Summit: A Shopify Theme Built for B2B Catalogs
Summit is the DEVDIY theme we point wholesalers to when the order is a company order. It is for merchants in the United States and Europe who sell a catalog to other businesses: distributors, retailers, or procurement teams. It is not a retail theme with the button relabeled. If every customer sees the same price and checks out like a consumer, you do not need Summit. If the price depends on who is logged in, you should stop imitating that behavior with apps stacked on a consumer theme.
This is a buying and setup guide from devdiy.com. It is not a feature dump. The test is whether a buyer can become an account, see the right price, and place or request an order without a side email.
Who Summit is for
Use Summit when at least two of these are true. Buyers must apply before they see contract prices. Different companies see different prices or minimums. Large orders start as a quote, while samples can be paid by card. The catalog is big enough that filters have to speak purchasing language: pack size, material, certification, lead time. A store that is only a line sheet in PDF form can stay a PDF. A store that is trying to take the reorder online should not.
Do not use Summit as a costume for a direct-to-consumer brand that wants a “wholesale” page with a form. That page can be a single contact section. Summit earns its place when the catalog itself is the sales tool and the sales team is tired of retyping orders from inboxes.
Set up the account before the homepage
Build the customer model first. Decide who approves accounts and how long approval takes. If approval takes a week, say so on the application. A silent form is how you lose the buyer you paid to acquire. Decide what a guest sees. Many B2B brands show products and hide price. Some hide the catalog. Pick one and apply it everywhere, including search. A price that leaks in a collection and hides on the product page is a bug, not a strategy.
Create two test companies. Give one a contract price and a minimum quantity. Leave the other as a new applicant. Log in as each. The contract company should see its price without a refresh mystery. The applicant should not see that price. Try to add a quantity below the minimum and confirm the store stops you before payment. Then place a sample order if samples are part of your motion. If any of those steps require a staff member to edit code, the setup is not finished.
Quotes, terms, and the sales team
Quotes are where themes go to die. A quote that creates no record will be screenshotted into a chat and argued about later. Summit is meant to keep the request on the product, with the quantity and the company attached. Your sales team still needs a rule: who answers, in what time zone, and what happens if the price in the quote differs from the price in the ERP. The theme cannot reconcile your ERP. It can stop you from collecting quotes in five different inboxes.
Payment terms are a policy, not a badge. If some accounts pay on invoice, say which accounts, and do not offer that path to a guest. US sales teams often treat terms as a relationship. EU buyers will also ask about tax. Show the tax treatment you actually apply. Do not promise “tax handled” in a heading if checkout still surprises them.
Catalog hygiene
Import a small, true catalog before you import everything. A hundred correct products beat a thousand with empty specs. Each product needs a name a buyer uses, a unit of measure, and a lead time you can meet. Filters should match those fields. Color-only filters are how retail habits leak into wholesale and make the catalog feel unserious.
Images still matter. A buyer comparing suppliers will not stay on a page with a broken image and a novel. One clean image and a spec table outperform a lifestyle video. Keep the spec table in a metafield or a section you can edit, not in a pasted HTML block nobody can find next quarter.
Launch and the first month
Invite five existing customers before you open applications to the public. Watch them order. Fix the stuck sentence, not the logo. Then turn on the application path and answer it inside the time you advertised. Publish Summit only after the unpublished copy passes the two-company test. Keep the previous theme installed so you can roll back if a price rule is wrong. A wrong contract price is worse than a late launch.
In the first month, measure approved accounts, quotes answered, and orders placed without a manual rewrite. If those numbers are flat because sales still prefers email, the theme is not the problem. The process is. Sit with the team and remove one email step. devdiy.com built Summit so that step can live in the catalog. Use it that way, or stay on the PDF until you are ready to. A half-used B2B theme is just a slower line sheet.
After the first month, review the two numbers that tell you Summit is in use: orders a salesperson did not retype, and quotes that have an owner. If both are zero, sit with the team and remove a step rather than adding a badge to the homepage. A wholesale theme earns its license when the catalog replaces a spreadsheet, not when the homepage looks more expensive than the free theme you left behind.
