Approval workflows for Shopify B2B: sign-ups or purchases?

Search results mix two different jobs under one name, and a third look-alike makes it worse.

• Approving who can buy. A distributor reviews a wholesale application, checks the business, and approves the account so the buyer sees B2B prices. You are the approver.
• Approving what a buyer orders. Inside a buying company, a maintenance technician can place small orders, and a larger order waits for a plant manager to sign off. The customer's own purchasing policy decides, and the approver works for the customer, not for you.
• The look-alike: reviewing an order on your side. Shopify lets you set a company location to submit every order as a draft for review, so your team checks an order before accepting it. That protects you, and it is not the customer's own sign-off. Shopify labels the checkout button 'Submit for approval', which adds to the confusion.

These are the approval-related features in Shopify's own help pages, read on October 22, 2026.

• Sign-up approval: company account requests. You add the Shopify Forms app and publish a form. Each submission creates a company, a location and a customer, and you approve or deny it from Customers, then Companies, in the 'Ordering not approved' tab. A Shopify Flow template can approve every request automatically. The feature cannot add a person to an existing company. (company account requests)
• Contact permissions: a location's contact has ordering permission, which is the default, or location admin permission. A location admin also sees every order placed for the location and can update its addresses. (creating companies)
• Order review on your side: a location set to 'Submit all orders as drafts for review' sends every order to your Drafts page, where you confirm it and then charge the saved card or send an invoice. (checkout settings)
• Review by order value: Shopify's note says that to submit just certain orders as drafts, such as by order value or cart contents, you can consider a Payment Customization Function, and that Shopify Functions are available on all plans. A Function is built in an app. (checkout settings)
• Not described: a spending limit for a contact, an approver role, or a chain of sign-off inside the buying company. Shopify's company and contact pages cover roles, catalogs, terms and checkout settings, and do not mention them.

Illustrative figures, not from a real account. A plant maintenance team buys supplies from an HVAC and bearings distributor. The plant's policy: a technician can place an order of up to $2,000 alone, and anything above that needs the plant manager. Two orders from the same technician show how the chain runs.

• A technician orders $640 of 6205-2RS bearings. It is under the limit and goes straight in.
• The same technician orders a $3,800 replacement compressor. It is over the limit, so it stops in the plant manager's queue instead of going in.
• The plant manager opens it, sees the lines and the total, and either approves it or sends it back with a reason.
• On approval the order is placed. On a send-back the technician gets it back with the reason and changes it.
• Three details make the chain work in practice: the limit belongs to a person, the approver is a named role, and a send-back carries a reason. Our post on why buyers skip purchase order approvals covers what happens when the ordering channel cannot reflect the policy.

These apps describe approvals in their own Shopify App Store listings, read on October 22, 2026. The second column says which approval the listing is about. Ratings, review counts and prices move, so check each listing.

Copiara is our app, so weigh this entry accordingly. It is in early access: it is not on the Shopify App Store yet, nobody can install it today, and it has no customers.

Copiara covers the second meaning. The merchant sets approval rules and spending limits for each buying company in the Copiara admin, and they clear before the order is placed in Shopify. A rule reads like a sentence, such as orders over an amount go to an approver, and the merchant chooses who decides: contacts with the Approver role, or the company's admins. A contact's spending limit is the most that person can order without an approver, and blank means no limit.

Quotes follow the same path. If an approval rule applies to the buyer's company, the request waits for the buyer's own approver, and the store sees it once that clears. A quote an approver rejects goes back to the person who asked, marked as not sent and with the reason, and the store does not see it.

Another app is the better choice in some cases. Copiara does not approve wholesale applications: use Shopify's company account requests, or Tradelane or SmartB2B for a one-click version. If your policy needs location-level and company-created approval chains with an audit log, B2B Company Controls lists them on its higher plans. ApproveCart B2B and SelfApprove are narrower tools built for purchase approval alone.

Approvals and credit live in the same app, and credit exposure counts orders that are waiting in approval. See credit limits for Shopify B2B. Copiara suits distributors and brands on Shopify that negotiate prices, need sign-off inside the buying company, and sell on credit.