Every wholesale application is a claim: "we're a real business, give us trade prices." Approve without checking and you hand wholesale margins to retail customers — or worse, take on tax liability for exemptions the buyer wasn't entitled to. Here's how verification actually works on each side of the Atlantic.
When wholesale onboarding is manual, verification is the first corner that gets cut. The application arrives by email, the tax ID sits in a text field, and checking it means finding the right government website, figuring out the format, and doing a lookup — per buyer. Most merchants approve on gut feeling instead.
The two failure modes are predictable. First, margin leaks: individuals posing as businesses to buy at trade prices. Second, tax exposure: in the US, if you don't collect sales tax because a buyer claimed resale status, an invalid certificate can leave you on the hook for the uncollected tax in an audit.
The EU makes this side easy. Every VAT-registered business has a VAT number, and the European Commission runs VIES (VAT Information Exchange System), a free lookup that confirms whether a VAT number is valid and, for most member states, returns the registered business name so you can match it against the application.
A useful detail: VIES validity also matters for zero-rating cross-border B2B sales within the EU. If you sell from one member state to a VAT-registered buyer in another, the buyer's valid VAT number is part of what justifies not charging VAT on the invoice.
The check itself is a ten-second lookup — the friction is doing it for every application, remembering the format quirks (Greek numbers use the EL prefix, Northern Ireland uses XI), and recording what you found. That's why it's the first thing worth automating: Tradelane runs the VIES check automatically on every EU application and shows the result — valid, not found, or service unavailable — next to the tax ID in the review queue, along with the registered name.
The US has no VIES. There is no national registry of businesses, no single certificate format, and no free national API. What a US wholesale buyer has instead is a resale certificate (in many states tied to a seller's permit or sales tax permit), issued by the state where they do business. It documents that they buy your goods to resell them, which is what exempts the purchase from sales tax.
Three things every wholesale merchant should know about them:
The practical workflow: collect the certificate number and issuing state on the application form (asking later, by email, is where the trail goes cold), then verify it on the issuing state's revenue site before approving, and keep the record. Tradelane collects both fields from US applicants and shows them in the review queue with a direct link to the issuing state's revenue agency — one click to the right lookup page instead of a search through fifty state websites.
Yes. VIES is a free public service from the European Commission. The member-state services behind it occasionally go down, so a "service unavailable" result means retry later, not that the number is invalid.
On the website of the tax authority of the state that issued it. Most states offer a free online verification tool where you enter the permit or certificate number. There is no national lookup, so the issuing state is the key piece of information to collect.
It depends where they're based. In the five states without a state sales tax it's expected. Elsewhere, a US buyer purchasing for resale should be able to provide one — treat a refusal as a signal worth a follow-up question, not necessarily a rejection.
Tradelane builds verification into wholesale onboarding on Shopify: buyers apply through a form on your storefront, EU VAT numbers are validated automatically via VIES, US resale certificates are collected with a one-click state verification link, and approval creates the B2B company in one click. Try it free on the Shopify App Store. See also: how to onboard wholesale customers and how to approve B2B customers in one click.