Shopify B2B Catalog vs Line Sheet: They Are Not the Same Thing

A Shopify B2B catalog is a pricing rule

In Shopify, Products → Catalogs is where you tell the store which products a group of B2B buyers can see and at what prices. A B2B catalog has a product selection (all, or an include/exclude list), a price adjustment (a percentage off retail or fixed prices per variant) and, optionally, quantity rules and volume pricing. You attach it to a B2B market, and companies assigned to that market see those prices when their contacts log in.

Three things follow from that:

• It is invisible until a buyer logs in. There is no page, no file, nothing to send.
• It is live. Change a price and every buyer in the market sees the new one on their next page load. There is no version.
• It is limited by plan: three active catalogs on Basic, Grow and Advanced, unlimited on Plus. (More in our guide to B2B without Plus.)

A B2B catalog answers the question "what does this buyer pay?". It does not answer "what do I send the buyer?".

A line sheet is a document

A line sheet (also "wholesale catalog", "price list", "order sheet" depending on the industry) is the PDF a buyer receives, prints, forwards and marks up. It has one image per style, the style name and SKU, sizes and colours as a grid, the wholesale price next to the suggested retail, your minimums and terms, and your contact on every page.

• It is a file. It travels by email, sits on a USB stick at a trade show, gets printed and annotated with a pen.
• It is a snapshot. "Spring 2027 line sheet, v2, prices valid until 31 January". Buyers rely on it not changing under them.
• It has no plan limit, because Shopify does not make it. You make it, from your product data, with a spreadsheet, a designer or an app.

A line sheet answers "what do I send the buyer?". It is also what most buyers ask for before they ever log in to anything.

Why you need both

The typical wholesale cycle uses them in order: the line sheet goes out to prospects and existing stockists at the start of the season; the buyer picks styles on paper or in a reply email; the order is placed either by the rep as a draft order or by the buyer logging into the B2B storefront, where the catalog applies the same prices. If the two disagree, you get the email every brand dreads: "your PDF says 24, the site says 26".

Keeping the prices in sync

The practical rule is one source of truth for the wholesale price, and both the B2B catalog and the line sheet read from it.

• Percentage pricing. If your catalog is "40% off retail", the line sheet should compute 40% off retail from the same retail price. Any app or spreadsheet can do this; just make sure the rounding matches (Shopify rounds to the currency's minor unit).
• Fixed prices. If prices are negotiated per variant, store them where both can read them: a product or variant metafield such as custom.wholesale_price. Use it to fill the catalog's fixed prices (by CSV import or a bulk editor), and have the line sheet tool read the same metafield.
• Regenerate, do not edit. When prices change, change them in Shopify once and regenerate the PDF. A line sheet that was last touched by hand in a design tool will drift.
• Version the PDF. Put the season and a date in the footer. Buyers holding an old one will tell you which one they have.

This is the setup Sheetfolio is built around: the catalog definition (collection, template, price source, branding) is saved, and Refresh produces the same document with today's data. But the principle holds for a spreadsheet and InDesign too; see the four ways to make a line sheet from Shopify.

Related: Shopify B2B on Basic, Grow and Advanced · What Sheetfolio does.