Wholesale pricing, customer groups, quotes, and net terms on OpenCart, and why you almost never need a marketplace module.
B2B on OpenCart is a stack, not a single feature: who sees which prices, how orders get placed, and how it all reaches your accounting. Here is what ships free and what you pay to build.
Core OpenCart lets you price per group. Wholesale customers see trade prices; retail sees retail. No extension needed to start.
Set special prices and quantity discounts that only the wholesale group sees, straight from the product admin.
Hide prices or the whole catalog from the public with a light extension, so only approved trade accounts see them.
Force minimum orders or multiples (buy in sixes) with a small custom tweak on the cart, not a marketplace module.
Replace instant checkout with quote requests, buying on account, and credit limits. This is where custom dev earns its keep.
Push orders and customers to 1C, QuickBooks, or your ERP so trade orders do not get re-keyed by hand.
If you need quote requests, net-30 accounts with credit limits, per-customer catalogs, or an ERP sync, that is custom work. We build the wholesale features OpenCart core and off-the-shelf modules do not cover.
If your B2B needs are heavy, native company accounts, shared catalogs, and negotiated quotes at scale, Magento's B2B feature set is built for it. We are honest about the line: see our Magento for B2B page before you outgrow OpenCart.
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Partly, and more than people expect. Customer groups, per-group pricing, quantity discounts, and account approval all ship in core. That covers basic wholesale. Quotes, net terms, and per-customer catalogs need extensions or custom development on top.
Almost certainly not. Marketplace modules turn your store into a multi-seller platform like Alibaba. If you sell your own products to trade customers, that is the wrong tool. You want customer groups and wholesale pricing, which is a much simpler build.
Yes. A small login-to-see-price extension or a theme change hides prices, or the entire catalog, from the public and shows them only to approved trade accounts. It is a cheap, common request.
Not in core, but we build it. Net-30 terms, credit limits, and a quote-request flow instead of instant checkout are custom development. This is the part of a B2B build that actually needs a developer.
Yes, and usually you should. One install serves retail at retail prices and trade at trade prices, split by customer group, with wholesale gated behind login. One catalog, one inventory, two pricing experiences.
A basic wholesale setup using customer groups and a price-hiding extension is a few hundred dollars of configuration. A full build with quotes, net terms, per-customer catalogs, and ERP sync starts around $1,500 and scales with the integrations you need.
Search “OpenCart B2B” and almost every result sells you a multi-vendor marketplace module, the kind that turns your store into a mini Alibaba with dozens of sellers. Most wholesale businesses do not need that and never will. If you sell your own products to trade customers at trade prices, you need per-customer pricing, minimum orders, and a way to handle quotes and account terms. That is a different, simpler build, and OpenCart handles a surprising amount of it without any extension at all.
OpenCart’s customer groups are the foundation of B2B, and they ship in core. You create a Wholesale group, assign trade customers to it, and set special prices or discounts that only that group sees. A retail visitor sees $40; a wholesale customer logged into the same product sees $28. No plugin required. You can also require admin approval before a new trade account is active, so random shoppers do not get wholesale pricing by signing up.
Quantity discounts are built in too. Set price breaks per product so 10 units cost less each than 1, and tie those breaks to the wholesale group. For a lot of small distributors, that plus customer groups is 80 percent of what they meant by “B2B.”
A few common wholesale needs sit just outside core. Hiding prices until a customer logs in, or hiding the whole catalog from the public, takes a small “login to see price” extension or a theme tweak. Minimum order quantities and step quantities, where a product must be bought in multiples of six, need an extension or a bit of custom code on the cart. None of these are expensive, and none of them require the marketplace modules the search results push at you.
The parts that genuinely need a developer are the ones the off-the-shelf modules do worst: quote requests instead of instant checkout, buying on account with net-30 terms and a credit limit, per-customer catalogs where each client sees a different product list and their own negotiated prices, and syncing all of it to your accounting system or ERP. These are the features that separate a real wholesale operation from a shop with a discount group, and they are where we spend most of an OpenCart B2B build.
You do not need two stores. One OpenCart install can serve retail customers at retail prices and trade customers at their own prices, split by customer group, with the wholesale side gated behind login. This is usually the right setup: one catalog, one inventory, two pricing experiences. We only split into separate stores when the branding or the product ranges are genuinely different.
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