Stopping a wholesale order when the account is over its limit

The part that works is the stopping, and Shopify has two different ways to do it, which matter for different reasons.

Refuse the checkout. A rule of your own can turn an order away with a message — available on any plan that has B2B, through an app from the App Store. The buyer sees why; nobody else hears anything.

Or hold the order for review. A company location can be set so its orders arrive with you as drafts instead of going through. Nothing is refused, you see each one, and you release or refuse it yourself. That mechanism has a page of its own, because most merchants meet it as an approval step rather than as credit control.

"This company is over its limit" can use either. Which one you want depends on whether you need to know, and most merchants asking this do.

And here is the part that decides the whole job. Shopify does know what each order still owes — every invoice carries an outstanding amount and an Overdue flag, and Shopify will even send payment reminders about them. What does not exist is the total: nothing adds those up per company, there is no credit limit on a company record, and checkout cannot see any of it. So the rule can only check a number that something else has already written onto the company — your accounting system, a nightly total from Shopify's own unpaid orders, or a person marking the account. The enforcement is native. The adding up is not.

That is the honest shape of every "B2B credit limit" answer you will read, including the paid ones.

What payment terms actually are

Worth clearing up, because the name suggests more than it does.

"Payment terms define how long a company has to pay for an order."

That is a due date: Net 7 through Net 90, due on fulfilment, or a fixed date on a draft order. It is not a limit, and it does not gate anything. When the date passes:

"After the terms expire, customers can still make payments but the order displays as Overdue in customer accounts."

"Payments aren't automatically captured when the payment terms expire."

So an overdue account is labelled, not stopped. The buyer can place another order the same afternoon, and nothing in Shopify objects.

Store credit is not the missing piece either — it is the opposite one. It is money the customer has already got with you, capped below $10,000 per company location, and "Only the full store credit amount can be applied as a payment method." Useful for refunds and deposits held in advance. Nothing to do with how much you will let someone owe.

Overdue accounts still ordering? Describe the rule you need →

How the stopping actually works

Shopify can run a validation of your own at checkout — a rule that looks at the cart and either allows it or refuses it with a message. A store can have up to 25 of them, and a B2B checkout brings the buying company with it, along with whatever has been recorded against that company.

Two constraints worth knowing before anybody scopes this:

It cannot go and ask. Shopify lets a checkout validation call out to another system only for a custom app on an enterprise store, and only once Shopify has switched that on; an app from the App Store cannot do it at all. So the number has to be sitting on the company record before the buyer reaches checkout.

So the real work is upstream. Something has to keep "what this account owes" current — nightly from your accounts system, or on each invoice, or a person marking accounts on hold. The checkout rule is the easy half and it is the half everybody demonstrates.

The apps that appeared in May 2026, and the number they use

Five apps arrived in a single month promising to block checkout on a credit limit — Trade Credit at $39 a month, Net Vantage at $29 to $99, and TermShield, BizCred and Upro. Between them they have no reviews at all, so nobody can tell you yet how they behave in a real account.

The thing to check before you subscribe is not the price. Not one of their listings mentions QuickBooks or Xero. What they describe is a balance worked out from unpaid orders inside Shopify — and that is a different number from what your customer owes you. Ask each vendor directly before you buy; we read the listings, we have not run the apps.

It differs by everything that never touched your store: the order taken over the phone, the credit note for the damaged pallet, the cheque that cleared last Tuesday, the co-op deduction. If your receivables live in your accounts system, an app that counts unpaid Shopify orders will hold a good customer at the checkout and let a bad one through, and it will do it confidently.

That is worth being precise about, because it is the same distinction this whole page turns on: stopping the checkout is easy, and knowing what to stop it against is the job. If your balance is genuinely just unpaid Shopify orders, any of the five may be exactly right and $29 a month is a fair price for it. If it is not, the number is the thing to solve first, and nothing on that list solves it.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You describe it the way you would explain it to a new member of staff: "Acme have a €5,000 limit. When what they owe passes it, hold their orders and tell me — and let them through again when the invoice is paid."

What happens is the outcome, not the plumbing. The limit and what they owe live as rows you can see and edit, and an account that goes over it is put on hold — its orders stop going straight through and arrive with you to release or refuse. So you hear about each one as it happens, instead of finding out from a spreadsheet next week.

Three things to say plainly.

Somebody still has to say what is owed. If the number comes out of your accounting system, that connection is part of the setup and a person builds it with you. If it is a total of your unpaid Shopify invoices, keeping that total current is part of the same setup. If it comes from you marking an account on hold, that is a row you edit. The limit itself is yours to set.

Checkout rules are set up for you, not by you. With a request that touches checkout, a person here takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours, rather than assembling it in the chat — that is how this is built, not a limitation we are working around.

And a stopped checkout needs a sentence the buyer understands. "Your account is over its agreed limit — please contact us" is part of the work, because the buyer standing at a failed checkout is a customer, not an error.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know what each account owes? Describe what should happen at their limit →