The setup
A direct-to-stockist apparel brand doing $12M/year, with a wholesale book that had grown to seven pricing tiers over five years:
- Tier 1: Independent boutiques, <$2K/year purchase volume (~30% off retail)
- Tier 2: Established boutiques, $2K–$10K/year (~35% off)
- Tier 3: Department stores (~40% off)
- Tier 4: Stylists (~32% off)
- Tier 5: Sample sales / showrooms (~50% off)
- Tier 6: Top-tier strategic accounts — negotiated per-account (~42–48% off)
- Tier 7: Trade press / editorial gifting (100% off, comped)
The forcing function
April 2026: Shopify announces native B2B on every paid plan. The brand's wholesale director realizes the 3-catalog cap is going to be a problem. Two paths surface:
- Upgrade to Shopify Plus. Quoted at $2,300/month on a 1-year contract.
- Try a tag-based pricing app on top of Advanced plan. $29/month on TagTier's Standard plan.
The Plus quote was the first time the platform fee became a serious budget conversation. Annualized, it was $27,600 — about a senior hire's salary.
What they did
Hybrid: kept native B2B catalogs for the three biggest tiers (1, 2, 3 — representing ~85% of wholesale GMV), and used TagTier for tiers 4–7. The architectural split:
| Tier | Where it lives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Boutique <$2K | Native B2B catalog A | High volume, simple flat % |
| Boutique $2K–$10K | Native B2B catalog B | Same |
| Department stores | Native B2B catalog C | NET 30 terms (native handles this) |
| Stylists | TagTier #stylist | Tier 4: outside native cap |
| Sample sales | TagTier #sample-sale | Tier 5 |
| Strategic accounts | TagTier #strategic-{name} per account | Per-customer pricing (Plus-only natively) |
| Editorial gifting | TagTier #editorial → 100% off | Tier 7 |
The math
- Plus path: $2,300/month = $27,600/year platform fee, before apps.
- Native B2B + TagTier path: stay on Advanced ($299/mo) + TagTier Standard ($29/mo) = $328/mo blended (~$3,936/year). Hybrid path saves ~$23,700/year.
The savings funded a part-time wholesale ops contractor for the year, which the brand had been postponing.
Migration timeline
- Week 1: Set up the three native B2B catalogs. Migrate tiers 1–3 from the legacy wholesale-app setup. Run native B2B in parallel with the old app.
- Week 2: Install TagTier. Configure tiers 4–7 as rules. Tag the relevant accounts.
- Week 3: Cutover. Disable the legacy app. Watch ~80 wholesale orders for two weeks across all 7 tiers.
- Week 5: Uninstall the legacy app.
Outcomes (120 days post-migration)
- Platform spend avoided: $2,300/mo → $29/mo for the tier-pricing layer. ~$27,200/year saved.
- Tier configuration time: Adding a new strategic account used to involve a developer (custom Function for per-customer pricing). Now it's a 5-minute admin task.
- Audit findings during the migration: 14 stockists were on the wrong tier in the legacy system. The migration cleanup recovered ~$3K/month in margin from those accounts being correctly priced.
- Wholesale director's quote: "We didn't outgrow Shopify. We outgrew the assumption that wholesale equals Plus."
The cleanest finding
The brand expected to save money. They didn't expect the migration to surface a 14-stockist tier-mismatch problem. That cleanup alone paid for ~$36K/year in recovered margin — more than the platform-fee savings. Tier governance audit is its own ROI.
Related on TagTier
Want to be a case study?
If you have an interesting wholesale-on-Shopify story, email hello@tagtier.com.