Build a B2B Home Decor Strategy To Win New Buyers (2026)

It’s impossible to ignore the momentum in the B2B home decor market. Modern trade buyers are reshaping how sourcing happens, with 73% preferring digital channels when evaluating suppliers. 

After a soft 2024, the home decor wholesale market has been stabilizing, and buyers are returning with higher digital expectations. Today’s buyers want self-serve product discovery, transparent pricing, and real-time inventory without needing a rep. They expect the same seamless experience they get from consumer shopping—but built for bulk orders and complex variants.

With demand returning, brands need a unified commerce strategy. Running B2B and DTC on one platform streamlines operations and creates a consistent buying journey across channels.

Ahead, you’ll learn how to bring your B2B home decor brand into the new age, with guidance for everything from platform essentials to marketing.

The B2B home decor market opportunity in 2026

Understanding the $200 billion home decor wholesale market

The home decor market is a big opportunity for B2B brands looking to scale. Total spending is within the hundreds of billions, and spans:

• Soft goods like textiles and rugs
• Hard goods like lighting and flooring
• Furniture

Broader US wholesale trends support moving to B2B home decor sales. Merchant-wholesaler sales hit $711.3 billion in July 2025, a 6.2% year-over-year increase, according to the latest report from the US Census Bureau. Inventory-to-sales ratios are leaner than in 2024, coming in at 1.28 versus 1.34, which suggests that reordering and restocking cycles are accelerating.

For home decor wholesalers, faster inventory cycles mean buyers reorder more often. Designers, retailers, and hospitality teams need reliable stock and accurate product details to keep their projects moving.

Why traditional wholesale models are losing market share

Digital-first channels are replacing legacy wholesale models. Today’s B2B buyers are everywhere, using an average of 10 channels to interact with suppliers. 

The data shows three trends driving the change:

• Ecommerce leads in B2B revenue. Where it’s offered, ecommerce is now the top revenue-generating B2B channel, accounting for roughly 34% of all revenue.
• The buying experience is the new moat. Buyers' expectations are higher than ever, with more than half saying they will switch suppliers for a seamless digital experience. 
• Marketplaces are changing distribution channels. B2B marketplaces are growing seven times faster than traditional ecommerce. Marketplaces make it cheaper for brands to find buyers and easier for buyers to bypass the conventional, high-cost intermediaries.

In home decor, this shift is even sharper. Designers and retailers are still used to showrooms and slow quoting cycles—but those workflows create friction. Add in hidden pricing and manual estimates and it’s not surprising that buyers flock toward brands that offer transparent pricing and lead times.

Overall, a poor digital experience with manual processes for quotes and terms will drive buyers to competitors. Commerce platforms like Shopify B2B are welcoming the change, helping brands create a more streamlined B2B buying experience and reducing operational costs. 

How modern B2B buyers shop for home decor inventory

So, what does this new buyer actually do? They live online, and they expect you to be there.

Their journey is fluid, moving across your website, an in-person visit, or a video call—and they expect you to recognize them at every step. They might start their search on supplier sites or marketplaces, expecting rich product data, real-time inventory, and their specific tiered pricing without having to pick up the phone. And because home decor products rely so heavily on key product details, these buyers also expect visual detail—like photos or videos—to show them exactly what they’re purchasing.

In fact, a 2024 Forrester-commissioned survey found that 73% of buyers expect the same convenient online experience they enjoy in B2C. That doesn’t make reps obsolete. On the contrary, they are more important as buyers will only engage a human expert for complex needs they can’t handle on their own.

That means empowering home decor buyers with robust self-service options. Designers and retailers want to order samples, check accurate lead times, compare finishes, and understand freight costs up front—without waiting on a rep. Surfacing these details digitally gives them the confidence to inspect products and place larger orders on their own. 

Building a winning B2B home decor strategy

Creating catalogs that convert: Product presentation best practices

Research from the Baymard Institute found that high-quality media, complete technical specs, and clear delivery information are the top confidence drivers on any product page.

For a high consideration category like home decor, trade buyers rely on visual information first. Imagery of dimensions, materials, and finishes helps prevent cart abandonment and returns that come from uncertainty about fit and finish. Your product detail page (PDP) has to provide all the data a trade buyer needs to make a decision. 

Home decor brands can take it one step further with a product configurator. B2B brand Future Glass, for example, offers a line of products that involve nuanced ordering processes, which were confusing for buyers.

Building a custom configurator powered by Hydrogen, Shopify’s headless framework, gave their team the flexibility to manage complex dimensional rules while giving customers a simple, guided experience.

Future Glass saw positive results:

• 80% decrease in time to quote railing jobs
• 340% growth in B2B sales year-over-year
• 83% increase in conversion rate 

Other ways to present your products are:

• Showcase every angle: Use Shopify’s native support for product media like high-resolution images, video, and 3D models to let buyers inspect texture, scale, and bundled contents.
• Standardize technical specs: Use metafields and metaobjects to create and display consistent technical data, like materials, finishes, or carton dimensions, across your entire catalog.
• Merchandise complex variants: For collections with many finishes, use the Combined Listings app to group all colorways and SKUs onto a single, swatch-based PDP.

For home decor specifically, clear variant presentation, finish details, and real-world-scale visuals give designers and retailers the confidence to buy without seeing the product in person.

Pricing strategies for wholesale home decor success

Today, 7 in 10 B2B buyers prefer to place orders online rather than via phone or email. Self-service is the clear winner for wholesale ecommerce moving forward. The preference for self-service means your pricing can’t be hidden behind a “contact for a quote” button. 

Keep a transparent price structure so home decor buyers can self-configure orders. Display all the rules up front:

• The base wholesale price
• Visible volume-based price breaks (e.g., “Price break at 50 units”)
• Any company-specific pricing for strategic accounts
• Published lead time and freight rules

Alongside your pricing, offer flexible payment options. Assign Net 30/45/60 payment terms or require a deposit at checkout, all managed automatically within the customer's B2B portal.

Transparency is especially important in the home decor industry. Buyers often compare multiple suppliers for the same style or finish, and hidden pricing or slow quoting can push them toward competitors. 

Hollis and Morris, a furniture and lighting design brand, realized that hiding pricing was actively hurting growth. 

"We just decided that at one point, you know what, we're going to go alone. We'll put our prices online,” says founder Mischa Couvrette, in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “There's no more lookbook and hiding prices and letting people dictate it we're going to control the product.”

“We're going to control the entire customer journey because we sold through agencies and those agencies don't know, they're just trying to sell product. They have 20 to 30 brands to sell. They didn't care like we cared," Mischa adds. 

By rejecting the industry standard of opacity, Hollis and Morris secured major commercial clients like Uber and Google, pioneering pricing transparency years before their competitors followed suit.

Balancing B2B and DTC operations on one platform

If you’re dedicated to growing a B2B home decor brand, it means committing to a unified commerce strategy.

Running your DTC and B2B businesses on separate platforms makes this impossible. It creates operational silos, inventory errors, and catalog drift, where your two sites show different product information. 

A B2B unified commerce platform is how to solve those issues. Shopify’s B2B features are built into the core admin, so you can run both B2B and DTC from a single back end. A single product and inventory system lets you syndicate your assortment to both retail and trade audiences, simply applying different pricing, terms, and visibility rules for each.

However, brands often fear that selling DTC will alienate their trade partners. The key is to align your incentives rather than walling off your channels. Stark, an 85-year-old luxury carpet company, transitioned from trade-only to a unified model by actively protecting their designers. 

CEO Chad Stark instituted a commission protection program. He explains in a recent Shopify Masters episode. 

"If an interior designer specifies a product from us, gets a quote from us, and the homeowner that they're working with buys any product for that room from our company, if the designer got cut out and they message us we give them 25% of whatever the homeowner spent,” he says. “I can assure you any designer we've sent a 25% commission check to, when their homeowner went around them now they're a client for life."

Instead of creating conflict, this turned designers into clients for life, allowing Stark to capture DTC revenue without burning bridges. If you plan to expand internationally, you can also use B2B with Markets to group company locations into specific markets and create a localized experience for any partner. 

This unified approach creates a smoother buying experience for both sides of the business and gives your team one source of truth for inventory and pricing—no matter what channel buyers use.

Essential features for B2B home decor ecommerce

To deliver that unified, self-serve experience, your platform needs a few key B2B capabilities.

Self-service ordering portals that reduce sales friction

A striking 81% of B2B buyers select a vendor before they ever talk to a sales rep. So basically, your online portal is now your most important salesperson as decisions are made before you can even talk to a buyer. 

A B2B portal should cover the buyer's entire job to be done. Buyers expect to log in as a company and instantly see:

• Their specific, live pricing and inventory
• Tools for quick, bulk reordering
• Their complete invoice and order history 

The goal is to let them complete a purchase without needing a rep. The main source of friction today is a lack of integration.

In home decor, stronger self-service reduces the back-and-forth that slows large, project-based orders. When buyers can verify key details and place orders independently, it removes friction and speeds up conversions. 

One problem is that only 25% of B2B brands have fully connected their ecommerce to their enterprise resource planning (ERP), leading to fragmented, manual processes that kill conversion. Meanwhile, 23% of B2B organizations still haven't embraced ecommerce at all.

You can create your own B2B customer portal with Shopify. It’s designed from the ground up for self-service, allowing buyers to log in as a company, place bulk orders, and see their unique catalogs, quantity rules, and payment terms.

This centralizes essential information and helps buyers make confident decisions early in the process.

Custom catalogs and tiered pricing for different buyer segments

Some 80% of B2B buyers report being dissatisfied with their chosen provider after a purchase. One cause for this buyer remorse is a poor fit, often stemming from mismatched or misaligned pricing. Inconsistent pricing practices are a systemic cost across B2B industries.

Segment your buyers by account type, like designers versus retail stockists, and market region. With segmentation, you can:

• Publish curated assortments so buyers only see the products relevant to them
• Apply account-specific prices and volume breaks to reduce the endless back-and-forth quoting
• Show transparent tiers and freight rules so buyers can self-configure large orders without a request for quote (RFQ)

Using B2B catalogs on Shopify, you can create customer-specific catalogs, each with its own price lists, volume pricing tiers, and quantity rules. When a buyer logs in, the platform automatically applies the most specific price assigned to their company location, ensuring they see the right price, every time.

Inventory management and real-time stock visibility

Many B2B companies are operating with an incomplete picture of their own inventory. A study from GS1 found that 43% of companies say they struggle with full supply chain visibility, and 44% still lack a centralized, real-time data-management system.

The same study found that firms with centralized data are three times more likely to trust their own data. Those who implement real-time tracking are 68% more likely to report better inventory control.

For a B2B buyer, inventory accuracy is key because it directly affects their planning timelines and ability to meet project deadlines. They want answers from your product pages like:

• Show sellable stock: Display the real-time, available quantity that already accounts for existing holds or minimum order quantities.
• Show stock by location: For buyers managing their own logistics, displaying available inventory by distribution center or store location allows them to accurately calculate freight and coordinate their own pickups.
• Show replenishment dates: If an item is out of stock, show the next ETA. Transparency allows the buyer to place a back order that fits their project timeline, rather than abandoning the cart to find a more certain supplier. 

Because home decor products often support timed and seasonal buying cycles, reliable inventory data helps buyers avoid delays and keeps projects on schedule.

Payment terms and net billing options

In the US, nearly half of all B2B sales are made on credit, not with a credit card. The average payment term is 45 days. In 2025, 70% of companies increased the amount of trade credit they extended to buyers.

A good digital experience will reflect how B2B buyers interact. Payment terms like Net 30/45/60 or options for deposits shouldn’t only take place offline. Present them at checkout and in the customer portal just like any other B2B payment option.

Given that nearly half of credit invoices are overdue, offer terms with a plan. Pair expanding credit with risk controls like:

• Automated credit approvals
• Setting specific credit limits per account
• Automated dunning to protect your cash flow 

Publish your rules up front. Give buyers your invoice cadence, the process for disputes, and any available early-pay discounts.

Digital transformation success stories in home decor

Industry West

After moving to Shopify, home and furniture brand Industry West saw a 90% lift in B2B web order revenue, a 10% increase in new trade accounts, and a 20% increase in average order value (AOV). Those results were no accident. It happened because Industry West built a personalized B2B experience on Shopify. 

The website serves as the catalog for both DTC and trade, using visual storytelling to showcase complex furniture SKUs. Industry West also cut down on quote times and lifted conversion on high-ticket items with a self-serve B2B workflow that offered company-level catalogs and quantity tiers. 

Jenni Kayne

For home goods with a long consideration cycle, the sales journey often starts in a showroom. The lifestyle brand Jenni Kayne solved this by unifying their Shopify store and Shopify POS systems.

A single back end gives their store staff endless-aisle visibility to ship from the warehouse if an item isn't in the store. It also empowers associates to act as trade reps. Staff can access unified customer profiles, see trade program tagging, and generate branded PDF quotes for designers directly from the POS.

Sweet Water Decor

Sweet Water Decor, a home fragrance and decor brand, shows a different model for B2B growth. By using Shopify Collective as both a supplier (wholesaling their products) and a retailer (curating partners), the channel now accounts for 9% of their total annual Shopify sales.

With 126 partnerships, the brand saw their first sale in just nine days and achieved higher-value carts on their retail site by curating premium partners. 

Collective gives the team wholesale-like reach without the traditional inventory risk or MOQs, making it easier to test new categories and expand their assortment. 

Choosing the right B2B platform for home decor

Platform evaluation criteria for wholesale operations

When comparing platforms, focus on solutions with strong native B2B capabilities and proven enterprise performance so you can scale. 

For a visual, spec-heavy category like home decor, your evaluation has to go deep. Look for a platform that offers an integrated, native B2B feature set with features like:

• Company-level accounts: Your platform should support company profiles that allow for multiple buyers and locations, each with its own assigned catalogs, payment terms, and tax exemptions.
• Flexible catalogs: Look for the ability to create custom catalogs that control product availability and assign customer-specific pricing, volume price breaks, and quantity rules like minimums or case packs.
• Integrated B2B checkout: Aim for a platform that natively handles B2B transactions, including offering automated net payment terms, accepting purchase order (PO) numbers, and vaulting credit cards at the company level.
• Self-serve customer portal: The portal should allow B2B customers to view their complete order history and place easy reorders from past purchases without sales rep assistance.
• Headless and API-first architecture: The platform must provide a headless framework (like Hydrogen) to build custom configurators and robust B2B APIs to handle deep, real-time integrations with your ERP, product information manager (PIM), and other core systems.

For deeper platform comparisons, many teams reference objective analyst evaluations like the Gartner Magic Quadrant when building their shortlist. Recognition can help validate a platform’s reliability and ability to scale with your business.

Integration requirements with existing systems

A B2B platform that isn't perfectly synced in real time with your ERP is a liability. If your storefront and back-end systems are not speaking the same language, you risk quoting incorrect prices or, worse, selling inventory you don't have.

Shopify's unified commerce platform is built for this, providing the tools and stable APIs to connect all your channels—B2B, DTC, and in-store POS—with your ERP into one managed system.

TIP: Take advantage of Shopify’s Global ERP Program to connect your commerce operations with major providers like NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

Home decor brands often manage large catalogs, so clean ERP and PIM integrations help ensure accurate specs, pricing, and inventory across every channel.

Total cost of ownership considerations

To compare platform costs, look beyond the license fee and calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) over a three-to-five-year period. A TCO model includes three core buckets:

• Build and Run: The up-front costs for licenses, hosting, content-delivery networking (CDN), and apps
• Change: The cost to launch new features, update themes, or make headless changes
• Operations: The day-to-day cost of support, monitoring, and integration maintenance

The Change bucket is the most overlooked cost. Favor platforms that reduce this cost by providing core B2B features natively. Shopify commissioned an independent study on platform TCO, which found that brands can improve their TCO by up to 36% compared to other major platforms.

Often, the smartest move is investing in a good B2B platform early. Dianne O'Connor, founder of Weston Table, took this route and scaled her creative team into the millions without getting bogged down by technical maintenance. 

She explains in a recent Shopify Masters episode. 

"I invested in Shopify when we only had $250,000 in revenue, which is kind of surprising and certainly not the normal route,” she says. “But what we decided to do is to really do what Kevin Costner did in Field of Dreams and say if we build it, they will come. We really only want to manage one big tech tool, so how can we make it work—we are a creative team, and I think our entire site reflects that sort of creativity."

Marketing your B2B home decor business

Once your foundation is in place, you need a marketing strategy that helps digital-first buyers find and choose you.

Moving beyond trade shows to digital discovery

Buyers are now conducting the majority of their research independently online, long before you ever know they exist.

Research shows that 78% of B2B buyers start their research on Google. What’s more, 73% of buyers actively avoid irrelevant outreach from sales reps, preferring to do their own digital research instead. Because the majority of B2B buyers also shortlist brands they already know, your brand recognition and SEO strategy are what determine if you even get considered.

Three ways to improve your presence with ecommerce SEO are:

• Treat product pages as procurement tools. Use technical language your buyers search with on your PDPs and collection pages so your products surface correctly in search engines and AI-driven discovery tools. Include materials, finishes, exact dimensions, compliance codes, and pack or case details. 
• Capture non-brand discovery. Create problem-and-solution pages or comparison guides to capture buyers who don't know your brand name yet. Content like “velvet vs. linen sofa care” or “matte vs. gloss tile for hospitality” meets them mid-search.
• Publish credible thought leadership content. 75% of decision-makers say a strong piece of thought leadership prompted them to research a product they weren't even considering. Focus on quarterly research, sharing insider tips, and coming up with new ways for your buyers to succeed in the industry. 

However, digital search relies on customers knowing what they are looking for. For innovative home decor products that require visual discovery, physical wholesale channels can still be a powerful launchpad.

Mustard Made, known for their colorful retro lockers, faced a challenge—customers didn't know they wanted lockers until they saw them. Cofounders Becca Stern and Jess Gray explain in a recent Shopify Masters episode why they chose a wholesale-first strategy with trade shows. 

"We launched wholesale first. So we needed to get these products out there and the response that we always get now is that they're so much better in real life,” says Becca. “People got to walk into their favorite store. And you know maybe they're looking for a gift for their friends or something like that and they see this product that they weren't expecting."

The strategy paid off. Mustard Made exceeded their target of nine wholesale orders on day one of a trade show, and by day four, they had orders to fill two 40-foot containers. Wholesale became the discovery engine that eventually fueled the brand’s DTC growth.

Building brand awareness in B2B marketplaces

B2B marketplaces are the most rapidly expanding digital sales channel. 

Their pull on procurement is immense — Amazon Business alone reports over $35 billion in annualized gross merchandise volume and serves eight million organizations. Niche marketplaces like Faire have also achieved global scale, attracting tens of thousands of buyers via events like Faire Markets.

Marketplaces are excellent for top-of-funnel reach. They help new buyers find your brand, often with built-in incentives like net terms or returns programs. Once you acquire that customer, though, the goal is to migrate their repeat business to your own B2B portal where you control the data, assortment, and pricing. 

Shopify Power-Up: Shopify Collective is an effective tool to expand distribution with reputable brands. With Collective, you get wholesale-like reach and collaborate with other retailers from your Shopify admin.

Home decor brands often see early traction on marketplaces because the category lends itself to visual discovery and curated assortments. Marketplaces can introduce buyers to your style, while your B2B portal becomes the long-term home for reorders.

Content marketing strategies for wholesale buyers

Top-performing B2B content marketers are doubling down on original research, case studies, and practical how-to guides. It’s important to publish the right content on your digital properties as 93% of B2B buyers say brands that publish original research earn more trust.

Buyers care more about substance than debates over format. For home decor brands, helpful content can support long sales cycles and answer the questions buyers typically have before committing to large orders. Examples include: 

• Spec guides and installation PDFs
• Freight and packaging explainers
• Designer lookbooks
• Return-on-investment (ROI) calculators that help retailers figure out sell-through

Connect every asset you create to a clear next step, like a request for a sample or get-a-quote call to action (CTA). These research-backed assets build authority and help shorten the buying committee's decision-making cycle.

Future-proofing your B2B home decor business

Emerging trends in home decor wholesale

The outlook for 2026 is strong, with the home and housewares category noted as a key driver of general merchandise sales. Buyers are backed by larger budgets from procurement, and they are spending their funds differently. 

Here are some changes to expect:

• Plan for AI-assisted buying. Some 64% of procurement leaders say better insights via AI and analytics are a top goal. They are actively adopting AI chatbots (36%) and AI for supplier-risk analysis (37%). Structured, accurate product and pricing data helps ensure AI tools can return reliable quotes and ETAs.
• Meet sustainable sourcing mandates. Some 61% of procurement leaders prioritize buying from sustainably certified suppliers. Publishing clear materials, provenance, certifications, and packaging specs at the SKU level increases your chance of making the shortlist.
• Build a resilient supply chain to manage risk. Buyers see significant risk in the next two years, including supply disruptions and new regulations. Prove that you are trustworthy with clear back-order windows, inventory visibility, and accessible compliance documentation on your product pages. 

Preparing for omnichannel buyer expectations

The line between B2B and DTC behavior is blurring. Organizations now expect 54% of all revenue to come from digital channels, and B2B buyers are bringing their B2C expectations with them.

New payment methods and discovery methods are on the rise. Digital wallet transactions grew 62% year over year, and AI already influenced 17% of ecommerce orders in Q3 2023. Commerce is becoming embedded across every touchpoint, from a sales rep’s email to a customer service chat.

In home decor brand terms, omnichannel often means a buyer sees a product in-store or at a showroom, reviews details online, and completes the order through their B2B portal. 

Build a channel-agnostic foundation. Your catalog, pricing, inventory, and account terms should live in one central system. Buyers can get the same data whether they are on your website, reordering from their portal, or getting a quote from a sales rep. 

High-value orders have also moved online. Buyers are increasingly comfortable making remote or self-serve purchases of $500,000 or more. Brands that force these buyers offline to get freight quotes, confirm minimum order quantities (MOQs), or apply for net terms are creating friction and losing business.