I’ve done some research, but haven’t fully found the answer that I’m looking for.
For a B2C e-commerce store, what is the best way to implement B2B accounts/registration without upgrading to ShopifyPlus without creating a different url?
What we need:
Trade registration on main Shopify storefront
Once approved, the B2B login is created and customer will be able to see discounted rates (not bundles or anything at this time).
If also possible, having shipping rules vs a B2C consumer (if retail customer has free shipping, but wholesale B2B customer would then pay shipping).
Is there one great app for all of this or would I need multiple apps - or is there another way to workaround it?
You don’t need Shopify Plus or a separate URL to set up B2B on your existing Shopify store. You just need a way to let wholesale customers register, get approved, and see their own pricing and shipping rules when they log in. The best way to do this is with an app that handles both customer tagging and price adjustments.
B2B Wholesale Solution by BSS Commerce
If you want an even simpler setup, you could use Locksmith to hide certain prices from regular customers and only show them to approved wholesale buyers.
This comes up a lot, especially for stores that aren’t on Plus.
The usual non-Plus workaround is customer tags. You keep everything on the same storefront, add a wholesale signup form, approve people manually, then tag them (like b2b or wholesale). Once they’re tagged, you can show different pricing, collections, or even different shipping logic using Liquid. It works, but it does mean touching theme code and keeping tags + rules in sync as things grow.
I built Latch to simplify exactly this flow. It lets you approve B2B customers, tag them automatically, and then lock products, prices, and collections so only approved accounts see wholesale rates. You can also separate B2B vs B2C behavior, including shipping rules, without needing a second URL or Shopify Plus.
This is really three separate problems, and they don’t need one app:
Registration & approval - collecting business info, deciding who gets in. Google Form + manual tagging works for a few customers. Helium Customer Fields or a wholesale suite like BSS handles it at scale.
Differentiated pricing - showing B2B prices to tagged customers. Liquid conditionals work, or Locksmith / Latch as mentioned above.
Shipping rules - Shopify’s native shipping profiles can split B2B vs B2C with customer tags.
@Clueless3 re: doing it without apps - yes, customer tags + Liquid works for all three. The catch: you’re writing theme code that breaks when you switch themes, and keeping tags in sync manually gets old fast.
One thing nobody’s mentioned: most wholesale apps (BSS especially) inject code into your theme files. If your D2C store is running well, that’s a real risk. I’ve read App Store reviews from merchants who had to rebuild their theme after conflicts, or couldn’t fully remove the code after uninstalling.
Disclosure: I’m building B2B Onboard - handles just the registration & approval part via App Proxy, so zero theme code. Doesn’t do pricing or shipping - you’d pair it with something else for that. Still pre-launch but happy to answer questions on the approach.
One thing worth adding for context: once your B2B customers are approved and set up, a meaningful chunk of them will still send orders by email, a PDF purchase order, an Excel sheet, a plain-text list. Even if you’ve built a great wholesale portal, a lot of B2B buyers just… don’t use it. They forward a PO the same way they have for years.
Order intake: converting emailed POs into draft orders without manual re-entry
That last piece is what we built LevelOps PDF to Order for. You forward the customer’s email to a dedicated address and it creates a Shopify draft order automatically, product matching, customer assignment, location, pricing from your catalog. Works alongside whatever stack you’re using for the other three layers.
Not necessarily relevant if your wholesale volume is low, but once you’re processing a meaningful number of B2B orders it becomes the actual bottleneck. Happy to answer questions if useful.
There’s a third option nobody’s mentioned yet — a standalone B2B portal that connects to your existing Shopify store via the Admin API.
I’ve been building Shopify stores for 12+ years and ran into this exact problem with a client. The app-based approach (BSS, Locksmith, wholesale apps) works for basic setups, but the trade-off is real: those apps inject code into your theme. When you update your theme or
Shopify pushes a platform change, things break. The Shopify App Store reviews for most wholesale apps are full of merchants dealing with theme conflicts, broken uninstalls, and pricing logic that tangles B2B and B2C together.
The manual tag + Liquid approach that @mt686 described works too, but as @Clueless3 is probably discovering, it gets painful to maintain as you add more wholesale customers and pricing tiers.
What I ended up building for my client (a jewelry brand doing 600K+/year) was a separate B2B portal — a standalone web app that sits on its own subdomain (like b2b.yourstore.com). It connects to the Shopify store via API, syncs products automatically, and handles wholesale pricing, customer approvals, and ordering completely outside
the retail theme.
The key advantage: zero code injected into the retail Shopify store. The B2B portal and the retail store are completely decoupled. Theme updates, app conflicts, broken uninstalls — none of that applies because the wholesale system never touches the theme files.
Trade registration: The portal has its own registration form with business verification (we even integrated automated VAT number checking for EU customers)
Approved wholesale pricing: The portal has a pricing engine with per-product and per-category discounts, with a fallback hierarchy.
Wholesale customers only see wholesale prices when logged into the
portal.
Different shipping rules: Since it’s a separate application,
shipping logic for B2B is completely independent from the retail store
rules.
The build cost is significantly less than upgrading to Shopify Plus ($2,300+/month). And unlike wholesale apps, there’s nothing to uninstall from your theme if you ever want to change approach.
Happy to answer questions about how this works technically — I’ve been running this setup in production for a while now and it handles 1,500+ products synced between both platforms.