Pricing Tiers

Wholesale pricing ecommerce integration is native to UltraCart. Every account includes a Pricing Tiers engine that lets merchants assign customers to named groups such as Wholesale, Distributor, or VIP, then display custom per-item prices to each group when they log in, with no B2B portal app, no external pricing plugin, and no separate storefront to maintain.

Pricing Tiers are different from public volume discounts in two important ways. They are gated to authorized customers, meaning a shopper only sees the tier price after logging in to a profile that is assigned to that tier. And each tier carries group-level behavior alongside pricing, so a single tier can waive tax, enable purchase-order payments, turn on Cash on Delivery, and provide free shipping for everyone in the group. That bundles commercial terms and payment terms with the price itself, which is how real wholesale and distributor relationships actually work.

On most platforms, wholesale support is a separate paid app with its own login flow, its own customer list, and its own pricing table. When a wholesale customer places an order, the app rewrites prices at the cart but the group-level commercial settings (tax, PO, COD, free shipping) live in other tools or get handled manually. UltraCart avoids that entirely because Pricing Tiers, customer profiles, tax rules, payment methods, and shipping are all the same system. One customer record carries the tier assignment. The cart, the checkout, the tax engine, the payment selector, and the shipping logic all read from it.

For each pricing tier on an item, merchants can set a custom unit price, a set of tier-specific volume discounts, and maximum quantity limits per order or across all orders, which is how you prevent a wholesale account from hoarding inventory or running up an unlimited line of credit. Items can be flagged as Automatic Pricing Tier products so that purchasing the item grants tier access (typical for paid memberships or VIP programs, with a tier-assignment step handled through the UltraCart REST API). And because Pricing Tiers and Volume Discounts coordinate, customers in a tier still get the better of the two prices automatically.