When one person orders and someone else has to approve it
Shopify has an approval step for wholesale orders, it is on every plan with B2B, and it works well. It just approves in the wrong building: the person who releases the order is you, not your customer's finance manager. Here is what the native step does, and what to do when the approval your customer needs is internal to them.
Shopify can hold every wholesale order until somebody approves it, and you do not need Plus for it. Turn on order review for a company location and their buyers stop seeing a "Pay now" — they see Submit for approval, and the order arrives with you as a draft with its prices locked, waiting for a decision.
"To review orders placed by B2B customers before they're approved, in the Orders submission section, select Submit all orders as drafts for review."
And here is the catch that sends most people looking for an app: the approver is you. The order pauses in your admin, for your staff to release. If what your customer actually needs is their own junior placing an order that their own finance manager signs off, Shopify has nothing for that — and the reason is worth knowing, because it is structural rather than a missing setting.
There is no approver role inside the buying company
A person attached to a company location gets one of exactly two permissions:
- Ordering only — "Place orders for the assigned company locations and view your own order history."
- Location admin — "Place orders for the company location, view the list of orders that all customers have placed for that location, and edit billing and shipping addresses."
Read the second one carefully. A location admin can see everything their colleagues ordered. There is no step where they approve it, no order that waits for them, nothing to notify them. The senior person gets visibility, not a gate.
Your customer's approvals happening by email? Describe how it should work →
What the native step is genuinely good for
Do not skip past it — for most wholesale businesses this is the feature they actually wanted:
- New accounts whose first orders you want to eyeball. Turn review on for them, off for everyone else. It is set per company location.
- Orders you often need to adjust — a substitution, a freight line, a discount you agreed on the phone. The draft is editable before it becomes an order.
- Prices you do not want moving. Drafts from checkout keep their prices locked, so an approval next week does not reprice at this week's numbers.
- Turning an order into an invoice. The draft can go out as one instead of being paid at checkout.
If your answer to "who approves" is we do, the native step is the whole solution and you can stop here. It is also how a credit limit usually gets enforced in practice — the same hold, a different reason.
When the approval belongs to your customer
Three shapes come up, and they are worth separating because they need different answers.
A spending threshold. Orders under some amount go straight through; above it, someone senior has to say yes. Below Plus, Shopify's review is all-or-nothing per location: it cannot ask how big the order is. On Plus, an app can decide per order — by order value or what is in the cart — so only the large ones go to review. Either way the order lands with you to release, not with your customer's manager.
A named approver. Their buyer places it, their manager releases it. Nothing native notifies a second person at the customer, and there is no state for "waiting for their approval" as distinct from "waiting for ours".
A purchase order number. Sometimes what looks like approval is really "we cannot pay an invoice without a PO number on it". Shopify does support a PO number on B2B orders, so check whether that is the real requirement before anybody builds a workflow.
Which route is yours
| Who has to approve | What to do |
|---|---|
| You, on every order from an account | Native — submit all orders as drafts for review |
| You, only for new accounts | Native — it is a per-location setting |
| Only orders above an amount, reviewed by you | Plus — an app can route just those to review; below Plus it is all or nothing |
| Your customer's manager, by amount | Not native — has to be built |
| Your customer's manager, by name | Not native — no role, no notification, no waiting state |
| Nobody, they just need a PO number on it | Native — PO numbers on B2B orders |
What Shopivibe does
You describe it as your customer explains it to you: "Anything over €2,000 from this company waits for Pirjo to approve it, and she gets an email with what is in the order."
What you get is the outcome: the order holds, the right person at your customer hears about it, and when they approve, it proceeds — with you seeing where each order is rather than reconstructing it from a mail thread.
Two things to say plainly. Shopify has no field for who approves for whom, so that list lives with us rather than on the company record in your admin — and a person sets it up with you rather than you switching it on. And an approval chain is a build, not a setting — a person here takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours.
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 who has to sign off what? Describe the chain you need →
Checked against Shopify's documentation and the App Store on 20 September 2026.