Add a wholesale lead to your Shopify customers
Each wholesale application creates a Shopify customer with the business name, buyer contact and address already filled in.
New submission on your wholesale application form
Create a customer in Shopify with the company, email and shipping address
One-directional. A submission triggers the action — nothing is written back into your form.
A wholesale application arrives full of details somebody would otherwise retype: the trading name, the buyer, the address pallets go to. This flow writes them into Shopify as a customer the moment the form is submitted.
Brands that sell direct and through stockists reach for it once applications have outgrown a shared inbox. The record exists before anyone reviews it, tagged so it stays out of your retail segments until a buyer approves the account and attaches a trade price list.
Setting it up
- 1
Publish the wholesale application form and make Business Name, Business Email and Business Address required. A Shopify customer missing any of the three cannot be approved for trade pricing without a phone call.
- 2
In Shopify, settle on the tag that marks an unapproved application — wholesale-pending reads clearly — and check no existing discount or segment already uses it.
- 3
In Zapier, choose formformform as the trigger app, select the New Submission trigger, connect your account and pick the wholesale form, then pull a real submission through as test data.
- 4
Add Shopify's Create Customer action and connect the store you actually take trade orders through, not a development store you will forget to switch later.
- 5
Map Business Email to Email and split Contact Name across First Name and Last Name, since Shopify searches and sorts its customer list on the surname.
- 6
Put Business Name into the Company slot of the default address and map Business Address, city and postcode into the address lines, so the record is ready to ship to.
- 7
Type wholesale-pending into the Tags field and map Estimated Monthly Order Volume (USD) into Note, so whoever reviews the account sees its size without opening the form.
- 8
Send the test, confirm the customer appears in the Shopify admin with both the tag and a complete address, then switch the Zap on.
What maps where
Using the Wholesale Account Inquiry Form as the starting point. These are its real fields — swap in your own and the mapping works the same way.
| Form field | Shopify |
|---|---|
| Contact Name | First and last name on the Shopify customer |
| Business Email | Email on the Shopify customer |
| Business Name | Company on the customer's default address |
| Business Address | Address lines, city and postcode of the default address |
| Phone Number | Phone on the customer record |
| Estimated Monthly Order Volume (USD) | Customer note, read during account review |
Variations worth knowing
Add a Zapier Paths step after the trigger and branch on Estimated Monthly Order Volume (USD). Smaller applications get wholesale-pending alone; larger ones pick up a second tag such as wholesale-priority, which is enough to build a Shopify segment your sales lead watches. Both paths still run Create Customer, so nothing is lost at the fork.
The resale certificate question is what decides whether an account is legitimate. Map its answer into the note and add a resale-unverified tag when the answer is no. Approvals then work as a Shopify customer view, and the tag comes off in the admin once the certificate has been seen.
If something isn't arriving
Shopify stores Company on the address, not on the customer itself, so it only saves when the rest of the default address saves with it. Map the street, city and postcode in the same action as Business Name — an address holding a company and nothing else is discarded silently.
Shopify treats email as unique and refuses a second customer with the same address rather than merging the two. Put a Shopify Find Customer step ahead of the action and route the matches to Add Tags to Customer instead, keeping Create Customer for addresses that are genuinely new.
Frequently asked questions
Can the form approve a wholesale account and apply trade pricing?
No. The Zap creates the customer and applies a tag; a person decides whether the account is real and attaches the price list or discount in Shopify. That review step is the point of the wholesale-pending tag.
Does the applicant get a Shopify account they can log into?
Creating the customer record does not invite anyone. Send the account invite from the Shopify admin once you have approved the application, so nobody gets access to trade pricing before a human has looked at their details.
What happens to the answers the Zap does not map?
They stay in your responses list in formformform, searchable and exportable. Only the fields you map reach Shopify, so questions like the competing-brands answer can inform the review without cluttering the customer record.
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Build the form first
The automation needs somewhere to fire from. Publish a form, connect it once, and every submission from then on runs this flow.
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