Import wholesale customers to Shopify

Why wholesale accounts are the hard part of a B2B migration

Products and retail customers have a well-worn path onto Shopify. Wholesale accounts do not. Shopify has no native CSV import for companies — the built-in customer importer creates customers, not B2B companies, company locations, or company contacts. So the entity your trade business actually runs on is the one entity you cannot upload.

Shopify’s own help centre points at three routes, and they are the three routes most merchants end up choosing between:

• Enter each company by hand in the Shopify admin — fine for twenty accounts, a week of typing at four hundred, and every keystroke is a chance to mistype a tax ID.
• Use a general-purpose data app such as Matrixify — a capable bulk tool that moves many Shopify resources. Worth knowing before you plan the cutover: its Basic plan caps companies at roughly 50 per file, so a few hundred trade accounts means splitting the list across files or moving up a tier.
• Hire a Shopify Partner to write against the Company API — the most flexible option, and a development project with a quote attached before a single account moves.

All three move rows. None of them checks a tax ID against an official registry, and none of them decides how tax should be treated for the company that comes out the other end. That work lands on you afterwards, account by account, at exactly the moment you are least able to spend a week on it. B2B Onboard imports the same list and does that checking as part of the run — and records what it found, so the decision you make later has something behind it.

How accounts come across

Three steps, in Companies → Import companies. Nothing is created until you say so.

Uploaded the same file twice by mistake? A file that has already been imported is recognised before anything is created — you can open the earlier run’s report instead, or deliberately choose to run it again. Imported records stay visible in the applications list under the Imported filter, badged on every row, and stay out of your dashboard metrics and weekly digest so a migration never flatters your approval rate. See the applications guide for how the Imported badge and filter behave.

Every column the template accepts

Thirty columns, in this order. Four are required — a row missing any of them is reported as invalid in the preview and is not created.

File limits: 5,000 rows and 20 MB per file. A larger list splits cleanly across several files — each run gets its own preview and its own results file.

This table reflects today’s template, and it will grow: further columns are on the roadmap, and this page is updated as each one ships. Columns not listed here are ignored on upload, so an export from your old platform can keep its extra fields — only the thirty above are read.

Purchase-order numbers are deliberately not an import column. Requiring a PO number at checkout is a store-level Shopify checkout setting rather than something held per company location, so there is nothing per-customer for the file to carry — set it once in Shopify and it applies to every B2B customer.

Re-uploading a file

Migrations rarely land in one pass. When rows carry an external_id, a second upload of the corrected file recognises the companies it already created, so you choose — before the run starts — what should happen to them:

• Skip the row (the default) — the existing company is left exactly as it is and the row is reported as skipped.
• Update the company from the row — the name, address, phone and reference IDs in your file replace what is on the company. Tax IDs and tax treatment are never changed this way; those stay with the tax-exemption workflow.

The results file records the outcome of every row — created, updated, skipped, matched, held back or failed — alongside a matched_by column naming which key claimed it (external_id, tax ID, email domain or company name), so you can see exactly why a row landed where it did.

The same file also carries a payment_terms column, naming the terms that were applied to each newly created location, and a deposit column reading applied or not_applied (plan) — so a store that is not on Shopify Plus gets a precise list of the companies whose deposit still needs setting by hand.

Every tax ID checked against the registry, recorded as evidence

A tax ID that was typed into your old system five years ago has never been checked by anybody. During an import, each row’s tax ID is checked against the official registry for that company’s country:

• VIES for the EU
• HMRC for the UK
• the ABR for Australia
• the NZBN register for New Zealand
• Brønnøysund for Norway

The result and the reference behind it are recorded as evidence on the row and on the company it created, so months later you can see what was checked, when, and against what. Companies whose number qualifies receive the matching tax treatment as part of the run.

Where a registry cannot confirm a number, the row still imports — marked unavailable, flagged for you, and with tax still collected. Nothing is quietly exempted on a number nobody could confirm; collecting tax is the safe default, and the flag tells you which rows to look at. A registry that was simply unreachable at the time is re-checked automatically in the background afterwards, so an outage costs you nothing and you do not re-upload for it. A number that is genuinely wrong you correct and re-import, or re-check from the company later.

This is decision support, not tax advice. The app checks, records and flags; the decision on any individual account stays with you and your accountant.

Login invitations are a separate, explicit step

Imported customers do not receive login instructions automatically. Sending them is a single checkbox at upload time, and it is off by default. Move the data quietly this week, check a sample of accounts, brief your sales team — and send the welcome email when you are ready for the replies. Nothing about the import reaches your customers until you decide it should.

What we deliberately don’t import, and why

The import creates companies, company contacts and company locations. Everything below is left alone on purpose — each for a reason worth knowing before you plan the cutover.

Plan availability

Importing wholesale accounts as native B2B companies works on every paid Shopify plan — Basic, Shopify, Advanced and Plus. Company creation stopped being a Plus-only capability in 2026, so a Basic or Advanced store gets real companies, company contacts and company locations from the same file.

One caveat, stated plainly because you will meet it eventually: assigning a catalogue directly to a company location is a Shopify Plus capability. Below Plus, a B2B catalogue reaches a company through B2B markets instead. That is how Shopify works, not something the import changes. What the importer does with it is worth stating precisely. On Plus, the catalogs column attaches the named catalogues to the location the row creates. On Basic, Shopify (Grow) and Advanced, if you have set a Default B2B market under Settings → B2B Company, every company location the import approves — newly created, matched to an existing company, or updated by external ID — is added to that market — so it picks up that market’s catalogues and prices without any follow-up work, and the results file’s market column names the market for each row it applied to. If no Default B2B market is set, the import still creates the companies, contacts and locations, and you assign them to a market afterwards. One caveat either way: a B2B market carries its own currency and region settings, so pick the market that matches the buyers in the file rather than assuming one market fits every country you import. Imported rows are never evaluated against your form rules either — a market assigned by a rule’s Assign B2B market action only applies to applications submitted through your storefront form, so set the Default B2B market for the companies you import.