounts_enabled -%}
  {% if customer %}
    <a href="{{ routes.account_url }}">Account</a>
  {% else %}
    <a href="{{ routes.account_login_url }}">Sign in</a>
  {%- endif %}
{%- endif -%}

For custom flows, /customer_authentication/login?return_to=<relative-url> redirects the buyer to any storefront page after sign-in (relative URLs only), and a login_hint parameter prepopulates the email field. The sign-in link itself can live anywhere: header, footer, navigation menu items, or a direct email to the buyer.

Blended or dedicated store: what changes in the theme?

A blended store serves B2B and D2C from one storefront. On free themes v11.0.0+, you customize by context in the theme editor; on custom themes, you branch on customer.b2b?. Third-party locking apps can hide parts of the store from visitors who are not signed in. Note the account-system consequence: switching a blended store to new customer accounts affects your D2C customers too.

A dedicated B2B store flips the defaults: Shopify recommends the specialized themes (Trade, Horizon) and, optionally, a third-party locking app to restrict the whole store to B2B customers. There is no native storefront-wide B2B gate; full-store locking is app territory, not a theme setting.

Headless storefronts follow the same logic without Liquid: contextualize Storefront API queries with a customer access token plus a companyLocationId to get B2B pricing, volume pricing, and quantity rules. Without that contextualization, queries return base pricing and publishing. Headless B2B also works only with new customer accounts.

Where does the theme stop and the portal begin?

Everything above is presentation: the theme shows the right buyer the right prices, rules, and content. What a theme cannot add is workflow. The customer account behind routes.account_url is where B2B buyers actually operate, and its native surface is thin. The split looks like this:

This is why "shopify b2b portal" and "shopify b2b theme" are different searches with different answers. The theme is the storefront skin; the portal is the account workspace. Portal functionality lives inside the customer account, the surface apps extend through Customer Account UI Extensions. That is where B2B Supercharge adds its modules, in the customer account your theme already links to: Account Tools for buyer-managed teams, roles, approvals, and order search; Buying Tools for quotes, fast reorder, saved carts, and CSV upload; Payments for batch-paying invoices. No theme swap, no replatform: it installs as a Shopify app, and buyers stay in the account they already sign into.

Frequently asked questions