The B2B-distributor question lands four to six times a year in our pipeline. The merchant has an aging custom catalog or a Magento installation and is evaluating Shopify Plus against WooCommerce for the replacement. Both platforms have improved meaningfully on the B2B side in the last two years. The decision is now more nuanced than it was in 2020.
Below is the cost math from four real builds we shipped in 2024 — two on Shopify Plus, two on WooCommerce — for distributors in the 5 to 40 million annual revenue range, with catalog sizes between 4,000 and 25,000 SKUs.
What B2B distributors actually need
Before the cost math, the feature requirements. Most B2B distributors share the same core list:
- Customer-specific pricing — different prices for different buyers, often tied to contract terms
- Customer groups or tiers with default pricing rules
- Net terms checkout (purchase orders, payment after invoice) alongside or instead of credit card
- Tax exemption handling for wholesale customers in applicable jurisdictions
- Quote requests for orders above a threshold or for customers not yet approved for direct ordering
- Quick-order or reorder flows from a CSV or past orders
- ERP integration (NetSuite, SAP Business One, Dynamics, or a custom system)
- Sales rep impersonation or shop-on-behalf functionality
- Volume discounts and tier-based pricing
Both Shopify Plus and WooCommerce can deliver all of these in 2024. The cost and the delivery model are different.
Shopify Plus: the cost lines
The Shopify Plus platform fee is the largest single line item. For most mid-market distributors it lands at 2,300 to 3,500 dollars a month, depending on order volume.
The B2B Catalog and Companies features, which Shopify shipped in 2022 and matured through 2023 and 2024, cover customer-specific pricing, customer groups, and net terms checkout natively on Shopify Plus. This is a meaningful change from 2020, when those features required apps or custom development.
Apps still account for a real cost line. A typical B2B distributor on Shopify Plus runs 6 to 12 apps in production. Quick-order, reorder workflow, sales rep impersonation, ERP sync, tax exemption automation, advanced quotes — most distributors will pay 600 to 1,800 dollars a month in app subscriptions.
The custom theme build runs 25,000 to 60,000 dollars depending on complexity, plus 50 to 120 hours per year of theme maintenance.
The ERP integration, if not covered by an off-the-shelf app, runs 25,000 to 80,000 dollars for the initial build plus a few hundred dollars a month in middleware hosting.
Total year-one cost on Shopify Plus, all in: roughly 100,000 to 200,000 dollars. Annual run-rate after year one: 50,000 to 90,000 dollars.
WooCommerce: the cost lines
WooCommerce has no platform fee. The hosting cost for a B2B catalog of this size — typically VPS or managed WordPress hosting capable of handling the database load — runs 200 to 800 dollars a month.
The B2B feature set is not native. It is assembled from a combination of plugins (B2BKing, Wholesale Suite, WooCommerce Memberships, custom code) and custom development. The plugin layer covers most needs but rarely all needs cleanly.
The custom theme and customizations are where the WooCommerce cost concentrates. The platform is more flexible than Shopify but the flexibility has to be paid for in developer hours. A typical B2B WooCommerce build runs 80,000 to 180,000 dollars in development, depending on how much of the B2B logic is custom versus off-the-shelf.
The ongoing maintenance is heavier on WooCommerce. WordPress core updates, WooCommerce updates, plugin updates, security patches — the typical retainer for a serious B2B WooCommerce site is 12,000 to 30,000 dollars a year.
The ERP integration is similarly priced to Shopify but typically requires more custom plumbing because WooCommerce’s API is broader and less opinionated than Shopify’s. Initial build: 20,000 to 70,000 dollars.
Total year-one cost on WooCommerce, all in: roughly 120,000 to 280,000 dollars. Annual run-rate after year one: 25,000 to 55,000 dollars.
The crossover point
Year one favors Shopify Plus on lower-end builds and WooCommerce on higher-end builds where the platform fee math starts to break even.
Year three onward, WooCommerce is consistently cheaper to run if the customizations have stabilized. The platform fee compounds. A merchant who spends 90,000 a year on Shopify Plus spends 270,000 over three years. The equivalent WooCommerce stack runs about 150,000 in the same window.
The cost math is not the deciding factor for most projects. The deciding factor is operational fit.
Where Shopify Plus wins on fit
For distributors who want their team to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time selling: Shopify Plus.
For distributors whose IT capacity is thin or outsourced: Shopify Plus.
For distributors who want a faster initial launch (12-20 weeks versus 20-36 weeks): Shopify Plus.
For distributors who want predictable monthly platform costs and limited surprise developer bills: Shopify Plus.
For distributors whose product catalog fits Shopify’s variant model (under 100 variants per product, three option dimensions): Shopify Plus.
Where WooCommerce wins on fit
For distributors with a development team in-house who can own the platform: WooCommerce.
For distributors with data residency or compliance requirements that rule out US-hosted SaaS: WooCommerce.
For distributors with product catalogs that exceed Shopify’s variant limits or have unusual data structures (vehicle compatibility, complex BOM relationships, custom configurators): WooCommerce.
For distributors with deep WordPress investment already (CMS, marketing site, content team trained on WP): WooCommerce.
For distributors who want full control over data, integrations, and customizations without platform-imposed limits: WooCommerce.
The 2024 update
The biggest change since we last wrote about this in 2020 is that Shopify Plus’s native B2B features — Companies, B2B Catalogs, customer-specific pricing, net terms — are now mature enough that the platform is a real contender for B2B distributors. In 2020 the answer was ‘WooCommerce, because Shopify’s B2B story was app-soup.’ In 2024 the answer is ‘depends on operational fit.’
For most mid-market distributors arriving in our discovery calls now, the recommendation lands in the same place: Shopify Plus if the team is sales-led and wants the platform to do the heavy lifting, WooCommerce if the team is tech-led and wants control. The discovery process is now genuinely about team shape rather than feature lists, which is the right place for it to be.