Shopify Moved Its Wholesale Stack
to Every Paid Plan.
Here Is What the Math Looks Like.

Shopify's own changelog entry on April 2 is worth reading directly rather than through the trade press. Merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans now get: up to three active B2B catalogs, company profiles for business buyers, payment terms from Net 15 through Net 90, volume pricing and quantity rules, vaulted credit cards, B2B checkout with purchase order fields and tax-exempt handling, and ACH payments for US brands. Shopify Flow automations work across all of it. No additional cost. No app install.

That list used to require Shopify Plus at $2,300 a month, billed annually. For most gift and lifestyle brands, that number was never going to make sense unless wholesale was already a major revenue line. Three years of a real feature set locked behind an enterprise price point.

What stays Plus-only is narrower than you might expect. Unlimited catalogs versus three on lower plans. Direct catalog assignment to specific companies rather than through Markets. Partial payments and deposit handling. Sales-rep permission scoping. For a brand with clean pricing tiers and a few dozen to a few hundred wholesale accounts, three catalogs covers the actual need.

The Winter 2026 Shopify Edition, which shipped at the same time, added two things specifically relevant for brands with chain-retail exposure: native EDI integration with SPS Commerce and Crstl, pulling purchase orders directly into Shopify as draft orders. That closes the last meaningful gap for anyone already selling into or pitching multi-location chain accounts.

The growth numbers explain why this happened. Shopify B2B GMV grew 96 percent in full-year 2025 and 84 percent in Q4, per the February earnings call. Shopify's president Harley Finkelstein described it on that call as "a very small portion of GMV today, given it is a newer product offering." That sentence is the entire strategic justification for April 2. Their fastest-growing product segment was gated to the top 10 percent of their merchant base. That arithmetic only runs one direction.

On March 31, 2026, Faire announced a direct integration with Lightspeed Retail. Their press release framed it as 100,000-plus Faire brands surfaced inside Lightspeed's POS. Lightspeed's CEO called it "the POS with wholesale built right in."

Two days later, April 2, Shopify opened B2B to every paid plan.

The Shopify-Faire relationship has a specific history. In September 2023, Faire became Shopify's recommended wholesale marketplace with an equity stake from Shopify attached. Shopify POS was named Faire's preferred point of sale. That partnership framing put both platforms in a complementary position rather than a competitive one.

The Lightspeed deal changed that framing. Faire moved toward a POS integration strategy that was not Shopify-exclusive. Shopify responded by removing the gating on the wholesale tools that had made Faire useful for the brands Shopify already served.

The read here is not that Shopify wants to build a marketplace. They shut down Handshake, their wholesale marketplace attempt, in late 2023. They are not going back there. What they are doing is making sure brands on Shopify can own their existing retailer relationships without needing a third-party platform to do it. The job of finding new buyers Faire still does. The job of managing the accounts you already have, Shopify just made much cheaper to run natively.

These numbers come from Faire's help center, not from a competitor's analysis. They are Faire's published terms.

For North American brands: 0 percent commission on Faire Direct orders, where you direct your own accounts to your Faire Direct link. 15 percent commission plus a $10 new-customer fee on first orders from retailers who discover you through the Faire marketplace. 15 percent on all reorders from those same marketplace-discovered retailers, with no tenure reduction and no cap. A payment processing fee on every order, tiered by payout speed: next-day, 30-day, or 60-day.

For brands based outside North America: 25 percent on the first order from a new marketplace-discovered retailer (the standard 15 percent plus a 10 percent referral fee), then 15 percent on all reorders from that retailer going forward.

The 15 percent reorder commission is the number worth sitting with. Every brand I have worked with on Faire eventually asks the same question when they actually do this math. A retailer who first found you through Faire three years ago and has been reordering every season since then still generates a 15 percent commission on every purchase. No loyalty reduction. No cap at a certain volume. No graduation to Faire Direct rates. The commission continues for as long as that retailer keeps ordering through the platform. Faire is clear about this in their help center. It is not buried.

The Faire Direct structure does allow 0 percent commission on accounts you bring to the platform yourself. But the documentation requirements are specific. As of the policy update that took effect January 9, 2024, qualifying a new relationship for 0 percent commission requires using the Faire Direct link or tool at the point of first contact, with documentation to match. Accounts that discover you on Faire and place their first order through the marketplace, even if you knew them before, require a commission change request and supporting documentation to reclassify.

The advertising layer sits on top of all of this. Faire's CEO Max Rhodes told Modern Retail that Promoted Listings now account for nearly 5 percent of Faire's total revenue. His exact words: "That makes it the fastest growing business we've ever launched." More than 7,000 brands were actively advertising at time of that publication. That spend does not reduce the commission. It is additional. A brand spending on Promoted Listings and paying 15 percent commission on every resulting order is paying both, stacked.

Moving wholesale reorders to a Shopify B2B portal and walking away from Faire tomorrow would be a mistake for almost any brand. The capability gaps are real.

Discovery. Faire's March 2026 newsroom post references 700,000-plus retailers on the platform. Shopify B2B has no buyer-facing marketplace. The portal manages accounts you already have. If a brand does not have a trade show calendar, a rep network, or some other mechanism for finding new buyers, removing Faire without replacing that demand surface is a revenue problem, not a cost saving.

Net terms financing. Faire pays brands on their payout schedule and fronts Net 60 terms to retailers. Faire absorbs the credit and default risk on those receivables. Shopify's payment terms feature is a billing tool. The brand sets the terms. The brand carries the receivable. The brand takes the default risk.

Free returns on opening orders. Faire absorbs the cost of free returns within 60 days on first orders from new retailers. That policy underwrites retailer trial of unfamiliar brands and is a real driver of opening-order conversion rates. Shopify has no equivalent. A brand wanting to offer the same guarantee self-insures it.

Retailer verification. Faire verifies business identity, resale tax credentials, and payment details before an order processes. On Shopify B2B, company approval is manual. At low volume this is manageable. At scale it is an operational task that needs someone to own it.

EDI for chain accounts. This gap largely closed with the Winter 2026 SPS Commerce and Crstl integrations. For brands selling into or pitching multi-location chain accounts, Shopify post-Winter 2026 handles what most brands actually need on the EDI front. If you wrote this off earlier, it is worth reassessing.

Faire's pricing policy is in their help center under the section for US and Canada based brands. The relevant line: wholesale and MSRP pricing must be the same or lower on Faire as on any other channel, including your own direct wholesale site.

A brand cannot run a Shopify B2B portal with lower wholesale prices than their Faire listing. Faire conducts pricing audits. If a discrepancy is found, the brand receives a notice to correct it or appeal.

The practical implication for any hybrid model: the margin recapture from migrating accounts off Faire comes entirely from eliminating the 15 percent commission, not from repricing. Both channels carry the same wholesale floor. The savings are real and the math works, but the mechanism is commission elimination, not a price adjustment.

The Faire Direct policy has another structural point worth understanding. Once a retailer places their first order through the Faire marketplace, that retailer is attributed to Faire. Getting to 0 percent commission on future orders from that retailer requires submitting a commission change request with documentation. Retailers who find you through the marketplace and later get redirected to a Shopify B2B portal do not automatically lose their Faire attribution. The documentation process exists to handle this, but the brand has to actively manage it. It does not happen automatically.

Faire's most recent valuation was $5.2 billion, from a November 2025 employee tender. That is down from a $12.59 billion peak in May 2022. Max Rhodes told CNBC in March 2026 that 2025 revenue grew 32 percent over 2024 and the company is projected to break even soon. Digital Commerce 360 reported the company is annualizing above $500 million in revenue.

A business at that stage, with an IPO option open, has one primary growth tool in the near term: take rate. The headline commission is unlikely to move. The more flexible tools are advertising load, new ad formats, enhanced features that cost extra, and tighter enforcement of existing policies. Promoted Listings grew from zero to nearly 5 percent of revenue since September 2024. Retargeting ads added in early 2025. Faire Market promotional matching that costs participating brands. Faire+ for chain retail with its own compliance requirements. These are all expansions of the take-rate surface, and none of them are unreasonable in isolation.

The brand-level decision is not whether to stay on Faire or leave. For most brands, the answer is stay and use it for what it does best: finding buyers you would not find any other way. The decision is whether to keep paying 15 percent on accounts that have been reordering for three years, when a $79 Shopify plan now runs the same reorder workflow at a processing fee and no commission.

The brands that figure out that split clearly, running Faire for discovery and Shopify B2B for retention, will be in a better position 24 months from now than the brands entirely dependent on whatever Faire's take rate looks like after a public offering. The brands that wait will be running their wholesale business on the same model as an Amazon seller, with the same predictable consequences.