Selldi vs Shopify B2B for Wholesale Distribution

Shopify B2B and Selldi solve different problems. Shopify B2B adds wholesale features — company accounts, custom catalogs, volume discounts and payment terms — on top of a best-in-class consumer storefront, and it is the better choice if you sell both retail and wholesale and value polished checkout plus a huge app ecosystem. Selldi is a purpose-built all-in-one platform for the wholesale back office: a B2B customer portal, an optional B2C storefront, a field-sales CRM, an AI Email Reader that turns order emails into structured orders, and ERP integration all share one catalog and one set of customer data, so distributors avoid stacking several paid apps.

What each platform actually is

Shopify B2B is not a separate product. It is a set of wholesale features — company accounts, customer-specific catalogs with custom price lists, volume discounts, quantity rules, net payment terms and vaulted credit cards — built into the same Shopify storefront, admin and checkout that power consumer stores. Since April 2026 the foundational pieces ship on the standard Basic, Grow and Advanced plans at no extra cost, capped at three custom catalogs; the fuller toolset lives on Shopify Plus. Selldi takes the opposite starting point. It is an all-in-one sales platform built around the wholesale back office, where a B2B customer portal, an optional B2C storefront, a field-sales CRM, an AI Email Reader and ERP integration share one catalog, one stock pool and one set of customer data.

Where Shopify B2B genuinely wins

If storefront quality and reach matter, Shopify is hard to beat, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise:

• Best-in-class checkout, themes and page performance, with B2B and B2C run from one admin and one catalog
• An enormous app ecosystem plus Shopify Payments, Flow and Markets that now cover B2B as well
• Reliable, globally scalable hosting with mature multi-currency and multi-market support
• 2026 additions for wholesale: native EDI via SPS Commerce and Crstl (purchase orders flow in as draft orders on Plus), Sidekick AI to create company accounts, and store credit for company locations
• Pre-built connectors and middleware paths for common ERPs and CRMs such as NetSuite, SAP, HubSpot and Salesforce

For a consumer or lifestyle brand adding wholesale alongside a thriving direct-to-consumer store, that combination is genuinely excellent, and no purpose-built B2B tool matches its retail reach or the depth of its app marketplace.

Where Selldi fits the wholesale back office better

The gaps appear once wholesale is the main event rather than a side channel. Shopify's B2B model assumes orders arrive through the storefront and that a handful of custom catalogs cover your pricing. A distributor with dozens of contract tiers, case-and-inner-pack rules and a sales team working the phones needs more, and Selldi bundles that as native functionality:

• Automated order-email intake: Selldi's AI Email Reader turns emailed, PDF and spreadsheet purchase orders into structured orders; Shopify has no native equivalent, so staff manually re-key each PO into a draft order
• A real field-sales CRM: leads and contractors, activities, a shared mailbox, order-on-behalf and onboarding customers onto the portal — in Shopify, reps are limited to draft orders in the admin unless you add third-party apps
• Native quoting and RFQ, which in Shopify is a manual draft-order process or a paid app
• A CENTER hub to manage products, prices and channels — including marketplaces such as Amazon — from one place, plus an activity log
• One system out of the box, versus stacking several paid apps (pricing, quoting, rep tools, ERP sync) to approximate all-in-one

The order-intake gap

This is the sharpest practical difference. A distributor's inbox fills daily with orders as PDF attachments, spreadsheets and free-text emails. On Shopify, someone reads each one and re-keys it into a draft order by hand — accurate, but slow and error-prone at volume. Shopify's 2026 EDI integration with SPS Commerce and Crstl can flow structured purchase orders in as draft orders on Plus, which helps with trading partners already on EDI, but it does not parse the messy human email that most small and mid-size buyers still send. Selldi's AI Email Reader is built for exactly that: it extracts line items from the attachment or message body and produces an order for review, so a two-person office can process volume that would otherwise need extra hands.

The cost picture

Shopify's foundational B2B is now free on standard plans, which is a real change, but the three-catalog cap and the missing pieces (no wholesale registration form, no bulk order form, no partial payments, no scoped sales-rep permissions) push most serious wholesalers to Shopify Plus. Plus is billed at a high monthly enterprise rate (higher on shorter terms), and above a high monthly sales threshold the fee shifts to a percentage of revenue up to a monthly cap; check the vendor's current pricing. Add transaction fees when you do not use Shopify Payments, plus the paid apps needed to reach all-in-one, and published all-in figures commonly reach several thousand a month and up. Selldi is deliberately positioned lower: a focused SMB and mid-market platform, quick to deploy and priced for wholesalers, with the CRM, AI intake and ERP connectivity included rather than assembled from apps.

When each is the right choice

Choose Shopify B2B if you already sell to consumers on Shopify, or want to, and wholesale is an add-on to a polished retail operation — the shared storefront, checkout and app ecosystem will serve you better than anything a B2B specialist offers. Industry guides put the tipping point at roughly 500 wholesale customers, above which the non-Plus limits become operational blockers and Plus (or a specialist) starts to pay off. Choose Selldi if wholesale is the core of the business and the back office is where you feel the pain: order emails to process, reps to equip, quotes to manage, and an ERP that must stay the single source of truth. Selldi does not try to out-feature an enterprise commerce suite; its edge is being genuinely all-in-one for a trading business without a stack of add-ons. And to be plain about it — if you need the absolute best consumer checkout and a marketplace of thousands of apps, that is Shopify's territory, not Selldi's.