Trade-only PrestaShop: hide the catalogue until you approve

«I only sell to trade customers and I do not want my prices on show for everyone.» It is one of the requests we get most often, and it almost always comes with a workaround already in place that does not hold up at all: hiding the price so it does not appear on the page.

The trouble is that hiding is not the same as removing. The price is still there on the page even if you cannot see it, and anyone who wants to look —a competitor, a price comparison site, somebody who does this for a living— can see it. If you really do sell to trade only, what you need is not to cover a number up: it is for the shop not to exist for anyone who has not logged in.

What «trade only» really means

A properly built B2B shop has three pieces, and all three have to work on their own:

• A closed catalogue. Anyone not logged in sees no products, no prices, no categories. Not «sees them without prices»: never gets to see them at all.
• A signup that asks what you need to know. Company, tax number, line of business, whatever it takes for you to decide whether this customer gets in.
• Your approval. Someone looks at the request and decides. That someone is you, and it should cost you fifteen seconds, not fifteen minutes.

Close it all, open just enough

The usual approach is covering pages up one at a time: remove the price here, hide the button there. We do the opposite: the shop is closed completely and only what is strictly needed to register stays open.

What ends up open is the login screen, the signup form, password recovery and the legal pages. Everything else —product pages, categories, search, cart— is out of reach for anyone without an account, and nobody has to remember page by page.

If you have to make a list of what you want to hide, one day you will forget something. Make the list of what you want to show.

One detail worth knowing up front: when you add a new page and you want it to be public —a landing page, a form, a promotion— you have to open it on purpose. It takes a minute, but if nobody tells you, you go mad wondering why it does not show.

The signup: what a trade customer actually gets asked

An ordinary shop registration asks for first name, surname and a password. For selling to companies that is no use, so the form is split into three blocks —person, company and billing address— and you decide which fields appear, which are mandatory and which are not needed.

What comes as standard is what we have seen asked for in almost every shop: company, tax number, EU VAT number if you sell abroad, phone and billing address. If your business needs something else —a licence, a permit, the code that customer has in your management software— it gets added, translated into your shop's languages.

And the EU VAT number is not stored blindly: it is checked against the European register while the customer is signing up, so the request reaches you with that already verified.

Approving should be one click

When somebody signs up, three things happen at once: they get a notice that their account is under review, you get an email with all their details sorted out and with the result of the VAT check, and the account is created but with no access to the catalogue.

You go in, look at it and approve or reject. On approval that customer moves into whichever trade group you have set up —which is what opens up the prices and discounts they are entitled to— and automatically gets the email telling them they can order.

That last bit matters more than it seems: from then on everything is handled by the shop with its own usual rules. There is no parallel price list invented by some module, which is exactly what turns a shop into a problem two years later.

Two decisions that stay yours

First, who gets in. The module checks the VAT number, sorts the details out and puts them in front of you; the yes is yours, in one click and with everything in view.

Second, how much shop you want to show. If on top of selling to trade you want people to find you searching for products, you leave a public part open —a catalogue with no prices, informational pages or a blog like this one— and decide it as you build. It is the first conversation we have on these projects, and having it early shows up later in the traffic.

It is in the catalogue

Everything this article describes is done by our professional signup module: catalogue closed to anyone not logged in, registration with the fields you choose, VAT number checked and approval in one click. It installs on the shop you already have.