If you sell wholesale on Shopify, you've probably found the "Submit all orders as drafts for review" setting — and then discovered it doesn't quite work the way your B2B customers expect. Buyers assume their purchasing manager can review orders before anything reaches you. They can't. Here's exactly how the feature works, what the Location Admin role actually permits, and the workarounds that exist today.
The setting lives in the checkout settings of each company location (not store-wide). When it's enabled:
Note the direction of every arrow: buyer submits, merchant reviews. The review step happens entirely on your side of the fence.
If you only want some orders held for review — say, above a certain order value — Shopify's answer is a Payment Customization Function, which requires a custom app or a developer.
Shopify B2B has exactly two customer permission levels per company location:
That's the full list. There is no third role, and no per-permission toggles.
This is where expectations break. A location admin cannot:
In other words: the location admin's view of pending drafts is a window, not a control panel. Real procurement workflows are usually two-sided — a purchasing manager checks quantities and PO numbers before the supplier ever sees the order — and Shopify's native flow simply doesn't model that side.
Give buyers "Ordering only" permission and agree (offline) that they build carts but don't check out — the location admin places the actual order, adding the PO reference and final quantities. Clunky, because Shopify won't enforce it, but it puts the internal review where the native flow can support it.
Keep drafts-for-review on, and before approving, email the draft details to the location admin for sign-off. Works at low volume; painful beyond a handful of orders a week. Tagging draft orders by company and using Shopify Flow to notify a contact can take some manual work out of it.
Require a PO number at checkout and instruct locations that buyers must obtain one from their purchasing manager first. The approval happens in the customer's own process, and you reject any draft without a valid PO.
This niche is young, but apps are appearing that let location admins approve or reject their team's orders before anything reaches the merchant. If internal approval is a hard requirement for a big account, an app is currently the only way to get it without custom development.
The Customer Account UI extensions and Admin APIs make it possible to build a bespoke approval step, but this is agency-budget territory.
Feature requests for two-sided B2B order review go back to at least August 2023, and new ones keep appearing — the most recent (July 2026) lays out the exact buyer-submits → admin-reviews → merchant-approves flow merchants want. Shopify has been investing steadily in B2B — it no longer requires Plus — so it may come. But if your wholesale customers need it now, plan around one of the workarounds above rather than waiting.
Whether drafts-for-review is on or off for a company location is decided when the company is set up — and it's one of the settings that's easy to forget when you're creating companies by hand for every new wholesale account. Miss it once, and that account's orders skip review entirely.
Tradelane turns a wholesale application into a ready-to-order B2B account in one click — Company, location, and catalog created in Shopify, correctly configured from day one. Turn on order review in Tradelane's settings and every company you approve is created with "Submit all orders as drafts for review" already enabled — no location left accidentally on direct checkout. There's a free plan, so you can try it on your next application.