How to set B2B credit limits in Shopify

Published July 8, 2026

A B2B credit limit is a ceiling on how much a single wholesale customer can owe you at any one time. If a company has a $10,000 limit and $8,500 in unpaid invoices, they have $1,500 of credit left. It is a debt cap, not a discount and not a payment term — and it is the single most effective control a wholesale merchant has against a good customer quietly turning into a large bad debt.

If you sell B2B on Shopify and you have been looking for where to enter that number, this guide explains why you can’t find it, what “setting a credit limit” actually requires, and how enforcement works at checkout.

Does Shopify have credit limits natively?

Short answer: no. Since Shopify’s Winter ‘26 release (April 2, 2026), native B2B works on every paid plan — Basic, Grow, and Advanced, not just Plus. You get company profiles, per-company payment terms (Net 7/15/30/45/60/90), company-specific catalogs and pricing, and self-serve B2B ordering.

What native B2B does not include, on any plan, is a credit limit or any enforcement of one. You can grant a company Net 30 terms, but nothing in Shopify stops that company from placing a sixth order on terms while the first five invoices are still unpaid. The payment term controls when an invoice is due. It says nothing about how much a company is allowed to owe you across all their open invoices at once.

That gap is fine when you have three wholesale accounts and you know each owner personally. It becomes a real exposure the moment you have thirty accounts and can’t hold every balance in your head.

The native workaround, and where it stops

There is one native lever: on each company location you can flag all orders to draft, which routes every B2B order to a draft order you approve by hand before it’s processed. That’s a manual credit gate — you can catch an over-extended buyer, if you remember to check their balance every time.

It works at small scale. It stops scaling the moment order volume means you’re rubber-stamping drafts without really checking, which defeats the point. What you actually want is for the limit to enforce itself.

What “setting a credit limit” actually requires

To enforce a per-company credit limit you need two things Shopify doesn’t provide natively:

1. Somewhere to store the limit — one number per company, that only you can change.
2. A rule that reads that number at checkout and does something when a buyer is over it.

This is the layer Quay adds. It stores a credit limit on each company in an app-reserved Shopify metafield — a field only the app can write, so a buyer or another app can’t tamper with it — and it continuously computes each company’s available credit as credit limit − outstanding balance, recalculated from the company’s real order and payment activity.

You set the limit from the company’s page in the Quay admin. From there, enforcement is automatic.

How enforcement works: three modes

A credit limit is only as good as what happens when someone crosses it. Quay resolves every company to one of three enforcement modes:

• Off (monitor only) — the limit is tracked and shown on your dashboard, but checkout is never changed. Good for watching a new account before you decide how strict to be.
• Hide net terms (pay on order) — when a buyer is over their limit, they lose the deferred-payment option at checkout and must pay on the order to complete it. Their terms come back automatically once they’re back under the limit. This is the default response to being over-limit.
• Hard block — checkout is stopped outright with a message you write.

An important design choice: being over the limit is soft-only. On its own it never hard-blocks a buyer — the worst that happens is they pay upfront instead of on terms. Hard block is reserved for accounts that are overdue (invoices past their due date) or that you’ve manually held. The logic behind that split is in the guide on blocking checkout over a credit limit.

Policies: set limits by trust level, not one by one

Setting an enforcement mode on every company individually gets tedious fast. Instead, Quay ships five reusable policy presets — Standard, Trusted, VIP, Probation, High Risk — and you assign one to each company. A policy bundles the over-limit response and the overdue-handling rules, so “put this account on Probation” is one click and applies a consistent, pre-agreed set of rules.

Companies you haven’t assigned a policy to are simply not enforced — “no policy” is a valid, first-class state, not a hidden default. And any single company can carry a manual override (pause, soft-hold, or hard-hold) that takes precedence over its policy, for the times you need to act on one account without touching the preset.

How to decide a company’s credit limit

The number itself is a business judgment, not a formula, but a few practical anchors:

• Start from order history. A common starting point is one to two times a company’s typical monthly order value — enough for them to operate on terms without a single unpaid period ballooning.
• Weight it by payment behavior. A company that has paid on time for a year earns a higher limit than a new account. Raise limits as trust is earned; that’s what the Trusted and VIP presets are for.
• Account for your margin. The real risk in an unpaid invoice is your cost of goods, not the retail total. Thin-margin, high-volume accounts deserve tighter limits.
• Set new accounts low. Probation exists for exactly this — a modest limit and strict handling until the account proves itself.

Once the limits are set, the other half of the job is seeing how each account is tracking against them — which is what an accounts-receivable aging view gives you.

Where this leaves you

Native Shopify B2B, now on every plan, handles the mechanics of selling on terms. It does not handle the risk. A per-company credit limit — stored safely, computed from live balances, and enforced automatically at checkout — is the control that turns “we offer net terms” into “we offer net terms without lying awake about it.”

If you’re weighing whether you even need an app for this, the honest breakdown is in do you need Shopify Plus for B2B — native covers more than it used to, and this guide’s companion pieces map exactly where it stops.