Trade and Contractor Customers Buying Online and In Store

The short answer: a trade or contractor account is a bundle of promises (a price, a tax treatment, payment terms, sometimes a pickup arrangement), and many retail platforms, Shopify most clearly, keep those promises in different places for the website and the register. Something set up for the account online may not follow the customer to the counter. On Shopify, B2B company pricing does not reach Shopify POS at all.

So before a store tells a contractor "you get your trade price here too", someone has to check, setting by setting, which channel actually honours it. This guide walks through price, quotes, tax, terms and pickup, using Shopify, Square, Lightspeed and BigCommerce documentation as of October 2026.

Why do trade prices work online but not at the register?

On Shopify, because a trade account is modelled as an online B2B customer first. Shopify's B2B features attach catalogs, payment terms and tax exemptions to a "company location", which Shopify's developer docs describe as "A single location or branch of the company." B2B catalogs are ultimately assigned to company locations, through B2B markets or, on Plus, directly.

The register works from a different model. Shopify's Help Center page on markets for Shopify POS says: "Company-specific prices for B2B markets aren't available for retail purchases." It adds that a customer with B2B pricing for a company location "can't access those prices through Shopify POS" and needs to buy from the online store instead.

B2B portal guides, including ours, tend to stop at the website. A contractor who gets a trade price online and walks into your store gets the store's retail price, not their account price, unless staff change it by hand. POS Pro lets you set different pricing "for Shopify POS and for your online store in the same region", but that price applies to everyone buying at those locations, not to one account.

Other platforms draw the line elsewhere:

• Lightspeed Retail (X-Series) price books have a channel setting: "in-store, online (in Lightspeed eCom), or both." Its support pages note that "Minimum and maximum unit rules are not available for online price books." Its customer-specific pricing article is written for the register; we found no page confirming that a customer-group price book applies to a signed-in online customer, so test it.
• Square lets you create a discount that applies automatically when a customer from a group is added to a sale, at the point of sale, on websites, or both. That is a discount on top of the item price, not a separate trade price list. Square notes that "Category-based automatic discounts cannot apply to websites or online ordering profiles."
• BigCommerce assigns price lists "to a specific sales channel, customer group, or customer group on a specific sales channel." Its B2B documentation says company accounts "are independent of customer groups," and company pricing is done by applying price lists to customer groups and associating those groups with companies. BigCommerce has no register of its own, so whether trade pricing reaches the counter depends on your POS integration.

Which plan do you need for trade accounts on Shopify?

Not Plus, as of October 2026. Shopify's Help Center says B2B is available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, and "isn't available on the Starter or Retail plans." Most B2B features, including companies, are on all four. Note that this rules out the Retail plan.

The limits are in catalogs. On Basic, Grow and Advanced you can have up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets, and "Direct catalog assignment isn't available on the Basic, Grow, or Advanced plans." Plus allows an unlimited number of B2B market catalogs. Our reading: below Plus, you can run a few trade price tiers, not a price list per contractor.

Inside a catalog, prices are layered. A catalog can raise or lower prices by a percentage, and "fixed prices override any overall adjustments." If you add volume pricing to a product in a catalog, "the price becomes fixed," so the catalog's percentage adjustment no longer applies to it. You can add up to 10 price breaks per product. Discounts then apply on top of catalog prices.

How do quotes become orders?

On Shopify, the quote is a draft order. When staff assign a company location to a draft order, "the prices, payment terms, and checkout options automatically reflect the settings for that company," and if the negotiated price differs from the catalog, staff can set a custom price on the line. Shopify's draft-order documentation for B2B does not mention Shopify POS; we found no page saying a B2B quote can be completed at the register, so plan for it to be paid online or by invoice.

Square has a separate estimates feature that lets clients "review a quote before moving forward." An accepted estimate is converted into an invoice for payment, and automatic conversion needs Invoices Plus. BigCommerce's B2B quotes move through Draft, In Progress, Ordered and Expired.

Whichever tool you use, decide whether a quote reserves stock. None of the quote documentation we read says a quote holds inventory, so a quote can be accepted for stock that has already sold. Check your platform's settings, and decide how long any hold lasts, before trade customers start relying on quotes. For how stock positions across stores and the website should line up, see one source of truth for inventory across stores and marketplaces.

Does the tax exemption follow the contractor into the store?

Not reliably, and it carries the most risk, because a wrongly exempted sale is tax the store may owe.

On Shopify, a customer can be set to "Don't collect tax" or "Collect tax unless exemptions apply", and on plans that support B2B, exemptions can be applied to company locations. For customer exemptions online, Shopify says exempt customers "need to check out using the same email address as the one listed on their customer account." Shopify's POS tax pages describe overrides by location and staff turning tax rates off for an order or an item in the cart; they do not say customer or company-location exemptions apply at POS.

Square's conditional tax rules work on "fulfillment method, item price, total price, or item quantity," with no customer condition. Lightspeed's other retail product, R-Series, lets staff mark a customer exempt in their details or set tax on the whole sale at the register; we did not find an equivalent X-Series exemption page.

There is also a legal question before the software one. Whether a contractor can buy tax-free depends on the state and the kind of job. Nevada's Department of Taxation says construction contractors "are considered the consumers of any material purchased to fulfill a construction contract" and cannot use a resale certificate to buy materials tax-free in Nevada. In Texas, the Comptroller's guidance on residential repair and remodeling says that under a separated contract the contractor gives suppliers resale certificates for incorporated materials, while under a lump-sum contract they pay tax on materials when they buy them. A single "trade = exempt" flag on an account is wrong in some states. Keep each certificate on file, and let your tax adviser set the rule per state.

Can trade customers pay on account and pick up in store?

On Shopify, pay on account is an online and draft-order feature. Payment terms (Net 7 to Net 90, due on fulfillment, or a fixed date on a draft order) attach to company locations, and "Payments aren't automatically captured when the payment terms expire." None of the Shopify pages we read describe selling on B2B terms in Shopify POS. Card vaulting for B2B works only with Shopify Payments and only for cards the customer saves themselves. Lightspeed X-Series, by contrast, documents on-account sales at the register: a customer must be added to the sale and needs enough credit.

Store pickup for trade orders needs deliberate setup on Shopify:

• "Pickup in store is turned off by default for Shopify B2B," and turning it on is a request to Shopify Support.
• You cannot use shipping profiles to offer pickup only to B2B customers.
• B2B customers cannot choose local delivery at checkout.
• Fulfilling pickup orders in Shopify POS needs POS Pro on each location that does it, and pickup orders can be edited only in the admin or mobile app, not in POS.

For what store counts do to pickup coverage, see store location limits for pickup and fulfillment.

A checklist before you promise trade pricing everywhere

1. List the account settings you promise: price, quantity breaks, tax treatment, terms, pickup, delivery.
2. For each one, name the channel that owns it: website, register, or both.
3. Test each one at the counter with a real trade account, before staff are told it works.
4. Write down the manual steps for anything the register cannot do, and who is allowed to do them.
5. Keep exemption certificates on file and check them against each state's rules.
6. Decide whether quotes reserve stock and when any hold ends.
7. Report trade sales by account across both channels, so a contractor's spend shows up as one customer. For how register and central systems share data, see POS systems and inventory management with a central OMS.

The goal is not identical software in both places. It is that staff and the trade customer both know, setting by setting, what applies at the counter and what only applies online.