How to approve B2B wholesale applications on Shopify
Shopify B2B lets you sell wholesale once a company account exists — but it doesn't give businesses a way to apply for one, or give you a queue to approve them. Here's the native gap, the workaround merchants build today, and a few ways to close it.
The gap in native Shopify B2B
Shopify's B2B features — company profiles, catalogs, payment terms — only apply once a company account exists in your admin. There is no built-in flow for a business to apply for one, and no approval queue for you to review applications in. Merchants have raised this directly in the Shopify Community: setting up a new B2B company today means doing it manually, one business at a time, in Settings → Customers → Companies.
The DIY workaround — and where it breaks down
The common no-code route is Shopify Forms to collect an application (company name, tax number, business category, expected order size) paired with Shopify Flow to notify you, tag the submission, or send an access email. It works for collecting information, but it stops short of the actual approval step: the application doesn't automatically turn into — or get linked to — a company record in your admin. You still create the Shopify company, location, and contact by hand, and match it back to the form submission yourself.
That manual link-up is where the time goes once you have more than a handful of applications a week — not in collecting the information, but in turning it into a working account.
How Wholesale Approvals closes it
A few dedicated apps have shown up on the Shopify App Store to solve this exact problem. Wholesale Approvals is ours — built to remove the manual link-up step entirely:
One application form, hosted on your own domain
Served through a Shopify App Proxy on your storefront, not an off-domain hosted page — it looks and feels like part of your store.
Approval creates the company, not just a record
One click creates the Shopify company, location, and main contact — with the submitted tax ID and shipping address carried straight through. No manual matching.
- Configurable fields — company website, tax ID, business type, expected order volume, business address
- Full application detail before you decide, not just a name and email
- Rejected applications stay in history, but never create a company
- $49/mo flat, 14-day free trial
Questions, answered
Does Shopify B2B have any native approval workflow?
No. Shopify's native B2B tools — company profiles, catalogs, payment terms — apply once a company account exists in your admin. There's no built-in application form or approval queue to get a new company into that state.
Can I build this myself with Shopify Forms and Flow?
You can collect applications that way, and Flow can notify you or tag the submission. The gap is the approval step itself: Forms + Flow doesn't create or link the application to a Shopify company account automatically, so you still set that up by hand.
What does Wholesale Approvals do differently?
Approving an application creates the Shopify company, location, and main contact in one click, using the submitted information, including tax ID and shipping address when provided. The application form itself runs on your own storefront domain via Shopify's App Proxy.
Is this only useful for large stores?
No — it's aimed at any merchant who takes wholesale applications regularly, even a handful a week, since the manual company setup is a fixed cost per application regardless of volume.