7 min read
How to Give Wholesale Prices on Shopify Without Installing an App
You can run real wholesale pricing on Shopify without installing anything from the App Store. Four methods, in order of how long they survive contact with actual buyers.
Method 1 — Manual draft orders
The buyer emails a purchase order. You open Shopify admin, create a draft order, apply the agreed price per line, and send the invoice. Nothing to install, nothing to configure.
This works to roughly 20 orders a month. Past that you are paying a salary to retype emails, and every typo costs more than the discount you negotiated.
Method 2 — Customer tags plus discount codes
Tag wholesale customers, issue codes, and hope the codes stay inside the account they were issued to.
- Codes leak — they end up on deal aggregators within weeks of your first bulk buyer sharing one.
- No quantity tiers — a code is one percentage, not a volume break at 10/50/100 units.
- No MOQ enforcement — a retail shopper buys one unit at your distributor price.
- Retail buyers see wholesale prices in the same checkout, which distorts every conversion metric you track.
Method 3 — A second Shopify store for wholesale
A clean separation: retail on store A, wholesale on store B. It works, and it doubles your Shopify bill, your catalog maintenance, and your inventory reconciliation problem. Inventory now has to be kept in agreement across two stores in real time, which is the exact problem you were trying to avoid.
Method 4 — A login-gated portal on the Admin API
Approved buyers sign in to a separate wholesale portal on its own subdomain. They see their own price list and their own quantity breaks. Their order arrives in your Shopify admin as a draft order, and you invoice from Shopify exactly as you do today.
The reason this needs no App Store install: it uses Shopify's Admin API through the official OAuth flow. No theme edits, no Liquid changes, no App Store review. This is how Hasil Pricing works, and the shape is copyable even if you build it yourself.
Which one to pick
- Under 20 wholesale orders a month, one price for everyone: manual draft orders.
- Occasional buyers, no tiers, low leak risk: customer tags and codes.
- Fully separate brand and catalog with the budget to match: second store.
- Recurring buyers, more than one price tier, MOQs: login-gated portal.
Frequently asked
- Can Shopify show different prices to different customers without an app?
- Not natively on the storefront. Shopify's own price rules are discount-based, not customer-specific price lists. To show a buyer their own price you either create the order manually as a draft order, or serve prices through a separate login-gated portal built on the Admin API.
- Do wholesale discount codes hurt retail conversion?
- Yes, in two ways. The code field itself invites retail shoppers to leave and hunt for a code, and leaked wholesale codes get redeemed by retail buyers at distributor pricing. Separating the two checkouts removes both problems.
- Do draft orders deduct inventory?
- Not when the draft is created. Inventory deducts when the draft order is paid and fulfilled, exactly like a normal Shopify order, so your stock numbers stay accurate while the invoice is outstanding.
- Is a wholesale portal the same as Shopify B2B?
- No. Shopify's native B2B features require Shopify Plus. A portal on the Admin API runs on any Shopify plan and does not touch your retail theme.
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