Hi all,
I’m looking for a B2B/trade theme that already includes most of the key B2B features we need, without having to rely on too many additional apps.
Ideally looking for built-in functionality such as:
Quantity selectors
Login page before customers can view the website
Account application and approval process
Etc.
We’re looking for something that can quickly be adapted to look on brand, while already having the core functionality we need.
Thank you!
Hey @Ali_parr
The honest part though: two of your asks aren’t theme features at all, no theme delivers them.
“Login before viewing the site” is storefront access control, and “account application and approval” is a workflow, neither lives in a theme. How you get those depends on your plan: if you’re on (or can move to) Shopify Plus, native B2B covers it, gated catalogs that require login, company accounts you approve, and quantity rules, which paired with the Trade theme is basically your whole stack with minimal apps. If you’re not on Plus, a theme won’t gate access or handle approvals, so you’d lean on a single B2B suite like SparkLayer or BSS B2B/Wholesale, which bundle login gating, a registration and approval flow, quantity breaks and customer specific pricing onto a standard theme, fewer moving parts than stitching separate apps together.
Best,
Moeed
Hello there @Ali_parr
My closest native starting point is the Shopify Trade theme, designed around wholesale workflows. Warehouse and Empire are also very good for large catalogs, and can be customized with customer accounts, locked pricing, and quantity based purchasing. If you’re on Shopify Plus, the Shopify B2B features, company accounts, catalog controls, customer approval flows, will natively take care of a lot of the requirements. Add to that the customer account required access and a little bit of theme customization to keep the stack lean.
Hi Ali — since you’re already on Plus, native B2B + the Trade theme is the right backbone, as others said. One nuance on the “login before viewing the site” part: on Plus you can gate the B2B catalog and pricing behind company-account login without hiding your entire public site. Fully gating everything also hides you from search, kills any ad landing pages, and removes retail discoverability — so unless you’re 100% trade-only, it’s usually better to gate pricing and checkout rather than the whole storefront. The other thing that tends to bite people is the approval step itself: native B2B lets you approve company accounts, but once you get a steady flow of trade applications, that manual review becomes the actual bottleneck. Worth building your application form around exactly the fields you need to vet someone — business details, resale/VAT info, etc. — so you can approve or reject at a glance instead of going back and forth over email.
Hey @Ali_parr!
Something to note that everyone else seems to have gotten wrong here: You no longer need to be on Shopify Plus to use Shopify’s native B2B features! Shopify recently announced that B2B is now available on all plans (although there are still some limitations for non-Plus).
However the consensus here that some of these features are not things you would find built into a theme are correct, especially the access control and application/approval functionality.
A couple of recommendations: