Worked example: a $28M GMV furniture brand, 35% B2B to interior designers, US-only, no in-house dev, high AOV/low order volume. Advanced or Plus?
Shopify Plus wins this profile, and catalogs are not the reason. A US-only trade program invoices in one currency, so three catalogs stretch further than they look. The binding constraint is payment structure: "Deposit requirements" and "Partial payments" are Plus-only B2B features (help.shopify.com, September 2026), and a high-AOV furniture order almost always takes a deposit.
Why order count is the wrong lens on this profile
Every plan-comparison framework built around order volume misreads a furniture brand. High AOV and low order count make the store look small in every operational metric that plan marketing uses, while each individual order carries more process than a hundred apparel orders combined: a quote, a deposit, a lead time, a freight arrangement, a balance payment and a delivery window.
The question is not how many orders you process. It is how much structure each order needs, and Shopify gates exactly that structure.
The Plus-only rows that decide it
| B2B capability | Basic / Grow / Advanced | Plus | Why furniture cares |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Deposit requirements" (companies) | Not available | Available | Custom and made-to-order goods are not produced without a deposit |
| "Deposit requirements" (draft orders) | Not available | Available | The quote-to-order path is where a trade order starts |
| "Partial payments" | Not available | Available | Deposit now, balance on delivery, natively rather than by invoice |
| "Payment requests per fulfillment" | Not available | Available | Multi-piece orders shipping across weeks bill per shipment |
| "Direct company catalogs" | Not available | Available | Per-designer negotiated pricing without spending a market catalog |
Per help.shopify.com, September 2026.
Read those five rows together and the pattern is clear: every one of them is a feature for orders that do not settle in one payment at one moment. That is the furniture trade business in a sentence. A brand at 35% B2B to interior designers is running payment structures that Shopify has placed entirely on the Plus side of the line.
What you do without them on Advanced
You do it manually. Draft orders and invoicing are available on every paid plan (help.shopify.com, September 2026), so you can quote. Net terms are available too. What you cannot do natively is take 50% now and 50% on delivery, so it becomes a person: an invoice raised outside the platform, a payment reconciled by hand, and an order whose true payment state lives in a spreadsheet rather than in Shopify.
At 35% B2B on $28M, that is roughly $9.8M a year running through a manual settlement process. With no in-house dev, nobody is going to automate it. The cost of Advanced here is not a licence difference; it is a permanent headcount in finance and a reconciliation risk that grows with the trade program.
The catalog question, answered properly
Do not skip it, but do not over-weight it either. US-only means one currency, which means catalogs are consumed by tiers alone. Designer trade programs usually run one or two tiers, sometimes with a separate rate for a handful of top firms. Volume breaks nest inside a catalog at no cost on any plan, and a company location can hold "a maximum of 25 catalogs" (help.shopify.com, September 2026).
So the catalog cap is probably not binding today for this brand. It becomes binding the moment a design firm negotiates its own pricing, because per-company catalog assignment is Plus-only. In this profile, catalogs are a second-order argument that supports a decision already made on payments.
One thing to verify before committing to Shopify B2B at all
Shopify lists "Accelerated checkouts, including Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay" as incompatible with B2B, along with "Local delivery," "Pickup points" and "Subscriptions" (help.shopify.com, September 2026). Furniture brands frequently run local delivery as a fulfilment method. If your trade orders depend on local delivery, that is a limitation you should confirm against your own configuration with Shopify before the plan decision, because it constrains the model on Advanced and on Plus equally.
When this profile says stay on Advanced
- When designers pay in full up front. Rare in this category, and worth checking rather than assuming. If true, the entire Plus case above collapses.
- When the trade program is deliberately being wound down. Do not buy a plan for a channel you are exiting.
- When the finance process already lives in an ERP that owns settlement. Then Shopify is not where payment structure is expressed, and the Plus-only payment rows are buying you a capability you have already bought.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Plus, on payment structure rather than catalogs. This is the profile where the standard catalog-count framing gives the right answer for entirely the wrong reason, and getting the reason right matters because it changes what you configure in month one.
- What we’ve seen: High-AOV trade businesses reach us with a catalog question and a spreadsheet where their deposit ledger should be. The catalog question is answerable in an afternoon. The deposit ledger is the thing that has quietly hired a person.
- Where we disagree: Plan-comparison content ranks merchants by order volume, which systematically under-serves high-AOV categories. A furniture brand at 400 orders a month looks like a small merchant in every framework and operates like a large one. Rank by process per order and the answer inverts.
- What this page adds: that four separate Plus-only B2B payment features (deposits on companies, deposits on draft orders, partial payments, payment requests per fulfillment) cluster around exactly the order shape a furniture trade program produces, and that the catalog cap is a second-order concern in a single-currency trade business.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records