A sales channel is a place where a merchant sells products and takes orders. On Shopify, that includes the Online Store, Point of Sale (POS), the Shop app, and connected apps like Google, Meta, or marketplace integrations. Each channel is a surface where buyers discover products and check out, all drawing from the same underlying catalog and inventory.
How it works
You add channels from the Shopify admin. Once a channel is active, you control which products are published to it, and orders from every channel flow into one order list and one inventory pool. That means a product sold in your Online Store and the same product sold through POS decrement the same stock count. Pricing, availability, and publishing can differ per channel, which is what makes channels useful for reaching different audiences without duplicating your product data.
Where B2B fits
Shopify B2B is not a separate sales channel in the same sense as the Online Store. Instead, B2B selling runs through the Online Store channel using company profiles, catalogs, and price lists layered on top. A wholesale buyer logs in, sees B2B-specific pricing and products through an assigned catalog, and checks out through the same storefront. So B2B is best thought of as a mode of selling on an existing channel rather than a channel of its own.
Why it matters for quoting
Quoting sits alongside these channels. A quote is a negotiated offer that, once accepted, becomes a real order in Shopify, so it settles through native checkout just like any other channel order. Tools that build on Shopify’s draft order and checkout system keep quotes inside the same order and inventory flow rather than creating a parallel system. See the B2B quoting glossary for related terms, or pricing for how quote workflows are packaged.