Upstream tech, translated for coffee operators.

Brewstack — Issue #002

brewstack.ai

Lead: If you roast coffee and sell it online, the tool that lets cafés and offices order from you on account — at their own price, billed net-30 — used to cost $2,300 a month. As of this spring it's free on the plan you already pay for. Turn it on.

Turn on the wholesale channel Shopify just made free.

The $2,300/month wall around online wholesale quietly fell in April. If you roast and sell on Shopify, that's a new sales channel waiting in a setting you already own.

This one is for roasters and café-roasters who already run their online store on Shopify — which is most of them. (If you're a single-shop café with no online store, skip to The Stack; there's a 7shifts and a loyalty item with your name on it.) On April 2, Shopify did something it had refused to do for almost four years: it moved its wholesale toolkit — what Shopify calls B2B — out from behind its top-tier plan and made it free on the Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans the rest of us actually pay for. B2B just means selling to other businesses instead of to coffee drinkers. Until April, getting it meant upgrading to Shopify Plus at roughly $2,300 a month. Now it's a setting, not an invoice.

Here is what turning it on actually unlocks. Your wholesale buyers — the café down the street, the office that wants a standing order, the restaurant buying two cases a week — get their own login. They see their negotiated price, not your retail price. You can build up to three price lists (Shopify caps it at three), set minimum order quantities, store a buyer's card for repeat orders, and — the one that matters most — bill them on payment terms: net-15, net-30, net-60. That's the single feature that turns a casual reorder into a wholesale account, because wholesale buyers expect to pay on terms, not tap a card like a retail customer.

Why this is a growth story and not a software story: a wholesale channel is a different lever than another retail discount. Wholesale is volume, predictability, and accounts that reorder for years. Most roasters know they should sell wholesale online and haven't, because the on-ramp cost $2,300 a month, a developer build, or a bolt-on app. All three just stopped being the reason. The wall around online wholesale didn't get lower this spring — it got deleted.

So three verdicts, depending on where you sit.

Buy — meaning turn it on — if you're a roaster on a standard Shopify plan with even two or three wholesale accounts you currently handle over email and invoices. This is the one most of you should do. Moving those accounts onto company logins with net-30 terms takes an afternoon, costs nothing beyond the plan you already pay, and gives the buyer a self-serve reorder page instead of an email thread. The channel was always worth building; the cost of building it just went to zero.

Rip out — if you're paying for a separate wholesale or B2B app (the SparkLayer-class add-ons run roughly $49 to $500-plus a month on top of your plan). Check one thing first: do three price lists cover your tiers? If you have one wholesale price, or a "café price" and an "office price," three is plenty — cancel the app at renewal and run native. Put a number on it: $200 a month saved on a bolt-on app is $2,400 a year — most of a part-time wholesale rep's first quarter, or your first run of wholesale sample bags and deliveries.

Build — only if you're a roastery with developer help that's genuinely outgrown the free version. The native tool caps at three price lists and doesn't do deposits or partial payments — those stay on Plus. If you run five wholesale tiers across two countries, or take deposits on large green-coffee-backed orders, the cap is a real ceiling and Plus earns its cost. For everyone under it — most roasters reading this — the free version is the whole answer.

The honest caveat: this is a Quiet Margin Shift that landed in April, not this week, and Shopify didn't blast it because free features don't sell upgrades. That's exactly why it's worth a Call now — the operators who'd benefit most are the ones who never heard. The verdict flips only if you need more than three price lists or you take deposits; then Plus is back on the table. Short of that, the wholesale channel you've been meaning to build is sitting in your settings, switched off, costing nothing to switch on.

Verdict: Turn on Shopify's native B2B this week and move your wholesale accounts onto net-30 logins. Rip out any paid B2B app if three price lists cover your tiers. Build on Plus only if you need more catalogs or deposits. The cheapest new sales channel you'll get all year is a setting you already own.

The Stack — what else moved this week

1. Cropster added batch blending inside its roasting software — you can combine roasted batches into a blend without leaving the system. Roasters: if you still build blends in a spreadsheet, move them into Cropster this week — one system of record, and the setup time you save is capacity for wholesale growth. Cropster
2. Square shipped drive-thru tools and is pushing app-less loyalty inside Apple and Google Wallet — its own data says loyalty members spend 46% more and visit 57% more often. Multi-unit cafés: turn on Square Loyalty ($45/mo per location) before any drive-thru hardware — the repeat-visit lift is the cheaper growth lever, with no app for customers to download. Square Loyalty
3. 7shifts now rebuilds a paper or spreadsheet schedule from a photo, then forecasts sales off your POS at a claimed 95% accuracy. Cafés: if migration was your excuse for skipping scheduling software, it's gone — and tighter labor forecasting protects the margin you reinvest in growth. 7shifts
4. Fairtrade launched a free tool letting coffee co-ops send farm-GPS data straight to EU buyers — the same deforestation-law data some roasters pay a vendor to collect. Roasters buying Fairtrade lots: before signing a paid traceability seat, ask your co-op if they're on the new tool — the data may already be free. (EUDR = the EU's deforestation law requiring farm-GPS proof on coffee entering Europe.) Daily Coffee News
5. The AI subscription price war kept escalating — Google cut its top Gemini plan $250→$200 and added a $100 tier; OpenAI is weighing big cuts too. Any operator paying for an AI tool: re-shop your plan at renewal — the same help is getting cheaper — but don't rebuild your business around one model while prices are still in free-fall. CNBC

Field Note

The wholesale-channel stack: 4 ways a roaster takes net-30 orders online

The Call says turn on Shopify's now-free wholesale tool and rip out what you're double-paying for. Here's the head-to-head — where the free version stops earning and a paid one starts. "Price lists" = separate pricing per buyer. "Net terms" = billing a buyer instead of charging a card.

Brewstack verdict: Start at the top row. For the roaster with a wholesale price and maybe an office price, the free native tool is the whole answer — and it now costs nothing to switch on. Only climb the table when you hit the ceiling: more than three price lists, or deposits on large green-coffee-backed orders. Paying for row two, three, or four before you've outgrown row one is Stack Drift — a line item that stopped earning its seat.

Sources: Shopify B2B by plan, Shopify B2B for all, SparkLayer, RoasterTools.

⭐ Do this week

If you roast and sell on Shopify: open your settings, find the B2B section, and turn it on. Add your two or three real wholesale buyers as companies, set their price, and switch their billing to net-30. Why now: the feature went free in April and most competitors haven't noticed — the on-ramp to a wholesale channel costs nothing today, and the first roaster on the block to offer café accounts terms wins them. Cost: one afternoon. $0 in new software.

If you don't sell online (most single-shop cafés): nothing to turn on this week — the Call isn't yours. But The Stack is: 7shifts now rebuilds your schedule from a photo (item 3), and if you've never run loyalty, the spend-and-visit lift is the cheapest growth move on the board (item 2).

Sign-off

The best growth move some weeks isn't a new tool — it's the one you already pay for, with a switch you never flipped. A wholesale channel used to cost a roaster $2,300 a month to unlock. This spring it became free, and almost nobody announced it, because free features don't sell upgrades. That's the gap Brewstack closes: the quiet changes that move your business, not the loud ones that move a vendor's stock.

Last week I promised a closer look at payments — the quiet Square rate hike sitting in café P&Ls for five months. It's in The Stack today (item 2), but it grew into a bigger story: Square is now giving away the loyalty engine that earns that rate back. Next Tuesday, we put a verdict on it.

Until next Tuesday.

— Stef. from Brewstack

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