Automating Wholesale Role Assignment and Registration

I built a WooCommerce plugin to solve a pretty common B2B problem in WordPress: the store needs to know which buyers are wholesale customers before it can show the right prices, payment methods, tax handling, and product access. In WooCommerce, that decision usually comes down to user roles. The problem is that default WordPress and WooCommerce roles are too generic for wholesale workflows, and many stores end up patching things together with custom PHP, manual account edits, or inconsistent approval steps. My approach was to make the role system the central switch for wholesale behavior. The plugin lets admins create custom wholesale roles from the dashboard, then use those roles as conditions across the store. Once a buyer is approved and assigned a role, WooCommerce can immediately apply role-based pricing, unlock restricted catalog areas, and expose wholesale-only payment options. The other half of the problem is onboarding. I added a registration form system that collects business