From Faire to Shopify: How to Build Your Own Wholesale Channel

Wholesale marketplaces such as Faire can be a great way to start and grow a wholesale business.

They help businesses discover suppliers, build relationships with brands, and simplify wholesale purchasing.

But as a business becomes established, a different question often appears:

Should we continue depending heavily on a marketplace, or should we start building a sales channel that we control ourselves?

That was the situation faced by one growing wholesale business.

The Situation: A Successful Business Built Through Faire

The business had built its wholesale operation using the Faire marketplace.

Over time, it established relationships with around four to five important vendors and grew the business to more than $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Faire had helped the company get started, but as the business became more stable, the owner wanted greater control over the future.

Marketplace commissions were one consideration, but there were broader concerns as well.

The merchant wanted to reduce dependency on a third-party platform and start owning more of the customer relationship.

They wanted control over:

• Wholesale pricing
• Customer relationships
• Product availability
• Shipping rules
• Payment terms
• Customer onboarding
• Future B2B growth
• Retail sales

The next step was clear:

Build an independent ecommerce channel.

The Decision: Move the Wholesale Business to Shopify

Shopify was the natural platform.

The merchant wanted to build a website where both wholesale buyers and regular retail customers could purchase products.

Instead of operating separate systems, the goal was to run:

B2B wholesale + B2C retail from the same Shopify store.

Shopify already provided the ecommerce infrastructure.

The challenge was finding the right way to implement the wholesale workflows.

Why Shopify Native B2B Wasn't the Best Fit

Shopify has invested heavily in its native B2B capabilities.

Today, Shopify's Basic, Grow and Advanced plans include several important B2B features such as company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and B2B catalogs.

For many merchants, these features may be sufficient.

But this merchant needed considerably more flexibility.

The Three-Catalog Limitation

On Shopify Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, merchants can currently use up to three active B2B catalogs.

For this business, that quickly became restrictive.

The merchant already had more than four customer relationships that could require different pricing and product access.

As the wholesale operation grew, the number of pricing arrangements was expected to increase further.

Shopify Plus provides much greater catalog flexibility, including unlimited catalogs and direct catalog assignment to companies and locations.

But upgrading the entire store to Shopify Plus purely to obtain those capabilities wasn't economically attractive for a business doing roughly $5,000+ in monthly recurring revenue.

BMT offered another approach.

The merchant could maintain their existing Shopify plan while using BMT B2B Wholesale Pricing to create more flexible customer-specific pricing rules.

Why BMT Was a Better Fit

The decision wasn't that Shopify B2B was a bad solution.

It was simply that BMT matched this merchant's requirements more closely.

Several requirements made the difference.

1. More Flexible Customer-Specific Pricing

Wholesale businesses rarely have one universal wholesale price.

One customer might receive a 10% discount.

Another might have negotiated fixed prices for specific products.

A larger customer might receive volume pricing.

Another group might have completely different pricing.

The merchant therefore needed the flexibility to create pricing rules for more than just a few customer segments.

BMT allowed the business to create customer and customer-group-specific wholesale pricing without making Shopify Plus a prerequisite.

That gave the merchant room to grow its wholesale customer base without redesigning the pricing system every time a new customer agreement was created.

2. More Granular Product and Variant Visibility

Another requirement was product access.

Not every wholesale customer should necessarily see every product—or every variant.

The merchant wanted to control product visibility depending on the customer.

For example:

Customer A

Can purchase Products A, B and C.

Customer B

Can purchase Products B, C and D.

And even within the same product, certain variants might only be available to specific wholesale customers.

The merchant therefore needed more granular customer-level and variant-level visibility controls.

BMT gave the merchant more flexibility to build those types of controlled wholesale experiences.

Instead of every B2B customer seeing the same storefront, the Shopify store could behave more like a personalized wholesale portal.

3. Customer-Specific Wholesale Shipping

Shipping was another important requirement.

Wholesale shipping doesn't always behave like consumer ecommerce.

Different wholesale customers may have:

• Negotiated shipping rates
• Free shipping agreements
• Different minimum order thresholds
• Location-specific arrangements
• Special fulfilment terms

The merchant wanted to configure shipping specifically for certain wholesale customers.

BMT provided a way to incorporate those B2B shipping rules into the overall Shopify setup without forcing the merchant to restructure the entire business around Shopify's native B2B model.

4. Wholesale Registration and Approval

The business also wanted to continue acquiring new wholesale customers directly through its website.

But wholesale access shouldn't automatically be given to everyone.

A prospective buyer should first apply.

The merchant therefore needed a workflow such as:

Visit website → Apply for wholesale → Merchant reviews application → Customer approved → Wholesale access provided

Using BMT's B2B registration and approval functionality, the business could create that onboarding process directly on the Shopify store.

This gave the merchant control over who became a wholesale customer.

It also helped transform the website from simply being an ordering portal into a customer acquisition channel.

5. Existing Shopify Customers Could Be Segmented Using Tags

Another advantage was operational simplicity.

Instead of rebuilding the entire customer structure around a new system, BMT could use Shopify customer information and customer tags to determine which wholesale rules should apply.

That made it easier to create different experiences for different customer groups.

For example:

Tag: Distributor

Receives Distributor pricing.

Tag: Wholesale

Receives standard wholesale pricing.

Tag: VIP Wholesale

Receives negotiated pricing and specific shipping rules.

For a growing business, this can be easier to manage than introducing a more complex company-location structure before the business actually needs it.

6. Draft Orders and Net Payment Terms

Established B2B customers don't always pay immediately.

Some buyers expect arrangements such as:

• Net 15
• Net 30
• Net 60

The merchant therefore wanted the ability to support B2B ordering workflows where an order could become a draft order and appropriate payment terms could be applied.

BMT helped support that type of workflow.

This allowed trusted customers to purchase using commercial terms that more closely resembled traditional B2B transactions.

7. B2B and B2C From One Shopify Store

Perhaps one of the most important requirements was that the merchant didn't want to create two separate ecommerce businesses.

Wholesale was already working.

But the business also saw an opportunity to sell directly to consumers.

The ideal setup was therefore:

Retail Customer

Visits the Shopify store ↓ Sees retail products and retail prices ↓ Checks out normally

Wholesale Customer

Logs into the same Shopify store ↓ BMT identifies the customer's wholesale rules ↓ Customer sees relevant products and wholesale prices ↓ Wholesale shipping/payment conditions are applied ↓ Customer places the order

This allowed the merchant to use the same product catalog, inventory and Shopify infrastructure for both sides of the business.

8. No Need to Upgrade to Shopify Plus Just for Advanced B2B Requirements

This was one of the biggest factors in the decision.

Shopify native B2B has become significantly more accessible.

Basic, Grow and Advanced merchants can now use foundational features including company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and up to three active B2B catalogs.

However, Shopify reserves several more advanced capabilities—including unlimited catalogs and direct catalog assignment to individual companies and company locations—for Shopify Plus.

For a much larger B2B operation, Shopify Plus may make perfect sense.

But this merchant was still at a stage where keeping software costs proportional to revenue mattered.

They didn't want to make a major platform upgrade simply because their wholesale pricing structure required more flexibility.

BMT allowed the business to stay on its preferred Shopify plan while adding the wholesale functionality it needed.

Shopify Native B2B vs BMT for This Merchant

The choice became clearer when the merchant compared the two approaches.

The important distinction wasn't simply features versus features.

It was the operating model.

Shopify native B2B is increasingly designed around a structured Company → Company Location → Catalog model.

That is powerful, especially for larger organizations.

BMT gave this merchant another model:

Customer → Customer Tag/Group → Pricing + Products + Shipping + Payment Rules

For their stage of growth, that was simpler and more flexible.

From Marketplace Dependency to an Owned Wholesale Channel

The biggest benefit wasn't any individual BMT feature.

It was control.

The merchant could start moving from:

Marketplace → Customer

toward:

Merchant's own brand → Customer

That meant greater ownership over:

• Customer relationships
• Pricing
• Customer data
• Store experience
• Product merchandising
• Wholesale onboarding
• Marketing
• Repeat purchases

Faire could still be useful.

It could continue functioning as a discovery or supplier marketplace.

But the merchant's own Shopify website could become an increasingly important part of the business.

In other words:

Faire could remain a channel without remaining the entire business.

One Shopify Store. Two Revenue Channels.

By combining Shopify with BMT B2B Wholesale Pricing, the merchant could build an infrastructure capable of supporting:

• B2B wholesale customers
• B2C retail customers
• Customer-specific pricing
• Volume pricing
• Fixed wholesale pricing
• Customer and variant-specific product visibility
• Wholesale registration
• Customer approval
• Customer-specific shipping rules
• Draft-order workflows
• Net payment terms
• Multiple wholesale customer groups

All while continuing to use Shopify as the core ecommerce platform.

When Does BMT Make Sense Compared With Shopify Native B2B?

Shopify's native B2B solution is becoming increasingly powerful and may be the right choice for many merchants.

BMT becomes particularly interesting when a merchant says:

"I need more than three wholesale pricing groups."

"Different customers need different prices."

"Certain customers shouldn't see certain products or variants."

"I need special shipping rules for some wholesale customers."

"I want wholesale registration and approval."

"I want to sell B2B and B2C from the same Shopify store."

"I don't want to move to Shopify Plus just to get additional B2B flexibility."

Those are exactly the types of requirements BMT B2B Wholesale Pricing is designed to solve.

The Bigger Lesson

Marketplaces can be incredibly valuable when starting a wholesale business.

But as the business matures, building an owned sales channel becomes increasingly important.

The goal doesn't have to be:

Faire OR Shopify.

A better strategy can be:

Faire for discovery and relationships.

Shopify + BMT for your owned wholesale channel.

That gives merchants the freedom to diversify where revenue comes from while building a customer experience and B2B infrastructure they control.

For this merchant, BMT wasn't simply another Shopify app.

It was the layer that helped turn a standard Shopify store into a flexible B2B + B2C commerce platform—without requiring Shopify Plus.

Current BMT capabilities

BMT brings customer-specific pricing, product and variant visibility, registration and approval, custom shipping, draft-order workflows, and net payment terms into one Shopify store for independent B2B and B2C selling.