Glossary: Ordering
Bulk order
A bulk order is a large purchase by a business buyer, either many units of one product at a lower unit price or many different SKUs in one order. In wholesale it often means ordering many lines at once from a list.
In detail
The term has two meanings, and a wholesale seller should support both. In the quantity sense, a bulk order is a large volume bought at a lower unit price. In the line sense, it is an order with dozens or hundreds of SKUs, such as a store restocking its shelves.
For volume, use quantity breaks or tiered pricing and set the thresholds from real savings in picking, packing and freight, not at random. Combine them with a minimum order quantity and a case pack so a bulk order matches how you ship, for example full cartons or full pallets.
For many lines, a buyer will not click through 80 product pages. A quick order form, a CSV or spreadsheet upload and a reorder page let the buyer enter SKUs and quantities in one go. For orders that arrive by phone, a draft order built by your team does the same job.
Check the operations as well: stock for the full quantity, shipping in several boxes or on a pallet, lead time, approval for very large orders, payment terms, and a maximum order quantity if stock is allocated. For the largest orders, a request for quote lets you price freight and discounts by hand.
Example
A cafe supplier sells cups at $0.30 each up to 999, $0.26 from 1,000 and $0.22 from 5,000. A buyer uploads a file of 60 SKUs with quantities and adds the whole list to the cart in one step.
On Shopify
Shopify's native B2B supports volume pricing, which lets you offer price breaks when customers buy larger quantities of a product in a single order, and quantity rules for minimums, maximums and increments. Once a product has volume pricing its price becomes fixed, so an overall adjustment on the catalog no longer applies. Quantity rules are listed on all plans.
Sources: Shopify Help Center: Quantity rules and volume pricing (read October 4, 2026); Shopify Help Center: Shopify B2B features by plan (read October 4, 2026).
In BSS B2B apps
BSS B2B Quote adds a Quick Order page (for Online Store 2.0 themes) with CSV and XLSX upload, which adds duplicate SKUs together and puts the lines in the cart. BSS B2B Solution applies quantity breaks on top of the customer's price. Plans and limits differ, see the pricing page.
Related use cases
Learn more
Read the Quick order and RFQ hub for guides, use cases and setup docs, or the complete Shopify B2B guide.