Net terms for wholesale on Shopify: how they work and how to control the risk

Published July 8, 2026

Net terms are the backbone of wholesale: you ship now, the buyer pays later — Net 30 means the invoice is due 30 days after it’s issued. Offering terms is often what wins a wholesale account in the first place, because it lets the buyer sell your product before they’ve paid for it. The catch is that every dollar on terms is a dollar of credit you’ve extended, and Shopify will happily let a customer keep drawing on that credit whether or not they’re paying you back.

This guide covers how net terms work on Shopify today, how to set them up, and — the part that actually matters — how to offer them without the risk piling up.

Net terms on Shopify: what you get now

Until 2026, native B2B payment terms were a Shopify Plus feature. That changed with the Winter ‘26 release on April 2, 2026: native B2B, including per-company payment terms, is now available on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans. If you’ve been avoiding B2B on Shopify because you assumed it meant upgrading to Plus, that assumption is out of date.

With native B2B you can:

• Create companies and company locations for your wholesale buyers.
• Assign a payment-terms template per location — Net 7, 15, 30, 45, 60, or 90, plus due-on-receipt and fixed-date options.
• Let B2B buyers self-serve: they log in, see their negotiated pricing, and check out with the deferred-payment option their terms allow.
• Vault credit cards on the company for later charging.

How to set it up

1. In your Shopify admin, create the wholesale buyer as a company with at least one company location.
2. Assign a payment-terms template (say, Net 30) to that location.
3. Add the buyer’s contact so they can log into the B2B storefront.

From then on, that buyer sees the net-terms option at checkout. Because terms live on the location, one company’s two locations can carry different terms — useful for a customer with a trusted head office and a newer branch.

The gap: terms without a ceiling

Here’s what native payment terms don’t do: they don’t cap how much a company can owe you. Net 30 controls when each invoice is due. It says nothing about how many unpaid invoices a company can stack up at once.

Play it forward. A company on Net 30 places an order Monday. Wednesday they place another. The next week, two more. None are past due yet, so nothing flags — but you’re now carrying four unpaid invoices for a single account, and if the first one goes bad, they’re all probably going bad. Multiply that across a growing book of wholesale accounts and “we offer net terms” becomes “we’re an unsecured lender who never agreed to be one.”

The two controls that close this gap are a credit limit and an accounts-receivable view — neither of which is native to Shopify B2B.

How to offer net terms safely

1. Put a credit limit on every account

A per-company credit limit is a ceiling on total outstanding balance. Net 30 with a $10,000 limit means the buyer has terms and can never owe you more than $10,000 across all open invoices. The two together are what responsible trade credit looks like.

Shopify has no native credit-limit field, so this is where an app comes in. Quay stores a limit on each company and computes available credit (limit − outstanding) from live order and payment activity.

2. Make over-limit buyers pay on the order

A limit is only useful if crossing it does something. Quay’s default response to an over-limit buyer is to hide the net-terms option at checkout — the buyer can still complete the order, but they pay on it rather than on terms. It’s a soft, self-resolving brake: the moment their balance drops back under the limit, their terms come back automatically. No manual account suspension, no awkward email.

Technically, Quay does this by clearing the company location’s payment-terms template while they’re over the limit and restoring it after — so the change is real at checkout, not cosmetic. Being over-limit is deliberately soft-only: it never hard-blocks a buyer outright. Hard blocking is reserved for accounts that are actually overdue or that you’ve manually held.

3. Watch the aging, not just the due dates

Terms create receivables, and receivables need to be watched. An AR aging view groups every open invoice by how overdue it is, so a slipping account shows up as a pattern before it becomes a write-off. Overdue balances are also what should trigger your firmest enforcement — a company that’s 60 days past due is a different risk than one that’s simply over its limit this week.

The bottom line

Offering net terms on Shopify is now a few clicks on any plan — that part Shopify handles well. What it doesn’t handle is the credit risk those terms create. Pair every term with a credit limit, make over-limit buyers pay upfront, and keep an eye on aging, and net terms go back to being a growth tool instead of a liability.

Not sure whether native B2B is enough on its own for your size? The Plus-versus-native breakdown lays out exactly where native stops.