How to set B2B credit limits in Shopify

Updated October 15, 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 native Shopify B2B leaves to apps:

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. Both are in your store’s currency: what a company owes in another currency shows beside the balance and doesn’t count against the limit (credit limits in multiple currencies).

You set the limit from the company’s page in the Quay admin, or apply the limit Quay suggests from the company’s payment history (how that works). From there, enforcement is automatic.

Every Quay policy is made of two rules, set separately. The first is what happens over the limit: the buyer keeps ordering but pays on order, or, if the policy opts in, the order is blocked. The second is what happens overdue: on the policy’s own schedule, net terms come off first, then checkout is held. The two are independent. A company can be fine on its limit and overdue, or the reverse, and the policy decides each on its own. What a buyer meets at checkout is the result of those two rules, and it is always one of three outcomes.

How enforcement works: two rules, three outcomes

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

• 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.
• Block new orders: checkout is stopped outright with a clear message that includes your accounts contact.

An important design choice: being over the limit is soft by default. Out of the box, an over-limit buyer isn’t blocked: the worst that happens is they pay upfront instead of on terms. If you need a harder line, a policy can also block over-limit orders outright: a cart bigger than the company’s available credit is stopped at checkout, while orders that fit still go through. If the buyer checks out in another currency, Quay converts the company’s available credit into the cart’s currency at the exchange rate Shopify priced the cart with, and Shopify records the order at its own rate, so an order that only just fits can leave the company over its limit. The gap is explained in credit limits in multiple currencies. Hard blocking otherwise covers 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.

Buyers aren’t left guessing either: a Finance and payments page in their Shopify account shows the company’s balance, due dates and credit, and explains any restriction in plain words before checkout does.

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. Quay also suggests which preset fits each company, from how it has paid you: see how the groups work.

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 (Force allow, Force pay-on-order or Force block new orders; Use policy hands control back to the policy) 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, but you don’t have to start from a blank field. 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.

Or start from the limit Quay suggests

Quay suggests a starting limit for each company: the most it owed you at one time on orders with payment terms in the last 12 months, plus 25% if it pays on time, rounded up to two significant figures. A company that pays on time and owed you at most $12,345 at once gets $16,000 ($12,345 plus 25% is $15,431, rounded up).

On the Suggestions page, Quay groups your companies by how they have paid you over the last 12 months (Pays on time, Pays late, Pays very late, or Not enough history yet) and suggests a policy for each group and a credit limit for each company in it. Pays on time means that, weighted by amount, the company settles by the due date; Pays late means up to 30 days past due on average; Pays very late means more than 30 days. Only orders with payment terms count, once they have come due. A paid order counts for 12 months from its due date. Money still owed counts for as long as it is owed. A company needs at least five such orders before it gets one of these; with fewer, or with orders in more than one currency, it is in Not enough history yet. A company that owed you on an order with payment terms in a currency other than your store’s at any time in the last 12 months gets no suggested limit, because Quay can’t convert that debt into your store’s currency, and applying its group leaves its limit as it is.

Pays on time gets Trusted, Pays late gets Standard, Pays very late gets High Risk, and Not enough history yet gets Probation with no limit suggested. As installed, Trusted moves an overdue company to pay on order after 8 days and blocks new orders after 30; Standard does the same after 4 and 14 days; High Risk and Probation block new orders from the first overdue day; all four make an over-limit buyer pay on order, and you can change the days.

Nothing changes until you apply, and each group can be undone for 30 days. Before you apply, Quay shows what changes at checkout for that group: how many companies would be blocked, move to pay on order, or be unblocked, and which limits it would set. You can leave any company out of a group and choose any of your policies for it. A limit or policy you set yourself stays as it is: Quay suggests changing it only when something has changed since you set it (the company pays differently, or owes close to your limit), and says why. Undo puts each company back to the limit and policy it had before; limits and policies you changed by hand since then stay.

Open Suggestions in the Quay menu. The companies list also has a Suggested tab, and a Review suggestions button when there is something to review; a company with a suggestion shows a Suggested line on its page, with a Review link. Suggestions cover the companies your plan includes, on every plan, while the plan is active or in its trial.

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.”

And when a buyer’s accounts team asks for their balance as of a date, the answer is a statement of account per company, rendered from the same orders for any date since your first B2B order.

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.