Where it gets stuck.
rade buyers on standard Shopify storefronts operate without net pricing, without volume breaks, and without any mechanism to request memo samples or tear sheets. They adapt: they email sales for quotes, they call for special pricing, they submit one order per project at full retail and negotiate credits afterward. Each of those adaptations is a data void — revenue that closes off-platform, outside Shopify's reporting, invisible to attribution.
Why it happens.
Most material brands built their trade program before they built their Shopify store. The trade workflow exists in email threads, in a Google Doc with a discount table, in a rep's memory. When the brand launches Shopify, they apply a blanket trade discount code and call it done. The code doesn't expire. The rep gives it to non-trade customers when they push back on price. The discount erodes margin without creating a traceable trade account.
The size of it.
We have audited four brands where trade represented 25–35% of claimed revenue but less than 8% of Shopify order volume. The gap was entirely off-platform transactions — wire transfers, Square invoices, phone orders. One brand had a single sales rep manually creating PayPal invoices for their top 12 trade accounts, all of whom bought $80,000–$200,000 per year. None of that revenue appeared in Shopify. The brand's conversion rate, AOV, and channel attribution were structurally incorrect because 30% of their business was invisible to their analytics stack.
Filed from inside a working engagement. Edited only for client privacy — the numbers and the mechanisms are exact.