B2B wholesale overview

You can sell to businesses on your existing store without running a second website. Each business gets its own account with its own contract prices, its own approved delivery addresses and its own payment terms. A dealer signs in, sees ₹412 a case instead of your ₹560 retail price, orders in case multiples, and pays you in 30 days instead of at checkout. You keep one product catalog, one stock pool and one order screen.

The one idea to read first

The commercial unit is the location, not the company. Payment terms, credit limit, tax exemption, approved addresses, allowed payment methods, catalog prices, PO rules and order-review rules all hang off a branch.

Sharma Distributors has three branches: Pune head office, Nashik and Vashi. That is three sets of settings, not one. Pune can run Net 30 with a ₹5,00,000 limit while Nashik pays at checkout, and a Nashik buyer never sees Pune’s terms. Nearly every later confusion in this guide traces back to this one sentence.

Enable wholesale

1. Go to Settings → B2B wholesale.

2. Turn on Enable wholesale. This is the master switch. While it is off, wholesale ordering is refused everywhere even though the Companies nav item is visible.

3. Leave Accept new wholesale orders on. Switching it off is the emergency stop: it halts every new company cart and checkout store-wide while existing invoices stay open and payable.

4. Choose Prices for signed-out visitors — show prices as normal, swap the price for a sign-in prompt, or hide prices and block buying. The strictest option also needs the Restricted pricing module below.

5. Check Company purchasing only. It is on by default: someone who belongs to a company can only buy for that company, never personally.

6. Set the New company defaults — the starting PO requirement and order submission mode for companies you create later. Changing them never rewrites existing companies.

7. Optionally set Payment reminders: up to five emails chasing an unpaid terms invoice, each a number of days after the due date.

8. Save.

Note

Enabling wholesale changes nothing for retail shoppers, and nothing appears on the storefront until you create a company and give someone access to it.

Advanced modules

Eight capabilities sit behind a second switch in Settings → B2B wholesale → Advanced modules. All eight are off by default.

Module	What it unlocks
Quotes (request for quote)	The whole quoting workflow
Invoice deposits	The “Pay a deposit now” plan and the per-location Deposit % field
Advanced receivables	Part-payment links, per-shipment payment requests, write-offs
Location store credit	A recorded credit balance on a branch
Location groups	One catalog aimed at a named set of branches across companies
Variant-level availability	Publishing single variants instead of whole products
Restricted pricing	The “hide prices and block buying” option for signed-out visitors
View storefront as a customer	Taking a phone order inside a buyer’s own account

Opening the account

Start at companies and locations. A company is the business; each location is a buying site that carries all the commercial settings. That page also covers the amber “Ordering incomplete” checklist — the list of reasons a buyer would be blocked at checkout, shown to you before your customer finds out.

A company with nobody in it is an empty shell. Buyers and invitations covers granting access to an existing customer, the access email, the main and billing contacts, linking someone’s past personal orders, and removing a person who leaves. Buyer roles explains the only two roles — Buyer and Location admin — and what each may see.

Two other doors open an account. Wholesale applications puts a public form on your storefront with your own questions on it, and gives you an approvals queue; approving creates the company, its location and the applicant’s access in one step. Bulk import companies migrates a whole existing book — companies, branches, addresses, terms, credit and buyers — from one spreadsheet, with a validate step before anything is written.

Deciding what they see and pay

Catalogs and contextual pricing is the longest page in this guide, and the one to read properly. A catalog holds three things at once: a price rule, an optional list of which products are available, and the audience who gets it. It covers percentage adjustments, fixed prices per variant, case-pack minimums and multiples, volume breaks, the precedence rule when two catalogs both reach a buyer, and the Preview prices tool that answers “why is this customer paying this?”.

Caution

The catalog prices CSV holds paise, not rupees. The admin screens take ₹800; the same price in the file is written 80000. This is the single most common wholesale support ticket. See the prices CSV.

Discounts on company orders matters even if you never intend to discount wholesale: every discount you already have defaults to personal purchases, so nothing you run today reaches company carts until you point it there deliberately. That page also covers whose usage limit a company order consumes, and how to stop a sitewide code stacking on top of an already-negotiated contract price.

Letting them order

Quick order and fast reordering covers the four ways a buyer builds a repeat order: the quick order pad you add to a product page, the account page where they paste a list of SKUs, Buy again, and reordering a past order. Only the first needs setting up.

Delivery addresses and shipping covers the branch address book. Vinayak Infra runs 40 jobsites off one buying location, so their engineer picks a named ship-to at checkout while the invoice still bills head office. That page also covers one-time addresses, who may edit the book, and where freight rates come from.

PO numbers and order review covers the two settings that change how an order arrives: whether the buyer must give you a PO reference, and whether the branch’s orders come to you as drafts to check first. Read the review section before you switch it on — nothing is reserved while an order sits in the queue.

Taking phone orders as a buyer lets a rep open your storefront inside a named buyer’s account, at that buyer’s real contract prices, for 30 minutes.

Agreeing a price first

Quotes (RFQ) lets a buyer send their cart to you instead of paying. You price it on a draft order, send a time-boxed offer, and negotiate in a message thread that carries attachments both ways. The buyer accepts and checks out at the locked prices.

Two things to know before you promise anything: every quote starts from the buyer’s checkout — you cannot open one yourself — and a new request emails nobody, so someone has to work the queue daily. The offer the buyer receives is a page in their account plus an email stating the total and the expiry date; there is no quote document to download.

Getting paid

Payment terms and credit is the money page: Pay at checkout, Net 7 to 90, Due on fulfillment, Due on delivery (company COD) or Due when invoiced, each set per branch, with a hard credit limit behind anything deferred. It also covers deposits, the buyer’s Invoices page, settling many invoices in one charge, payment links, part payments, reminders, recording money that arrived by bank transfer, the overdue list, and writing off a bad debt.

Location store credit records a goodwill balance against a branch with a full audit trail. Read the page before you use it: nobody can spend that balance yet, so treat it as a record and settle the goodwill another way.

Refunds and returns on invoice orders covers the case that has no retail equivalent — a return against an invoice the customer has not paid, where the right answer is to reduce the invoice rather than send cash.

Company tax exemption marks one branch exempt and stores its GSTIN or VAT number. The branch’s setting decides; the person’s own tax flag is never consulted.

What your buyers see

Buyer portal guide walks the customer’s side: the “Purchasing for” switcher, the read-only Company screen, their orders and invoices, and what a Location admin sees that a plain Buyer does not.

Before you promise anything

B2B / B2C isolation FAQ answers the separation questions — discounts, loyalty, personal store credit, gift cards, tax, analytics — and who at a company can see whose orders.

Current limits is the honest list of what wholesale does not do yet, with the workaround beside each one. It is worth twenty minutes in week one. A merchant who meets a limit in month three is a much unhappier merchant than one who read about it before quoting a customer.

A typical first setup

1. Create the company and its first location, then clear the Ordering incomplete checklist — companies and locations.

2. Build a catalog, set prices and point it at that location — catalogs and contextual pricing.

3. Decide how the branch pays — keep Pay at checkout, or set Net terms with a credit limit — payment terms and credit.

4. Give a buyer access, with the notify box ticked so they get the access email — buyers and invitations.

5. The buyer signs in, picks the branch in Purchasing for, and shops at contract prices — buyer portal guide.

6. Orders arrive as normal orders, or as drafts if you chose to review them — PO numbers and order review.

Companies & locations

Create your first company account.

Catalogs & pricing

Build a wholesale catalog with negotiated prices.

Payment terms

Offer Net terms with a credit limit.

Current limits

Read what B2B does not do yet before you promise it.