Hey everyone,
I just launched Tradelane B2B Onboarding on the Shopify App Store (you can find it by searching “Tradelane”).
The problem it solves: since April, Shopify’s native B2B (companies, catalogs, wholesale pricing) is included on all plans — but there’s still no way for a wholesale buyer to actually apply. Every new B2B customer means manually creating the company, location, contact and catalog assignment in the admin. Fine for 5 buyers, painful at 50.
What Tradelane does:
- Adds a wholesale application form to your storefront (app proxy — no theme edits)
- All applications land in one queue in your admin
- One click approves: company + location + B2B contact created and assigned to your wholesale catalog automatically
- Branded emails to the applicant at every step (received / approved / rejected)
It’s $9.99/month with a 7-day free trial. Built for stores using native B2B on any plan — it’s a companion to the native features, not a replacement.
I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from anyone running wholesale on Shopify — especially what your onboarding flow looks like today and what’s missing. Happy to answer anything here.
Great question — and it’s the reason Tradelane is deliberately human-in-the-loop rather than fully self-serve.
The app automates the busywork, not the decision. The application form requires a tax ID/VAT number, company details, country and expected volume (plus optional website/description), and every application lands in a review queue in the admin. The merchant does the actual vetting — for EU buyers that’s a 30-second VIES lookup on the VAT number, plus a quick sanity check of the website — and then one click executes everything that used to be manual: company, location, main contact with ordering permission, catalog assignment, approval email.
So the buyer experience is self-serve, but nobody gets wholesale prices without a human saying yes. In my view that’s the right split for wholesale: merchants don’t actually want auto-approval — they want to stop spending 10 minutes of admin clicking after they’ve already decided.
Automated VAT/tax ID validation (VIES lookup surfaced right in the review queue) is on the roadmap — it keeps the human decision but makes the check instant.
Out of curiosity, is that verification hesitancy something you hear from your users too?
Hey @jctcc10
Congrates, let me check
Quick update on this: shipped it.
EU VAT numbers on incoming applications are now checked against VIES automatically. The result shows right in the review queue next to the tax ID: a green badge when the number is valid (including the registered business name from VIES, so you can compare it with what the applicant typed), a red one when it’s not found, and a neutral one for non-EU tax IDs or when VIES itself is down.
It never blocks anything, the merchant still makes the call. It just makes the check instant instead of a tab switch to the VIES site.
Thanks for the nudge, this was the right first thing to build after launch.
Thanks for taking the time to check it out and for the suggestions.
On both points:
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Free plan: it’s on my radar. Right now the 7-day trial covers the “try before you pay” case, and I want to watch real usage patterns for a few weeks before deciding what a free tier should limit (applications per month is the obvious candidate). Out of curiosity, what would you expect a free plan to include for an app like this?
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Built for Shopify: agreed, that’s the goal. The admin UI is actually already built on Shopify’s Polaris web components, so the remaining gap is mostly the traction criteria (installs and reviews) plus the performance checklist. Working on it.
Appreciate you having a look.
