B2B Fashion Ecommerce in 2025: How to Launch and Scale Your Wholesale Brand

The fashion ecommerce market, spanning apparel, accessories, and footwear, is forecast to reach $974.9 billion in 2025, and rise to $1.5 trillion by 2029. And while consumer sales take most of the spotlight, what’s quietly powering this next wave of growth is wholesale fashion distribution. 

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) isn’t dead—but it’s no longer enough.

Margins are tighter. Acquisition costs are up. And your best buyers might not be shopping on your website at all—they’re browsing curated B2B fashion marketplaces, attending virtual trade shows, or placing wholesale orders through digital portals where reordering takes just two clicks.

Ahead, we’ll show you exactly how to build a B2B fashion ecommerce company fit for today’s market—from pricing strategies and buyer experience to the tech stack powering modern wholesale.

What is B2B fashion ecommerce?

B2B fashion ecommerce is the online sale of apparel, accessories, or footwear in bulk to other businesses, like retailers, boutiques, marketplaces, hotels, and corporate buyers.

In this model, you're selling to the stockists, resellers, and distributors who put your brand in front of their customers.

Instead of line sheets and emails, your buyers log into a sleek portal, browse your latest collections, see custom pricing, place bulk orders, and track shipments—all online.

B2B fashion ecommerce key characteristics

At its best, B2B fashion ecommerce is:

• Digital-first: Buyers browse, evaluate, and purchase online. They expect a seamless self-serve customer experience: detailed product data, real-time availability, order history, and shipping updates, all in one place.
• Personalized: Different buyers see different price books, product assortments, and minimum order quantities. Your best retailers get exclusive styles and net-60 terms. New accounts may access limited collections and prepaid checkout. 
• Integrated: Your storefront syncs with your enterprise resource planning (ERP), third-party logistics (3PL), and order management system (OMS)—so order data doesn’t get lost in translation. Inventory levels update automatically. Shipping workflows run without manual triggers. Everything talks to everything.
• Repeatable: Most B2B buyers order seasonally or monthly, and they expect easy reordering, clear terms, and consistent pricing. The smoother the workflow, the more likely they are to come back—and bring bigger orders with them.

How B2B fashion differs from B2C fashion retail

In B2C, a killer product page gets the sale. In B2B, it’s the pricing logic, the fulfillment reliability, and whether your portal actually works at 2 am when the buyer is placing an order for the next season.

Here’s how B2B and. B2C ecommerce compare at a glance:

Why B2B fashion ecommerce is growing

Two forces are colliding. Legacy brands are finally digitizing and digital-first brands are hitting DTC limits.

But it didn’t start there—the shift began during the pandemic in 2020.

Post-pandemic business model shifts

In 2020, fashion got flattened. US clothing sales dropped by over 50% in April alone.

Meanwhile, ecommerce exploded. Global online shopping surged 19% above projected trend lines. B2B buyers got used to instant gratification: real-time inventory, instant order tracking, and digital self-serve. 

That expectation stuck. The brands that thrived didn’t wait to adapt. Diane von Furstenberg was one of them.

DVF’s stylists couldn’t see a customer’s online and in-store purchase history in one place. Clienteling—essential in luxury fashion—was stalled by siloed data and manual workarounds.

“We wanted to migrate to a unified system that helped us keep up with the pace at which commerce and customer behavior was changing around us,” says Joanna Puccio, assistant manager at Diane von Furstenberg’s New York City flagship store. 

Mid-pandemic, DVF switched from Salesforce to Shopify for ecommerce and adopted Shopify POS for in-store operations. They now have a holistic view of their customers across more than 70 countries, 45 stores, and their Manhattan flagship.

Digital transformation in fashion wholesale

More than 60% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, according to Gartner’s August–September 2024 survey of 632 buyers. Most start and stay online—researching, comparing vendors, and placing orders without ever speaking to sales.

That shift didn’t go unnoticed. Platforms like JOOR, Faire, and NuORDER retooled fast, rolling out self-serve portals, live inventory updates, and video showrooms to rival the best of DTC ecommerce.

Legacy fashion brands, still relying on sales reps, spreadsheets, and seasonal trade shows, are finally rethinking wholesale. Meanwhile, digital-first brands that once went all in on DTC are waking up to a hard truth: you cannot scale through DTC alone.

For example, Faire’s revenue jumped to $117.1 million in 2024, nearly doubling year over year—proof that B2B buyers are building businesses on wholesale platforms.

Global marketplace expansion

China used to be the next big prize. But now, 89% of Chinese consumers prefer homegrown fashion brands over foreign labels.

India is now the rising star. By 2027, it’s set to be the third-largest consumer market in the world. India’s overall apparel market is expected to reach INR8.96 trillion (about $110 billion) by 2027, with branded apparel growing faster than unbranded.

B2B fashion marketplace strategies

Today’s B2B fashion brands are showing up where buyers already shop—online. 

Digital showrooms and virtual presentations

Virtual showrooms let buyers browse curated collections, zoom in on fabric textures, watch styling videos, and place preorders from their desks.

Take JOOR. The platform connects over 14,000 brands with more than 650,000 curated global retail buyers across more than 150 countries.

For brands, it’s a power move: lower costs, faster turnaround, and more visibility into buyer behavior. For buyers, it’s all about flexibility: they preview lines on their schedule, not yours.

📚Read: 10 B2B Marketplaces for Finding Buyers in 2025

Global buyer discovery and networking

Platforms like Faire, Abound, and Ankorstore are transforming how independent brands and retailers meet. Instead of cold emails or trade show foot traffic, discovery happens through curated marketplaces, algorithmic recommendations, and smart filters by minimum order value, product category, and more.

This year alone on Faire, more than 85,000 retailers joined Faire Market—a 49% jump from the previous year. Across three days, they placed more than 380,000 orders and bought more than 1.1 million products from around the world.

Trade show digitization

Dealing with racks, booths, $15 hotel lattes, and long-haul flights—just to chase a few maybe-buyers through a convention center maze—was expensive, exclusive, and inefficient.

According to recent research, B2B firms saw increased participation rates and lower cost per lead compared to in-person events.

The asynchronous nature of virtual events allows buyers and sellers to interact at their convenience, extending engagement beyond scheduled dates. More importantly, companies that lack the budget for large booths or travel expenses can now compete for buyer attention on equal footing through digital platforms.

Market research and target audience identification

In B2B fashion, your customer is a buyer with a calendar full of market appointments, an eye on margins, and a short list of brands they reorder from regularly.

This first step in starting a B2B fashion ecommerce business—or any business—is doing market research. That means analyzing the consumers and businesses in a target market to understand who your customers are, what they need, and how those needs are currently being met. Read trade journals, industry reports, and government publications, and run focus groups or customer surveys and interviews.

For example, an apparel company interested in selling athletic swimwear might read consumer reports to determine which demographics purchase these products. Then, they could conduct a focus group of aquatic athletes to understand their product preferences and needs. 

Start here:

• Segment by buyer type. Are you targeting independent boutiques, department stores, online retailers, or international distributors? Their needs—and buying timelines—differ.
• Study their buying cycle. Some plan six months ahead. Others reorder monthly. Align your availability and assortments accordingly.
• Find their (online) watering holes. Where do your ideal buyers discover brands? (Think: JOOR, NuORDER, Faire, LinkedIn, tradeshows, showroom partners.)

💡Pro tip: Use marketplace insights. Platforms like Faire and JOOR let you analyze trends in real time—which categories buyers search for most, and which price bands move fastest? Use this data to shape your drop cadence and entry-point SKUs.

Technology infrastructure setup

You need a back end that connects your storefront, ERP, OMS, 3PL, and customer relationship management (CRM)—so orders flow cleanly, margins stay healthy, and every buyer sees accurate pricing and availability.

If you’re selling both to businesses and direct to consumers, you don’t need two systems, two teams, or a messy middleware setup to keep things running.

You need one platform that does both—natively. That’s Shopify.

Here’s what you get out of the box:

• Centralized customer data across all sales channels, so you can make decisions based on the full picture
• Seamless integrations with your ERP, inventory, and CRM systems
• Built-in security and compliance for both wholesale and retail operations
• Automated workflows to manage repetitive processes like order routing, invoicing, and tax rules

Typically, retailers reduce total ownership (TCO) costs by 36% when they adopt Shopify. 

Wholesale pricing and minimum order strategies

Your B2B buyers aren’t placing a cartful of impulse buys. They’re calculating profit per unit, working out how many units to stock, and weighing that against shelf space and sell-through.

That’s why your wholesale pricing strategy needs to make doing business with you a no-brainer.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Tiered pricing based on order volume: Reward bigger buys with deeper discounts. For example, offer 10% off for 100 units, 15% for 250 or more, and 20% for 500 or more. Make it scalable (and visible) so buyers know exactly what they stand to gain.
• Buyer-specific pricing lists: Loyal stockists get better terms. Shopify helps you assign custom price lists to individual companies, locations, or customer tags. That means your top-tier stockist in New York sees a different price per unit than your smaller boutique buyer in Austin—automatically.
• Minimum order quantities (MOQs): Set clear thresholds to protect your bottom line, whether it’s $2,000 minimum per order or 50 units per style. You can also set per-product or per-variant minimums based on production cost or exclusivity.
• Prepayment or net terms flexibility: Offer net 30, 60, or custom payment terms to build trust with serious buyers. Shopify supports manual payment terms, so your invoicing aligns with your real-world wholesale relationships.
• Dynamic pricing for seasonal stock: Use smart promotions (like bundled discounts or early-buy incentives) to move inventory quickly without sacrificing brand positioning.

💡Pro tip: If you’re a Shopify Plus merchant, install the Wholesale Pricing Now app to offer net 15/30 terms, bulk order forms, tax overrides, and real-time pricing that scales. Also, it’s Ajaxcart–friendly, so your front end doesn’t break under the hood.

B2B fashion ecommerce business models

There’s no one way to run a B2B fashion business—and that flexibility is the point. The best model depends on what you sell, how you manufacture, and how much control you want over the buyer relationship.

Wholesale distribution models

You sell products in bulk to other businesses that resell them, like boutiques, department stores, or specialty retailers.

Example: A Paris-based accessories brand supplies 2,000 hair clips to Sephora Europe. Sephora handles final retail sales—the wholesaler fulfills the order and focuses on B2B operations.

This model is all about scale. You lock in large volume orders, maintain healthy margins, and build long-term relationships with retailers.

Private label and manufacturing partnerships

You manufacture products that another brand resells under its own label.

Example: A Vietnamese shoe factory produces vegan leather boots for three DTC brands in the US—each with its own branding, specs, and shipping requirements.

This model is especially attractive for factories, artisans, and scalable manufacturers, because you stay behind the scenes while locking in consistent B2B contracts. 

Marketplace vs. direct-to-buyer approaches

You can either list on multi-brand B2B platforms (like Faire or JOOR) or build your own buyer portal using Shopify.

Example: A South Korean loungewear brand gets discovered on Faire, then invites repeat buyers to a private Shopify B2B portal for better pricing, reordering, and net-30 terms.

Marketplaces are great for reach and buyer discovery. But direct portals give you more control, more data, and better margins.

B2B fashion technology integration

The success of your wholesale business depends on how tightly your systems connect behind the scenes.

Here are three core pieces to lock in:

ERP and inventory management systems

Your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is the control tower that tracks products, suppliers, financials, and fulfillment in one place. 

Say your knitwear brand sells DTC in Paris and wholesale to boutiques in Tokyo. With Shopify, inventory syncs in real time, so buyers never order what’s out of stock, and your team doesn’t have to babysit spreadsheets.

Shopify integrates natively with leading ERPs like NetSuite, Acumatica, and Brightpearl—so you get a single source of truth across DTC and B2B.

Order-processing automation

Auto-tag wholesale orders, route large-quantity orders to specific warehouses, or kick off invoice generation based on buyer tags.

Shopify Flow and Shopify Functions let you build custom automations across B2B and DTC without developer support.

So when a buyer in Milan places a 400-piece order using net-30 terms, Shopify auto-generates the invoice, applies their price list, and sends the order to your 3PL.

Supply chain visibility tools

Visibility tools help you track delays, update buyers, and tighten turnaround times. Shopify’s ecosystem includes robust integrations with logistics platforms like Anvyl, Flexport, and ShipBob—so you can keep buyers informed and inventory flowing.

For example, if a cotton shipment from India is delayed, your operations lead gets real-time alerts via Anvyl, updates the ETA inside Shopify, and triggers an automated email to wholesale customers waiting on that product line.

B2B fashion ecommerce platforms and tools

Here are the essential tools behind modern wholesale success—and how Shopify brings them all under one roof.

Shopify B2B capabilities for fashion

Shopify’s native B2B suite (available on Shopify Plus) is built for modern fashion brands seeking wholesale success without the headaches of selling online.

Here’s what you get:

• Customizable B2B storefronts: Instead of a generic wholesale portal, Shopify Plus allows you to create a dedicated, branded ecommerce store just for your wholesale buyers. Use the new "Trade" theme, which is specifically designed for B2B online stores. 
• Customer profiles and personalized catalogs: Create a ompany profile for each of your wholesale clients. Within this profile, you can:
• Assign custom price lists: Give your most loyal partners a special discount while maintaining standard pricing for newer accounts.
• Publish specific products: Only show them the collections and items relevant to their store, preventing them from seeing out-of-season or irrelevant products.
• Set unique payment terms: Automatically apply net 30, net 60, or other payment terms for each company, eliminating manual invoicing.
• Quick-order lists and bulk ordering: Instead of clicking on each individual item, your clients can use a quick-order form to purchase multiple variants (e.g., 6 small, 10 medium, and 10 large of a new dress) in a single action.
• B2B checkout: Your wholesale customers see their own pricing, payment terms, shipping rules, and order minimums, automatically applied.
• Self-serve portals: Buyers can log in, view order history, reorder favorites, and check real-time inventory without emailing your sales team.
• B2B APIs: For larger fashion brands, Shopify offers APIs that allow you to integrate your B2B storefront with existing enterprise systems like ERP and CRM platforms. 

💡Real-life success story: Merz b. Schwanen, a German heritage clothing brand with over a century of history, grew from a small operation into a global sensation (thanks in part to a viral moment on the hit TV show The Bear), but their legacy system couldn't keep up. 

The outdated technology cost them thousands in developer fees and lost sales. 

The solution was a full migration to Shopify, which provided a unified platform to manage their entire business, from in-store sales to global wholesale.

After making the switch to Shopify, the team:

• Set up Shopify POS in 10 days across their New York store—entirely remotely
• Reduced clothing loan form errors by 95%, saving 15 minutes per request
• Achieved an 85% in-store email capture rate for better customer segmentation

They now run multichannel sales across New York, Berlin, ecommerce, and wholesale from a single platform. Their team uses Shopify Flow to automate B2B follow-ups and apply conditional discounts with custom tags.

Thanks to Shopify’s plug-and-play integrations, they connected Report Pundit for automated weekly reporting and are adding Klaviyo, shipping tools, and loyalty programs next.

“With Shopify, we have a system that actually supports what we want to do in our operations and which can easily adjust to our needs—rather than the other way around.”

Integration with fashion-specific tools

Shopify plays well with the fashion industry’s favorite specialized tools.

Fashion is visual, and your store should be too:

• Shopify integrates with apps like EM Lookbook and Stylaquin, turning high-quality lifestyle photography into interactive, scroll-stopping shopping experiences. 
• Tools like Loox and Foursixty showcase real customer photos and videos, creating powerful social proof at every stage of the buyer journey.
• Sizing is one of the biggest friction points in fashion ecommerce. Shopify integrates with tools like Kiwi Size Chart and ESC Size Charts to offer international conversions, AI-powered size guidance, and custom fit charts for each SKU, cutting down on returns and increasing shopper confidence.

From managing fabric variants to tracking colorways across locations, fashion inventory gets complicated.

• Shopify connects with fashion-focused product lifecycle management platforms like WFX Cloud to streamline design-to-production workflows.
• Apps like Prediko and Stocky are built for fashion’s complexities, helping track inventory across multiple locations, manage purchase orders, and forecast demand by style, size, and color with AI.

Shopify also supports direct integrations with platforms like JOOR and Faire, giving you access to digital showrooms, buyer discovery, and order management—all from your Shopify dashboard. 

If you're exploring product expansion without holding inventory, Shopify’s integrations with wholesale partners like Printful and Printify handle on-demand printing, shipping, and fulfillment for custom apparel.

💡Pro tip: For established fashion brands, a native mobile app can significantly boost customer engagement. Apps like Tapcart or MobiLoud allow you to turn your Shopify store into a beautiful, high-performing mobile app for iOS and Android, complete with push notifications and exclusive content.

Shopify’s extensible app ecosystem and API library eliminate the need for custom code to create a fashion stack that fits your brand. From design to delivery, Shopify keeps everything in sync.