How to Sell Wholesale Online: Approve B2B Buyers and Show Them Their Own Prices

To sell wholesale online, you don't need a second website. You need three things working together: a way for business buyers to apply for a wholesale account (with their business name, account type, and tax ID), a manual approval step so you control who gets buyer pricing, and a storefront that automatically shows approved accounts their own wholesale prices while everyone else still sees retail. Get those three pieces right and wholesale becomes just another customer type on the store you already have.

What does it actually mean to "sell wholesale online"?

Wholesale ecommerce is the practice of selling at business-only, volume-based prices to approved buyers through a self-serve online storefront, instead of handling every order by phone, email, or spreadsheet. The buyer applies once, you vet them once, and from then on they log in and see the prices you've agreed to — no quoting, no back-and-forth, no separate invoice thread for every reorder.

This is different from a static "wholesale inquiries" contact form. A real wholesale storefront lets an approved buyer place the order themselves, at the correct price, with the correct terms, at 11pm if that's when they're doing their purchasing.

How do B2B buyers apply for a wholesale account?

The application is the gate. If it's too thin, you approve accounts you shouldn't. If it's too heavy, legitimate buyers abandon it. A working wholesale application asks for:

• Business name and account type (retailer, distributor, contractor, institution — whatever categories you actually sell to)
• Tax ID / resale certificate number, so you can validate tax-exempt purchasing where applicable
• Business address and a billing contact separate from the person placing the order
• Expected order volume or category interest, so you can route the account to the right pricing tier
• Anything specific to your trade — a contractor license number, an institutional PO number format, a reseller certificate upload

The application should sit on the same storefront as your retail catalog — a "Wholesale / Trade" link in the footer or nav, not a separate domain. That matters for the next step.

How do you approve or reject a wholesale application?

Approval should be a deliberate, human step — not automatic. A submitted application creates a pending account: the buyer can log in, but they see standard retail pricing (or nothing) until someone on your team reviews the tax ID, confirms the business is legitimate, and flips the account to approved. From that moment the same login sees wholesale pricing.

In practice, most stores run approval in a few minutes per application:

• 1. New application lands in a review queue with the submitted business details attached.
• 2. You check the tax ID / resale certificate and account type against what you actually sell to.
• 3. You assign the account to a pricing tier or contract price list (not every wholesale buyer gets the same discount).
• 4. You approve — the buyer's account flips from retail visibility to their assigned wholesale pricing, immediately, with no rebuild of the storefront.
• 5. You reject or hold — the buyer stays on standard pricing (or gets a message asking for more documentation).

How does wholesale pricing show up for an approved buyer, without a second site?

This is the part most stores get wrong: they stand up an entirely separate wholesale site because their ecommerce platform can't show two prices for one product depending on who's logged in. That means a second catalog to keep in sync, a second inventory count that can drift from the real one, and a second system to reconcile at month-end.

The alternative — and the one that actually holds up — is one storefront, one catalog, one inventory count, with price and visibility rules keyed to the logged-in account. A retail shopper browsing your site sees your normal retail price. A logged-in, approved wholesale account sees their contract price on the exact same product page, pulled from the exact same stock. Nobody duplicates a product listing to run two price books.

Do you need a separate ecommerce platform for wholesale, or just wholesale-aware settings on your existing store?

You need the second one. A dedicated "B2B platform" bolted next to your consumer store is exactly the second-system problem described above — two catalogs, two stock counts, two places sales can go missing from your books. What you actually need is a store built to handle both customer types on one inventory and one catalog, where wholesale is a customer account attribute, not a parallel storefront.

If you've already added an online store to your existing shop or you're thinking through omnichannel vs. unified commerce for your business, wholesale is the same principle applied to a different customer type: one source of truth, multiple ways to buy from it.

What else does a wholesale storefront need beyond pricing?

Price visibility gets buyers to checkout. These pieces keep the relationship running:

• Credit terms — net-30/net-60 buyers who invoice instead of paying card-on-file at checkout
• Contract pricing by tier — not every wholesale account should get the same discount; a 50-unit-a-month buyer and a 5,000-unit-a-month distributor are different deals
• Sales rep assignment — larger wholesale accounts often have a dedicated rep who places or approves orders on their behalf
• A vendor/PO portal — so buyers with formal purchasing processes can submit a PO number and get an order on file, not just a card swipe
• One inventory count — wholesale orders, retail orders, in-store sales, and marketplace orders all need to draw from the same stock, or you'll oversell the moment a wholesale buyer and a retail shopper want the same last case

How does Retailer OS handle wholesale and retail on one storefront?

Retailer OS ships B2B/wholesale as customer accounts on top of the same online store (a paid add-on) you already run for retail — not a second system to license and maintain. Concretely:

• Buyers apply for a business account with account type and tax ID, and the account starts in a pending state
• You review and approve — or hold — each application from your admin, assigning the buyer to the right pricing tier as part of approval
• Approved buyers log in and see their contract pricing on the same catalog pages every retail shopper sees, with no separate wholesale domain to build or maintain
• Wholesale customer accounts support credit terms, so approved buyers can order on net terms instead of paying at checkout every time
• Sales reps can be attached to wholesale accounts for larger buyers who work through a dedicated contact
• A vendor/PO portal handles buyers who purchase against a formal PO rather than a card
• Every wholesale order draws from the same inventory ledger as your retail store, marketplaces, and in-store POS — so a wholesale sale, an online sale, and a counter sale all decrement the same stock, and nothing gets oversold across channels
• Wholesale balances land in customer receivables with aging and statements, and the daily QuickBooks Online sync sends sales to your accounting — no manual re-keying between a wholesale platform and your books

This is the same underlying model that lets you sell on Amazon, eBay, and in-store from one inventory — wholesale is just one more customer type reading and writing to the same source of truth, rather than a channel that needs its own catalog and its own reconciliation.

How do payments and taxes work differently for wholesale orders?

Wholesale buyers often pay differently than retail shoppers — net terms instead of card-at-checkout, tax-exempt purchasing backed by the resale certificate collected at application, and larger orders that may need a different fee structure. Because Retailer OS payments run on your own Stripe account, card-paying wholesale orders and retail orders reconcile on the same payment surface, while credit-term accounts can be invoiced and collected separately without a second payments setup.