Since April 2026, Shopify's native B2B — company accounts, wholesale catalogs, volume pricing — is included on every plan. What Shopify still doesn't give you is a way to onboard those wholesale customers. Here's the full flow, step by step, and how to automate it.
Whether you do it by hand or with an app, taking a wholesale buyer from "interested" to "ordering at wholesale prices" always passes through the same five stages:
Shopify's native features handle the result of stages 3 and 4 beautifully. Stages 1, 2, and 5 — and the clicking that connects them — are entirely on you.
Shopify has no native wholesale application form. Your realistic options, from most to least manual: an email address on a "Wholesale" page (then you re-type everything), a generic form builder (data lands in your inbox, setup is still manual), or a purpose-built onboarding app that embeds an application form in your storefront and feeds a review queue. We compared these routes in how to add a wholesale application form to Shopify.
A quick checklist that catches most bad applications: does the tax ID/VAT number look valid for their country? Does the website exist and sell what they claim? Is their expected volume plausible for their size? You don't need a credit bureau — you need five minutes and a queue that shows every pending application in one place.
This is where wholesale onboarding on Shopify actually breaks. For a buyer to order at wholesale prices, four objects must exist and be linked: a company, a company location, a contact with ordering permission set as main contact, and a link from the location to your B2B catalog. Miss the contact and the company shows "not approved to order". Miss the catalog link and the buyer logs in to retail prices. The full anatomy is in how to set up and approve B2B customers on Shopify.
Doing this by hand takes 5–10 minutes per buyer when nothing goes wrong. At five wholesale customers, that's fine. At fifty applications a month, it's a part-time job with a compliance-shaped failure mode.
Two emails matter: "we received your application" (buyers who hear nothing assume the form is broken and move on) and "you're approved — here's how to log in". Shopify sends neither for you.
A dedicated onboarding app collapses the five stages into: buyer applies → you review → you click approve. With Tradelane, the application form is embedded in your storefront with no theme edits, every application lands in one queue in your admin, and one click on approve creates the company, location, and main contact and assigns the location to your B2B catalog — with confirmation and approval emails sent automatically at each step.
Whichever tool you choose, the principle is the same: native B2B is the engine, onboarding is the missing front door. (For where the line between native features and apps sits in 2026, see native Shopify B2B vs. wholesale apps.)
No. Native B2B is on all plans since April 2026 — companies, catalogs, and wholesale pricing included. Details in do you need Shopify Plus to sell B2B?
Yes — that's exactly what B2B catalogs are for. Logged-in company contacts see wholesale prices; everyone else sees retail. Same store, same products, no duplicates.
Same-day. Wholesale buyers are usually evaluating several suppliers at once; the first one to say "you're approved, here's your login" often wins the account.
Onboard wholesale buyers in one click. Tradelane adds the application form, the review queue, and the one-click approval that wires up the company, contact, and catalog automatically — find it on the Shopify App Store.