Does customer-specific product visibility (certain SKUs only shown to certain B2B accounts) migrate correctly to Shopify B2B's catalog-assignment model?
Short answer
Customer-specific product visibility migrates correctly only for in-or-out rules. A Shopify business-to-business (B2B) catalog only includes or excludes products for its company locations (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). SuiteCommerce's view-only Disable Purchase levels have no catalog equivalent (Oracle NetSuite Help Center, October 2026). Below Shopify Plus, one account's own assortment uses one of 3 catalogs (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
- What a Shopify catalog controls
- Which whole products a buyer sees, and their priceNo variant-level rules. Where several catalogs reach one company location, the buyer sees every product in any of them (October 2026).Sources: Shopify Help Center (Catalogs and pricing in B2B, Customizing B2B pricing using catalogs)
- One account's own assortment on Plus
- A direct company catalog, up to 25 per locationShopify Plus assigns catalogs straight to a company or company location. Direct catalog assignment isn't available on the Basic, Grow, or Advanced plans (October 2026).Sources: Shopify Help Center (Customizing B2B pricing using catalogs, Shopify B2B features by plan)
- One account's own assortment below Plus
- Its own B2B market, which spends 1 of 3 catalogsA business-to-business (B2B) market can hold specific company locations, even one. Basic, Grow and Advanced allow 3 active catalogs across all B2B markets (October 2026).Sources: Shopify Help Center (Shopify B2B features by plan, Managing B2B with Markets)
- SuiteCommerce visibility levels
- One of 3 per segment; only Display Fully mapsPersonalized Catalog Views set Display Fully, Disable Purchase, or Disable Purchase and Hide Price for each customer segment. Shopify catalogs have no view-only or hidden-price state (October 2026).Sources: Oracle NetSuite Help Center (Defining which Customer Segments can Access Items (Item Collection)); Shopify Help Center (Customizing B2B pricing using catalogs)
Deploi’s call
Only in-or-out visibility rules migrate as they are, so audit the rules before you port them. SuiteCommerce's three visibility levels collapse into Shopify's in-or-out catalogs, which forces a decision on every view-only or hidden-price rule. That decision is the useful part of this migration, not the painful part. Most of those rules turn out to be something else.
CustomizePort the rule to a catalog when
- The rule is in or out for a group of accounts. A catalog includes or excludes products on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
- One account needs its own products and you're on Plus. Give it a direct company catalog; a company location takes up to 25 (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
- An account below Plus needs its own products and one of the 3 active catalogs is free. Give it a business-to-business (B2B) market of its own company locations (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
- Native catalogs stay the source of truth for products and prices, which Deploi's catalogs and price lists record scores CUSTOMIZE at scale (October 2026).
WaitLeave the rule behind while
- Nobody can say why the product is hidden from that account.
- The rule exists to protect a price. Fix the catalog's price instead of hiding the product.
- The product is quote-only. Draft review, which submits the company location's orders as draft orders, covers it on every plan (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
Basis: Should You Build or Buy B2B Catalogs & Price Lists on Shopify?, our Build vs. Buy decision record, scored CUSTOMIZE.
What does a Shopify B2B catalog control for each account?
A Shopify business-to-business (B2B) catalog controls two things for each company location it reaches: which products the buyers there can see, and what they pay. Shopify says "B2B catalogs determine the products and pricing your B2B customers can access" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). A catalog takes whole products in or out, because it "can't include or exclude specific product variants" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
Where several catalogs reach one company location, Shopify shows every product in any of them: "If the catalogs include different products, then all products from each catalog are displayed" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Among catalogs assigned to the location itself, the buyer sees the lowest price. A location's own catalog beats a B2B market's catalog, even at a higher price (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). So a product is in a buyer's view or it isn't, and every legacy rule has to become one or the other. Visibility is the half of migrating one catalog per customer segment past the 3-catalog cap that a price-list export never shows.
Which legacy visibility levels have no Shopify catalog equivalent?
Two of SuiteCommerce's three visibility levels have no Shopify catalog equivalent: Disable Purchase and Disable Purchase and Hide Price. SuiteCommerce's Personalized Catalog Views (PCVs) give each customer segment one Website Visibility Level for an item collection (Oracle NetSuite Help Center, October 2026).
| SuiteCommerce visibility level | What the buyer gets | Shopify catalog equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Display Fully | Sees and buys the items | Product included in the catalog |
| Disable Purchase | Sees the items, with no Add to Cart button | None |
| Disable Purchase and Hide Price | Sees the items, with no price and no Add to Cart button | None |
SuiteCommerce calls PCVs "the recommended way of controlling access to and visibility of your inventory across difference audiences" and lists "Pairing down a large inventory so customers only see items handpicked for them" among their uses (SuiteCommerce Developers, October 2026). So if your source store uses the middle two levels, those rules have no catalog to land in.
What replaces each reason a legacy store uses the middle levels?
Each reason a legacy store uses the middle, view-but-don't-buy levels has a better Shopify replacement than a rebuild, except price confidentiality. Find the reason before you rebuild the rule.
- Quote-only products. The buyer should see the product and talk to sales. Keep it in the catalog and turn on draft review, so "every order placed by that company location will be submitted as a draft order" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Holding only orders with quote-only products takes the Payment Customization Function's review requirement, which runs only on Plus (Shopify developer docs, October 2026). Open quotes migrate as draft orders.
- Discontinued but supported items. The buyer needs to see that the item exists. Handle it with inventory and product status, not a visibility rule.
- Regulatory or licensing restrictions. Some buyers may not purchase some goods. Hiding the product is usually right anyway, so Shopify's in-or-out model is the safer one. A product a buyer can see but not buy invites a support call and a compliance argument.
- Price confidentiality. Show the product but hide its price from some accounts. This is the genuine gap, because a catalog either carries the product with its price or leaves it out. Shopify's theme guide uses Liquid, Shopify's theme language, to hide prices and Add to cart buttons and to show content by company or location (Shopify developer docs, October 2026). So the gap is theme work, not a catalog setting.
Which plan lets one account see its own assortment?
Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus all let one account see its own assortment. Only Shopify Plus does it without spending one of the 3 active catalogs that Basic, Grow and Advanced share. Plus assigns a catalog directly to a company or company location, which "isn't available on the Basic, Grow, or Advanced plans" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). A company location holds up to 25 catalogs (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Deploi's direct company catalog record scores one catalog per negotiated account on Plus WAIT: native, with nothing to buy or build (October 2026).
Below Plus, give the account a business-to-business (B2B) market of its own. A market can include "Specific company locations", even a single one (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). Its catalog is one of the three, as how catalogs count against the 3-catalog limit explains. A company location can also match several B2B markets at once (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). So keep a product this account mustn't see out of every catalog that reaches it.
Shopify's developer guide also separates visibility from price. Publication-only catalogs carry product sets, and pricing-only catalogs carry tiers (Shopify developer docs, October 2026). So 50 price tiers and 10 assortments need 60 catalogs instead of 500. That works only on Plus, because 60 catalogs is far past three.
What does the storefront still need once the catalogs are right?
Once the catalogs are right, the storefront still needs theme work only where your team placed products by hand. Shopify filters product lists by catalog: a product must sit in "at least one applicable publication to be visible" to a business-to-business (B2B) buyer (Shopify developer docs, October 2026).
Hand-placed content is the gap. In a November 2024 forum thread, a developer found a product outside the buyer's catalog hidden on collection pages, while a homepage button set in the theme editor still linked to it. Hiding that button "for a specific catalog / company location" couldn't be done in the theme editor (Shopify developer community, community-reported, October 2026). Shopify's theme editor customizes content by market on Advanced and higher, and by customer type, B2B or direct-to-consumer (D2C), only on Plus (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). So on Advanced and higher, a B2B market built for one account can take its own theme content in the theme editor (Shopify Help Center, October 2026). On Basic and Grow, and under a direct Plus catalog, that content needs Liquid, Shopify's theme language.
Budget that Liquid for every featured product, menu link and section that names a specific product. Deploi's blended storefront record scores this theme work CUSTOMIZE, with native B2B as the engine (October 2026).
In what order should visibility rules move to Shopify?
Visibility rules should move to Shopify in five steps, and the export comes first because the level is the part that doesn't port.
- Export every visibility rule with its level, not just the item lists.
- Sort each rule by reason: quote-only, discontinued, regulatory or price confidentiality. Most rules move to a different mechanism.
- Convert Display Fully rules to catalog membership. These port directly.
- Decide each remaining rule: hide the product, expose it with draft review, or scope a theme customization.
- Verify with a real buyer account per segment on the storefront, in search and in navigation, not in the admin.
Deploi’s point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Kept apart from the sourced facts above.
- What we’ve seen
- Hidden-SKU rules survive staff changes better than the reasons for them do. When we ask why a product is hidden from a named account, the answer is frequently that nobody currently employed knows. That is a finding worth surfacing to the client before it becomes a requirement.
- Where we disagree
- The standard answer is that Shopify catalogs handle per-account visibility, full stop. They handle the in-or-out case, on every plan with B2B inside the catalog limits, and the theme still has to stop linking to products a buyer can't see. A requirements document that records "catalog assignment" against a three-state source model has under-scoped the work and has not yet made the decisions that matter.
- What this page adds
- that the source model is three-state and the target is two-state, which SuiteCommerce visibility levels have no Shopify equivalent, the four reasons the middle state exists and what replaces each, and that one account's own assortment needs a direct catalog on Plus or its own B2B market below Plus, where it spends one of the three catalogs.
Decision records behind this answer
When this answer changes
- Shopify adds a view-only or hidden-price product state to B2B catalogs.
- Shopify extends direct catalog assignment below Plus, or changes the limit of 3 active catalogs on Basic, Grow and Advanced.
- Shopify changes the maximum of 25 catalogs per company location.
- Shopify stops theme editor links and sections from pointing at products outside a buyer's catalogs.
- Oracle changes the Website Visibility Levels in SuiteCommerce Personalized Catalog Views.
- Shopify opens the Payment Customization Function's review requirement to plans below Plus.
Related questions
This follows from How do multiple simultaneous B2B catalogs (one per customer segment) migrate to Shopify's 3-catalog limit on non-Plus plans, if we exceed that number?
- Do SuiteCommerce's bulk-pricing tables (common in B2B/wholesale setups) migrate to Shopify B2B's volume-pricing rules, or do they need rebuilding?
SuiteCommerce bulk-pricing tables need rebuilding on Shopify business-to-business (B2B).
- For a brand at $20M GMV where B2B/wholesale is 10%-30% of revenue, is Advanced's 3-catalog limit already a real constraint?
Shopify Advanced's 3-catalog limit binds a $20M brand with 10% to 30% wholesale at its fourth catalog.
- Does blended B2B/DTC customer data (one person who buys both wholesale and retail) migrate correctly without duplicating or misclassifying the account on Shopify?
Blended customer data migrates correctly, without duplicates, only when each person becomes one Shopify customer before any company link.
- Does draft-order and quote data (common in B2B sales-rep-assisted workflows) migrate to Shopify's draft order model cleanly?
Only open quotes migrate, as Shopify draft orders; closed quotes don't migrate as quotes.
- Is Salesforce Commerce Cloud's built-in B2B/B2C unification still a real advantage over Shopify Plus now that B2B is native on all Shopify plans?
Salesforce's business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) unification is still real but narrower, because Shopify B2B runs on every plan "at no extra cost" (Shopify Help Center, October 2026).
Sources
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. Official and vendor pages are checked on the date shown; Deploi records are our own published decisions.
- Shopify Help Center, Catalogs and pricing in B2B
- Shopify Help Center, Customizing B2B pricing using catalogs
- Shopify Help Center, Shopify B2B features by plan
- Shopify Help Center, Managing B2B with Markets
- Oracle NetSuite Help Center, Defining which Customer Segments can Access Items (Item Collection)
- SuiteCommerce Developers, Set Up B2B Functionality on SuiteCommerce
- Shopify Help Center, Managing checkout settings in B2B
- Shopify developer docs, Manage B2B catalogs
- Shopify developer community, Hide product link in Liquid when unavailable in B2B catalog
- Shopify Help Center, Online store customization in B2B
- Shopify developer docs, Support B2B customers in your theme
- Shopify Help Center, Creating and managing B2B catalogs with Markets
- Shopify developer docs, Payment Customization Function API
- Deploi Build vs. Buy, Should You Build or Buy B2B Catalogs & Price Lists on Shopify?
- Deploi Build vs. Buy, Should You Build or Buy Company-Specific B2B Pricing on Plus?
- Deploi Build vs. Buy, Build or Buy a Blended DTC + B2B Storefront on Shopify?