Shopify Catalog: What It Is and How to Set One Up (2026)

What is a Shopify catalog?

A Shopify catalog is the set of products — and the prices for those products — that a given customer is allowed to see in your store. In Shopify's own words, "B2B catalogs determine the products and pricing your B2B customers can access."

The word trips people up because it's used three different ways. Sometimes "catalog" means your whole product list. Sometimes it means a specific wholesale price list. And sometimes it means the product feed you send to an external channel like Google or Meta. They're related, but you set them up in completely different places.

This matters because searching "how do I edit my Shopify catalog" gives you the wrong answer half the time — the steps for a B2B price list have nothing to do with the steps for a Google Shopping feed. Get the type right first, and the rest is straightforward.

The 3 types of Shopify catalog

Before you change anything, identify which catalog you actually mean.

• Product catalog. This is just your store's products organized into collections. When someone says "clean up the catalog," they usually mean this — fixing titles, images, categories, and collection structure. Start here, because both other catalog types are built on top of it.
• B2B catalog. A custom version of your store that only a logged-in wholesale customer sees. It decides which products that buyer can access and what they pay. This is the feature most people mean when they search "Shopify catalogue" with a business buyer in mind.
• Sales-channel catalog. When you connect Google, Meta, or a new AI shopping channel, Shopify generates a product feed — a machine-readable catalog of your products. With Shopify's Spring '26 Catalog API, that same product data is what powers AI shopping agents, so a clean product catalog now feeds both your ads and the assistants shoppers ask for recommendations.

How to set up a B2B catalog in Shopify

This is the catalog most merchants need help with, so here's the full walkthrough — step by step, with screenshots from the live Shopify admin. B2B catalogs are available natively on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus (Plus removes the limits).

1. Turn on B2B. Go to Settings → Markets and add a B2B market (or open the existing one). B2B is what unlocks company profiles, logged-in wholesale pricing, and catalogs.
2. Create a company. Under Customers → Companies, add the business you're selling to and at least one location. Catalogs and prices attach to companies and locations, not to individual emails.
3. Create the catalog. In your B2B market, choose Create catalog. Give it a clear name (e.g. "US Wholesale — Tier 1").
4. Set which products are included. Add or exclude specific products. If you run a blended store, you can include products you sell only to wholesale and hide your D2C-only items.
5. Set the prices. Apply a percentage adjustment across the catalog (e.g. −30%), or set fixed prices per variant for full control.
6. Add quantity rules and volume pricing (optional). Set minimum order quantities and price breaks — buy 50, get a lower unit price — so larger orders are rewarded automatically instead of by manual edits.
7. Assign the catalog to the company. Attach the finished catalog to the company or location. You can assign more than one; if two catalogs price the same product differently, Shopify shows the buyer the lowest price.
8. Test as the buyer. Log in as a B2B contact (or preview) and confirm the right products and the right prices appear. This single check prevents the most common B2B complaint — buyers seeing retail prices instead of their negotiated rate.

A quick reality check on limits: on Basic, Grow, and Advanced you can run up to 3 active catalogs across all B2B markets. Shopify Plus gives you unlimited catalogs and lets you assign them directly to companies and locations — the reason high-volume wholesalers upgrade. Full details are in the Shopify Help Center.

How to organize your product catalog

Your B2B and sales-channel catalogs are only as good as the product catalog underneath them. A few fundamentals do most of the work:

• Group products into collections. Collections are how shoppers (and Shopify) make sense of your catalog. Use automated collections with conditions (tag, type, price) so new products file themselves. See our guide to the Shopify collection page for layout patterns.
• Use a consistent category and tag system. Disconnected product data confuses both customers and search engines. A simple, enforced taxonomy keeps the catalog navigable as it grows — our Shopify product categories guide covers five practical strategies.
• Standardize titles, images, and metafields. Same naming pattern, same image dimensions, same key specs in metafields. This is the data that feeds your ads and AI shopping channels, so consistency pays twice.
• Keep Shopify Pages for non-product content. Lookbooks, size guides, and brand stories belong on pages, not stuffed into product descriptions.

Common Shopify catalog problems (and how to fix them)

These are the issues merchants actually run into, drawn from Shopify community threads and B2B operators.

• CSV imports fail or scramble data. Bulk-updating a catalog by spreadsheet breaks when columns don't match Shopify's expected fields, producing cryptic errors. Fix: export a current products CSV first and edit that exact structure — don't build one from scratch. Change a handful of rows, import, verify, then scale.
• No tiered pricing on standard plans (for product options). Base prices adjust for wholesale, but add-on options often don't, which confuses buyers. Fix: use catalog volume pricing for quantity breaks; for complex option-level pricing, evaluate a dedicated B2B pricing app or Shopify Plus.
• Buyers see retail instead of their negotiated price. Usually the catalog isn't assigned to the company, or the customer isn't logged in as a company contact. Fix: always run the buyer test above before going live.
• Manual work doesn't scale. When every wholesale order needs a phone call or email, growth hits a ceiling. Fix: a self-serve B2B catalog with quantity rules lets buyers order themselves, which is exactly how brands free up their team.
• Inventory overselling. Bundles and shared SKUs sell past available stock. Fix: track inventory at the component level and set stock to stop selling when out of stock.
• Plan limits surprise you. Three active catalogs disappear fast if you serve many buyer tiers. Fix: consolidate tiers, or move to Plus for unlimited catalogs.

How to make your catalog actually convert

A catalog gets the right products in front of the right buyer — but the page is what closes the sale. Disorganized listings and slow, cluttered pages quietly cost conversions, whether the visitor is a wholesale buyer or a retail shopper.

This is where the storefront layer matters. With a visual page builder like PageFly, you can design collection and product pages that present your catalog clearly — filterable product lists, comparison blocks, bulk-friendly B2B layouts — without editing theme code. The goal is simple: make the catalog easy to browse and easy to buy from.

It pays off. After unifying its stock and pre-order buying into a single Shopify B2B storefront, Amsterdam gifting brand Vondels reported a 14% increase in B2B sales, according to Shopify's case studies. A well-structured catalog, presented on a page built to convert, is what turns "we have the products" into revenue.

If you want to test which catalog or collection layout converts best, you can build variants and run an A/B test before committing.