Wholesale applications

Instead of every new trade customer emailing you, you can put an application form on your storefront. A business fills it in, the submission lands in a queue, and one click creates the company, its first location and the applicant’s buyer access.

The form is off until you turn it on. While it is off, the page is a plain 404 — nothing is exposed.

Turn applications on

1. Go to Settings → B2B wholesale → Wholesale account applications.

2. Turn on Accept applications from the storefront.

3. Add your own questions, if you want any. Each takes a label (what the applicant reads), a storage key (how you find the answer later) and a Required tick. You can add up to 20.

4. Save.

The form is then live at /account/wholesale-application. Link to it from your footer, your contact page, or your trade-show handout.

Tip

Pair it with a trade-only storefront. Settings → B2B wholesale → Storefront access → Only signed-in customers can browse serves visitors a notice page explaining the store is for approved trade accounts, with links to sign in and to apply — so a shopper who arrives from a search result has somewhere to go instead of a dead end.

What the applicant fills in

The standard form asks for:

• business name
• contact name, work email and phone
• tax number
• a ship-to address
• a link to a supporting document

Your extra questions appear beneath those. On submit, the applicant gets a thank-you screen — no account, no prices, nothing else until you decide.

Caution

The supporting-document field takes a link, not an upload. Ask for a shareable URL and say so in the label. Kapoor Apparel’s supplier collected 60 trade-show leads this way with one extra question, “GST certificate link”, and it arrived filled in every time.

Work the queue

Submissions land at Companies → Applications. Filter by status, open one, and read what they sent.

Before you decide, correct the business name if the applicant typed it loosely. This is your only chance: once the company exists you cannot rename it. See companies & locations.

Then choose one of two outcomes:

• Approve and create company — creates the company, its first location and the applicant’s Buyer access in one step, and drops you on the new company page.
• Decline — with a note explaining why.

Both outcome emails are editable templates under Settings → Notifications, so you can put your own onboarding wording in the approval and your own tone in the decline.

“Chennai Cafe Supplies” applies with a GSTIN. You approve, land on the new company page, and set Net 30 with a ₹2,00,000 limit before you make coffee.

Approval and ordering readiness

Caution

Approval and readiness are separate decisions. Approval creates an Active company and an invited Buyer because you have accepted the application. The platform then runs the new branch through the same ordering readiness check used for an ordinary buyer invitation.

If the branch is ready, the approval email says the wholesale account is open and includes the sign-in link. If it is not ready, the email says only that the application was approved and setup is still in progress—there is no sign-in or “place orders” call to action. The approval toast tells you why the start-buying invite was held, and the Buyers table remains Not notified.

The approval decision, new company records and approval-email job are accepted in one database transaction. If that job cannot be queued, approval is not partially committed and you can retry safely. For a ready branch, the Buyers table’s Invited time is the time the start-buying email was durably queued, not a claim that the recipient’s mail server delivered it. Provider delivery continues from the queue and is retried independently.

Work through ordering readiness, attach the right catalog, then run Add a buyer for the same person again with Notify selected. That ordinary invite uses the readiness gate again and changes the Buyer row to Invited only after the ready-to-order message is durably queued.

Limits worth knowing

• Up to 20 extra questions.
• The supporting document is a link, not a file upload.
• The form is a plain 404 while the setting is off.
• Approval creates one company with one location and one Buyer. Extra branches, extra staff and the Location admin role are added by you afterwards — see buyer roles.
• Application approval creates the company Active; unlike manual company entry it does not use the Pending staging state. Readiness safely holds the start-buying message without undoing the merchant’s approval decision.