The brief
Smith & Munson grow cut flowers on their farm in Lincolnshire. They sell direct to consumers, but a significant part of their revenue comes from wholesale — florists, wedding planners, and hospitality buyers who order regularly and at trade prices.
When they came to me, they were running wholesale through a third-party Shopify app that cost £100 per month. It worked, but it was clunky for their buyers, hard to manage, and expensive for what it did. They wanted something cleaner.
The context
Most brands reach for a third-party app immediately because the native setup isn't obvious. But for a store like Smith & Munson, the right architecture meant they could own the experience entirely — without paying ongoing app fees.
They're on a standard Shopify plan, which means no B2B features — but customer tags, price rules, and some careful Liquid work can replicate almost everything a wholesale app does, for free.
The work
Wholesale buyers are tagged in Shopify's customer admin. Those tags gate access to a dedicated wholesale section and trigger wholesale pricing automatically — no login wall app required.
Business buyers need to see prices excluding VAT. A combination of Liquid conditionals and JavaScript ensures the right price is shown to the right customer type throughout the storefront — product pages, collection pages, cart.
A dedicated wholesale order page built in Liquid — quantity inputs per variant, inline stock indicators, add-to-cart for multiple products simultaneously. Built to feel like a proper trade portal, not a consumer storefront.
Wholesale orders need a proper invoice. We configured Order Printer Pro with a bespoke Smith & Munson template — their branding, correct VAT breakdown, order details formatted for trade buyers.
The wholesale portal was the start of the relationship. Smith & Munson remain an active client — the kind of long-term engagement this work is built around.
The outcome
The new portal went live and immediately performed better than the third-party app — faster, cleaner, and tailored to how Smith & Munson's buyers actually order.
More importantly: they're not paying for it every month. The £100/month app fee is gone, and the functionality is native to their Shopify setup — which means it works with any theme update, any Shopify change, any future development.
Two years on, Smith & Munson is one of my longest-standing retainer clients. The wholesale portal gave us a foundation to keep building from.
“When you find someone so easy to work with, who genuinely gets what your needs are and delivers — that’s worth a lot.”