We’re launching wholesale sales on our Shopify store and are trying to figure out the best way to verify new customers.
Some customers upload resale/tax-exempt certificates, while others need to provide professional licenses (cosmetology, medical, dental, etc.) before purchasing certain products.
Right now it looks like we’d have to manually:
- Read the uploaded PDF/photo
- Check the certificate or license on the state’s website
- Approve the customer in Shopify
That seems like it could become a lot of work as we grow.
How are you handling this today?
- is everyone still checking them manually?
- Is there an app that actually verifies these automatically?
- Any workflow you’d recommend?
Would love to hear what has worked for your store.
@Nithi1994 Hi! I would keep the final approval manual. I would collect the certificate or licence, its number, expiration date and then verify the document with the issuing authority before applying the tax exemption. I think the verification date and expiration date could be stored in company metafields, with a reminder set before the document expires. OCR can help extract the data, but honestly I would not trust it to verify whether the document is valid
The part you can actually automate isn’t the approval, it’s making sure an unverified customer can’t buy the restricted items while you’re still checking. If you gate those products behind a B2B catalog that’s only assigned to approved companies, or tag-gate them with Flow, nothing slips through even when a certificate is sitting in your inbox for two days. You keep the human check on authenticity since state license lookups don’t have a clean Shopify-native path, but the enforcement stops being manual.
The thing most people miss is expiration. A resale cert or a cosmetology license approved once never gets re-checked, and a year later you’re selling to someone whose license lapsed. Storing the expiration date as a customer metafield and having Flow re-flag them when it passes keeps that from sneaking up on you.
Are the licenses you deal with mostly one state or spread across many? That changes whether a lookup is even worth scripting.
Hi there @Nithi1994
We usually mix automation with a manual review process. Apps that gather wholesale applications can capture certificates and licenses, then automatically tag applications for review using Shopify Flow. For tax exempt status some merchants integrate verification services where they exist while professional licenses still require a fast manual check with the apropriate state database. When the customer has been verified tags in Shopify or company permissions can be set to automate future purchases, so it’s a one and done review.
Hi @Nithi1994 Welcome To Shopify Community So For the resale/tax-exempt certificate side specifically, this is a solved problem, apps like ExemptSync (Auto Tax Certs), TaxWisp, and PortalSphere are built exactly for this: customers submit through a branded portal, AI-powered OCR extracts the certificate data automatically (name, state, exemption type, expiry), and once you approve, tax-exempt status syncs directly to the Shopify customer account. That removes the manual “read the PDF and re-type it” step, though you’d still do the actual approval decision yourself, the OCR speeds up data entry, it doesn’t replace judgment on whether the certificate is legitimate.
The professional license side (cosmetology, medical, dental) is the harder half, and I haven’t seen a dedicated Shopify app that automatically cross-checks a license against a state licensing board database, that’s a much narrower, more regulated use case than tax certificates, and state license lookup systems aren’t standardized enough (different formats, different state portals, no unified API) for a general app to handle reliably across all states and professions. That part is probably staying manual regardless of what tool you pick.
A practical middle ground a lot of stores land on: use a certificate/tax-exempt app to handle the volume of resale certificates automatically, and keep license verification as a smaller, manual step specifically for the subset of customers buying license-gated products, since that’s likely a smaller volume than your general wholesale signups anyway. Hope this helps, and if it does, don’t forget to like and mark it as the solution. Thank you!