I have a prospect who wants to sell to pre-selected/pre-screened customers.
Can Shopify require customers create a profile and be approved before placing an order?
Thanks.
Topic summary
Goal: Limit purchases to pre-screened customers by requiring account creation and approval before checkout.
Key options discussed:
- Native setting: Require customers to log in before checkout (Settings > Checkout > Require customer login). Limitation: anyone can register, so it doesn’t ensure pre-approval. Deleting unapproved accounts is possible but not ideal.
- App-based controls:
• Helium Customer Fields: build custom registration forms and require admin approval before account activation; combine with Shopify’s login requirement to gate checkout.
• Locksmith: restrict access to products/pages (and optionally site visibility and prices) based on customer tags, email, passcodes, secret links, location, or purchase history. Can be paired with Helium or implemented via theme code for storefront access control. - Alternative workflow: Set payment capture to manual so the merchant approves and captures payments order-by-order; increases operational overhead and checkout friction.
Latest guidance: Use Helium Customer Fields for account approval plus the Shopify login requirement; optionally add Locksmith or theme code to hide site/products until approval.
Status: No final decision from the original poster; further details on desired customer flow requested. Thread open.
1 Like
Looks like this may be a good solution to what you’re looking to do:
https://community.shopify.com/post/1485875
Hi, @PacesetterMedia . I’m happy to help you out with this! Can you tell me more about the steps your client wants customers to go through to make purchases, and why they want customers to do this? The reason I ask is to make sure I’m giving you helpful suggestions for exactly what they want to do.
It is possible for merchants to require customers to log in to their accounts before making purchases. This can be done by going to Settings > Checkout in the Shopify admin and enabling the setting Require the customer to log in to their account before checkout under the Customer contact method section of the page. That being said, typically anyone can make a customer account so it may be difficult to pre-approve the customer accounts that can complete purchases. You can technically delete customer accounts which may prevent customers who aren’t approved from checking out. However, I don’t know if this would be the best option.
Another way to manage this would be to use a third party app like Locksmith, by Lightward. This app would allow you to restrict access to certain products or pages based on the specific criteria set up. For example, using this app you can set up conditions based on customer tags and email addresses, passcodes, secret links, geographic location, purchase history, etc.
One more option I can think of is to change the payment capture for your client’s online store to manual payment capture instead of automatic payment capture. This would require the merchant to manually process each payment for orders placed on the online store. We don’t typically recommend merchants do this as it can add more work for the merchant, and may add more friction to the checkout process for customers, but it may help your client depending on why they’d like to approve the purchases of customers. This guide has more information on payment capture, including the steps to manage how it’s set up.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
Hey @PacesetterMedia ,
As Erin mentioned, Shopify does have a setting to “Require the customer to log in to their account before checkout” however this doesn’t necessarily restrict access to approved customers since anyone can freely register for an account.
To provide further restriction, you can use this Shopify setting in conjunction with the Helium Customer Fields app which allows you to build custom registration forms, including the ability to require account approval before customers can activate their accounts.
If you want to control access even further by not allowing users to see your site, products, or prices before they are registered as approved customers, you can do so using the Locksmith app or by coding this directly into your theme.