Checking a trade licence before you approve the account

Somebody has to look at the licence. A salon supplier, a veterinary distributor, a dental wholesaler or a builders' merchant takes trade accounts, and before the first order goes out a person reads an uploaded PDF, finds the issuing body's website, types in the number, and decides.

Shopify will collect that PDF for you. It will do nothing else with it, and the gap between those two sentences is where this problem lives.

If you sell beauty, this is already solved and it is free

Start here, because it would be dishonest to sell you a workflow you do not need.

BeautyAList Login is on the App Store, free, and it does the actual checking: "It checks against state board records in every US state for licensed professionals." It also closes the loop everybody forgets — "Pro status ends when a license expires (unless grace period set)" — and it skips the upload entirely, because "Pros verified once are recognized instantly without uploading documents."

It has been listed since December 2023 and carries no reviews yet, so try it on a quiet week rather than a launch week. But for cosmetology, barbering and the licensed beauty trades, that is the answer, and nothing on this page improves on it.

The rest of this page is for everyone else.

What Shopify actually gives you

The native B2B signup form does the collecting properly. "Company name and email address are required for automatic creation of a company record", you can add custom fields, and one of the field types is a file upload — documents "of 20 MB or less", PDF and image formats included.

Then the applicant's submission lands in front of you: "In the Metafields section, review the information that the company contact has submitted by using your form."

Review. That is the whole of it. Shopify's documentation for company account requests says nothing about checking a licence against any register, nothing about an expiry date, and nothing about looking again later — not as a limitation it admits, but as a subject it never raises. The form is a filing cabinet with a doorbell.

Approving trade accounts by hand right now? Describe your approval checklist and we will build it into the signup →

The thing merchants keep discovering a year late

A wholesale merchant setting this up asked the obvious question — "We're launching wholesale sales on our Shopify store and are trying to figure out the best way to verify new customers" (Nithi1994, 23 July 2026). The thread is still unsolved and was still drawing replies in October 2026, and two of them are worth more than the question.

The first is the professional answer, and it is deliberately unglamorous:

I would keep the final approval manual. I would collect the certificate or licence, its number, expiration date and then verify the document with the issuing authority before applying the tax exemption.

— Tetianaholub, 23 July 2026

The second names the failure that nobody designs for:

A resale cert or a cosmetology license approved once never gets re-checked, and a year later you're selling to someone whose license lapsed.

— lumine, 23 July 2026

Three months later, another merchant in the same thread gave the plain version of why: "Shopify's tax-exempt flag has no expiry date, so keep the date somewhere you'll see it (a metafield works)" — mlaszuk, 5 October 2026. Two years earlier a dental supplier had asked the same thing — "There are some products that require a doctors license # and other information to approve before we can sell those products" (RobertoYoungs, 6 June 2024) — and the only answer offered was to tag approved customers by hand, with the admission that "a custom app or a backend solution might be necessary". That thread is unsolved too.

The apps that collect, and the apps that verify

These are two different categories and the listings do not make that obvious.

Collecting and gating is well served and cheap. Talon Advanced Registration — $35 a month, 4.9 stars from 42 reviews — will "Require fields like business ID, EIN, VAT, licenses, etc", build "custom forms with file upload, and image upload options", approve automatically or by hand, and save everything "to Shopify customer records and metafields". If what you need is a proper trade-account application with the document attached, that is a solved problem.

Verifying is where it gets interesting, and where the words stop matching the mechanism.

VerifyPass is the main product sold for this, and for most professions it does not check a licence register. It is a serious tool — 5.0 stars from 33 reviews, a monthly plan that bundles its first 49 checks, then $0.94 a check, decreasing with volume — and for military, student or first-responder discounts it is the right answer. But read what its veterinary community actually accepts. Eligible is "anyone whose paid role is within a veterinary clinic, hospital, mobile practice, laboratory, shelter medicine program", and that is spelled out to include "receptionists, practice managers, groomers, pharmacy or kennel staff". Accepted proof includes a professional licence — and equally a "recent pay stub, employment contract, letter on clinic letterhead, or any other document that reasonably confirms active or recent (within the past 12 months) affiliation with a veterinary employer."

That is an excellent discount gate. It is not a compliance gate. If your reason for asking is "I may only sell this to someone holding a current licence", a kennel assistant's pay stub passes it, and you will not find that out until somebody asks you to prove who you sold to.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You describe the approval the way your trade actually works, and it stops being a memory test. "When a vet practice applies, hold the account closed, put the licence number and its expiry in front of me with a link to the state register, open the account when I say so, and tell me ninety days before it runs out — and if it lapses, stop the restricted lines going out and tell me who is affected."

Two things worth saying plainly. The register check itself is a person's judgement, and the build keeps it that way on purpose — fifty state boards with no common way in, and a document that can be read wrongly, is exactly the place where an automatic answer is worse than a prompt one. What gets built is everything around that decision: the record, the clock, the reminder, the consequence when it lapses, and the list of orders that went out on a licence that was already dead. And the licence number you were shown is the thing worth keeping, because it is what makes the second check possible at all: a register lookup needs the number, the issuing state and the profession, and a year from now none of those are in anybody's head. What gets built is the record that survives the approval, so the re-check is a task rather than an archaeology exercise.

If your question is about resale and tax-exemption certificates rather than a professional licence, that is a different page and it is already written. This one is about the licence. 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.

Approving trade accounts on trust and a scanned PDF? Describe how it should work and we will build it →