Can a B2B buyer approve their own team's orders in Shopify

No. As of August 2026, Shopify B2B gives a company contact exactly two permission levels, “Ordering only” and “Location admin”, and neither one lets a buyer approve or edit an order that a colleague placed.

That surprises people, and there’s a good reason why. There is a button in B2B checkout labelled “Submit for approval”. If you’re setting up a wholesale account for a company where a junior buyer orders and their manager signs off, that button reads like exactly the feature you want. It isn’t. The approver in that flow is you, the merchant.

Here’s what’s actually documented, what merchants have been asking for since 2023, and the workarounds that people report actually work.

What the two permission levels really do

Shopify’s own help docs on companies list two permissions you can give a company or company location contact, and that’s the whole list:

• Ordering only. In Shopify’s words, “The customer can make purchases for the company location and review the list of orders that they have placed.”
• Location admin. “The customer can make purchases for the company location and review the list of orders that all customers place for that location.” A location admin can also “update shipping and billing addresses for the location.”

Read the Location admin line carefully, because it’s the one people misread. A location admin can see what everyone at their location ordered, and can change an address. There is no approve. There is no edit the line items. The strongest buyer-side role Shopify ships lets you look at your team’s orders and fix a delivery address.

So what does “Submit for approval” do

It sends the order to the merchant.

When you turn on the setting that submits B2B orders as drafts for review, Shopify’s docs say customers at that company location “are displayed with a Submit for approval button in the checkout.” What happens next is that the order lands as a draft in your admin’s Drafts page, where you review it, edit it if you need to, and turn it into a real order.

So the approval is real. The approval chain just has one link in it, and that link is you. Nothing routes to the buyer’s own manager first, and the buyer can’t edit the draft after they submit it either, which is its own long-running gap we wrote about separately.

One clarification worth having, because it gets stated both ways in forum threads: the order-review setting is not Plus-only. If your plan has B2B companies, you have it. What is Plus-only is deposit requirements on draft orders.

Merchants have asked for the internal approval step since 2023

This isn’t a niche request. The same shape of question keeps coming back, and it comes from people who are already running B2B and have hit the wall.

In April 2026 a merchant on the Grow plan laid out the requirement about as clearly as it can be put: “A company’s employee (or purchaser) can place an order or submit a purchase order (PO)”, the order “should not be finalized immediately”, and “Instead, it should go to their admin/supervisor for approval”. Their read of the situation: “Shopify seems to process orders instantly, and I’m not seeing a built-in way to add this approval step in the flow.” Read the April 2026 thread

Go back to April 2023 and a B2B company selling to large businesses described the same thing, with the manager doing the reviewing: “Client 1, Client2, Client 3 creates order’s separately> Orders are sent to Client1,2,3’s Manager> Manager can approve, edit or deny the order> If order is approved, order is placed”. Three months later another merchant found the thread and said they’d been “looking for something like this for a while without success”. The original poster’s answer to them, in July 2023: “Unfortunately no, we are desperately looking for this option.” Read the 2023 thread

And in July 2026 a Shopify Plus merchant filed a feature request for the neighbouring gap, a Location Admin being able to review and edit a pending draft before it reaches the merchant. Read the July 2026 feature request

Three years, independent merchants, no native answer in between.

What people actually do instead

Nobody in these threads found a native solution, but the workarounds are worth knowing, and a couple of them are genuinely reasonable.

Draft orders plus a Flow email. Turn on order review so employee orders land as drafts, then use Shopify Flow to email the customer’s supervisor when a draft is created. The supervisor replies or tells you to release it, and you convert the draft. It’s manual on your end, but it uses only native pieces. The honest catch a merchant raised in the same thread: payment gets collected after approval, so anything involving cards on file gets awkward.

A Cart Validation Function that blocks checkout. Tag the employee accounts, have a Cart Validation Function reject checkout for them, and store the pending order somewhere your approver can see it. This is the more robust version and it’s also a real development project, not an afternoon.

A purpose-built app. Several exist, and at least one launched in 2026 specifically for buyer-side approvals. We’re not going to rank apps we haven’t run, so check current reviews and pricing yourself.

One merchant in the April 2026 thread summed up why none of these feel great: “the core gap is that approval isn’t treated as part of the order lifecycle itself, so it has to be layered on top instead of flowing through the process.” That’s a fair description of every option above.

Where we stand on this

We should say this plainly, because the point of this page is to be accurate rather than to sell you something.

Kelso does not build approval routing. We’re not going to imply otherwise to get an email address. If an internal approval chain is what you need, one of the workarounds above or a dedicated approvals app is your answer today, not us.

We did spend time on the neighbouring problem, letting wholesale buyers change quantities and add items to their own open orders instead of emailing you to do it for them. We are not building that either. We ran a page for a few weeks to see how many stores wanted it, not enough did, and we have since moved onto a different product. So there is nothing for us to sell you here, which is why this page only points at the options above.

If Shopify has shipped buyer-side approval somewhere we’ve missed, we’d genuinely like to know. This page was written on August 7, 2026, and we’ll correct it if it goes stale.