Setting a minimum order for wholesale customers

"Minimum order" is two questions, and Shopify answers them from opposite ends. A minimum quantity — twelve of this item or none — is a native setting on every paid plan, and you can have it working before lunch. A minimum order value — no wholesale order under €500 — exists on Plus, inside Shopify's own checkout tooling, and nowhere below it.

Almost every argument about this subject comes from the two being discussed as if they were one thing. So start by deciding which one you actually need, because the answers have nothing in common.

The quantity version: native, every plan

Three rules, applied per variant:

"Minimum quantity rules let you define the fewest number of an item that can be purchased at one time."

"Maximum quantity rules let you define the greatest number of a product that can be purchased at one time."

And increments, for anything sold by the case: "If you want to sell a product in certain increments, then you can use increment quantity rules." The default is 1, and it has to be a whole number.

One caveat about what you will read elsewhere, including on Shopify's own site. Shopify's May 2024 announcement of its wholesale theme calls quantity rules and volume pricing "exclusive to Plus", and the theme store listing still frames them as something "Shopify Plus merchants" set up. Shopify's current B2B plan-feature page lists both as available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The plan page is the newer of the two, and the April 2026 change that brought B2B to every paid plan is what moved it — but be aware that Shopify's own storefront for its own theme has not caught up, and neither have most of the guides built on it.

Where the native version stops

The rules are per variant. "Increment rules apply to product variants." So "at least twelve of this shirt" works perfectly. "At least twelve items across my range" — the thing most wholesalers actually mean — is not a quantity rule at all, because no rule is looking at the basket as a whole.

Your theme has to do the telling. Shopify is unusually direct about this:

"If you set a minimum order quantity for a product, then make sure that your theme displays the minimum on the product page so that customers know how many items they need to add to their cart."

That is a job assigned to you, not a promise. Shopify's free themes support quantity rules from version 8.0.0 and volume pricing from 11.0.0; if yours is older or heavily customised, the rule still applies but the buyer may not meet it until the cart argues with them.

And volume pricing has to agree with it. "Price break quantities must be greater than the minimum order quantity, as well as a multiple of the increment that you set in your quantity rules." Set the minimum first; the breaks are checked against it.

Need a minimum across the whole order, not per item? Describe the order you will accept →

The order-value version: not native

Below Plus, there is no setting anywhere in Shopify that says "wholesale orders start at €500".

Shopify does sell exactly that behaviour, as part of Checkout Blocks: you can "set order value limits and block checkout for orders that are outside of your minimum or maximum limits", applied "to all your customers or only to B2B companies" and worked out "based on the order subtotal before any gift cards or store credit is applied as payment". Apart from two content blocks on the thank-you and order-status pages, Checkout Blocks is a Plus feature — so that is the answer if you are on Plus, and not an answer at all if you are not. (What else your plan does and does not include is its own question.)

Below Plus, a minimum order value that says so in those words is a rule somebody builds. It is not a gap in your setup, and no amount of looking through your settings will turn up a field for it.

One blunt native route exists, though, and it is worth knowing before you build anything. A shipping rate can carry a minimum order value: "In the Minimum field, enter the minimum order value for this rate." Give every rate the same floor and an order below it reaches checkout with no shipping method at all — "no rate applies and the customer receives a shipping error at checkout." Two things make it blunt. It is store-wide, because Shopify has no native way to offer a shipping method to trade buyers only. And the buyer is told about shipping, not about your minimum. For a store that sells only to trade, it is a ten-minute answer.

The mechanism it takes is available to you, though, whatever your plan. Shopify allows a rule to inspect a basket and stop the checkout with a message, and it is explicit about who may use one: "Stores on any plan can use public apps that are distributed through the Shopify App Store and contain functions." Its own list of what such a rule is for names this case outright — "Provide B2B location order minimums, maximums, or credit limits" and "Provide B2B product minimums, maximums, and multiples". A store can run up to 25 of them.

Two things Shopify does not say about its own quantity rules. The wording a shopper sees when one is broken at checkout is not documented, and neither is whether they are enforced on draft orders or at the point of sale. One test order in your own store settles both before you promise a customer anything.

A checkout rule of the kind described above is the opposite case, and the difference is worth knowing when you are choosing between them: its message is the one written for it, shown in the cart and at checkout, it does run on draft orders, and it does not run at the point of sale. All of that Shopify states.

Advice that is now dead

Most of the wholesale-minimum recipes still online are Shopify Scripts. Scripts could no longer be edited after 15 April 2026 and stopped executing entirely on 30 June 2026.

Worth knowing that Shopify's own B2B documentation has not fully caught up: its volume-pricing page still says Scripts "reached end of life on August 28, 2025" — an earlier deadline that moved — and still explains how quantity rules interact with scripts. Both dates appear on Shopify's own site. The one that matters is that nothing runs now.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

If a per-item minimum is what you need, set it in Shopify — it is free, it is yours, and nothing we build improves on it.

The two that come to us are the ones the settings cannot reach: a minimum that counts the whole order rather than each line, and a minimum that applies to your trade buyers while your retail customers carry on buying one of something. You describe it the way you would to a new member of staff: "Trade accounts have to reach €500 or twelve items before they can check out."

Two things to say plainly.

We know your wholesale customers by the label you give them, not by their company record. A rule reads the tags on a customer, so "trade buyers" means the buyers you have tagged as trade — which is reliable, and worth saying plainly rather than implying we read something deeper out of Shopify.

And a checkout rule is built for you, not switched on. A person here takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours, and part of what that person does is check whether a quantity rule you can set yourself in ten minutes would have done the job.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know the smallest order worth packing? Describe it in your own words →