Seasonal wholesale does not buy the way commerce platforms are built.
For most of the year your dealers are booking one season while another ships. The same style carries a pre-book price in one program and an at-once price in another. A single booking arrives as three dated drops. Earned status from last season has to apply to this one. None of that is continuous — and continuous is what B2B platforms are designed for.
So the season ends up living in four places at once: a dealer portal, spreadsheets and EDI, rep inboxes, and a second product catalogue nobody wanted to maintain.
This session is about closing that gap on Shopify Plus. We walk through the modelling — how the season gets structured on native B2B primitives, the architecture decisions behind it, the trade-offs, and the parts we got wrong on the way.
What we’ll cover
- The seasonal buying year, and why it breaks continuous ordering models
- What Shopify B2B gives you natively — companies, locations, catalogs, price lists, draft orders, and the extension points that matter
- Where the platform stops, and what has to be built on top of it
- The five capabilities that close the gap: concurrent program carts, per-program pricing, staged delivery windows, earned program tiers, and rep-assisted ordering
- What an implementation actually takes — workstreams, phases, and why you plan backwards from a booking window
- Seven things worth evaluating in any wholesale consolidation, regardless of platform
Who should attend
Brands and distributors running seasonal wholesale through a dealer network — outdoor, apparel, sporting goods. Commercial leaders, e-commerce and IT owners, and anyone evaluating their wholesale platform strategy for seasonal buying.
