Wholesale Roast: A B2B Wholesale Shopify Theme
A self-directed Shopify 2.0 build exploring B2B commerce: wholesale-gated pricing, a trade-only catalog, and a real application-to-approval flow for coffee roasters selling to cafés and restaurants.
The Challenge
Most Shopify themes are built for one audience: one price, one catalog, one checkout flow. A real wholesale coffee roaster needs two — a public storefront for retail buyers and a trade experience for approved hospitality accounts, with different pricing and different catalog visibility — without maintaining two separate codebases or requiring a Shopify Plus B2B plan.
The Solution (Access & Code)
- Tag-Based Price Gating: Every price display checks the logged-in customer's tags at render time — approved wholesale accounts see trade pricing everywhere, from product cards to the product page, with zero extra apps.
- Opt-In Collection Gating: A single theme setting lets the merchant mark specific collections as wholesale-only. Non-approved visitors see a locked state with a path to apply, and gated links quietly disappear from navigation instead of leading to a dead end.
- Safe Quick Add: Product cards ship with an inline quick-add that never guesses: single-variant products add instantly, multi-variant products open an inline option picker first, so a customer never silently gets the wrong grind or size.
The Key Build: The Application-to-Approval Flow
The hardest part wasn't the pricing logic — it was the handoff. A prospective buyer applies through a native Shopify contact form, no third-party app, which emails the merchant the applicant's business details, tagged separately from general inquiries so it's never missed.
From there, approval is a deliberate, human decision: the merchant tags the customer's account directly in Shopify admin. The moment that tag is added, the exact same storefront — same URLs, same product pages — starts showing trade pricing and unlocking gated collections for that one account. No dashboard to build, no app subscription, no webhook plumbing.
The Trade Experience
What Shipped
38 Theme Files
A complete, installable Shopify 2.0 theme — home, product, collection, cart, and the full wholesale flow, not a partial demo.
0 Theme Check Errors
Validated end-to-end with Shopify's own CLI linter before ever touching a live store.
2 Pricing Tiers, 1 Theme
Retail and wholesale customers share the exact same storefront and codebase — no duplicate theme, no Shopify Plus requirement.