How to offer salon and professional beauty pricing on Shopify

Why professional beauty needs its own setup

Beauty brands that sell to salons, spas and stylists usually run two programs on one store: retail products for everyone, and a professional program with lower prices and products that only trained professionals should buy. The hard part is not the discount itself. It is deciding who counts as a professional and keeping certain products away from everyone else.

• Proof of licence. Many brands only sell professional lines to licensed cosmetologists, estheticians or salon owners, so applicants need to send a licence, salon registration or student ID.
• Different groups, different prices. A salon buying back-bar sizes often gets a deeper price than an individual stylist or a beauty student.
• Professional-only products. Some products, such as high-strength treatments or salon-size developers, may only be meant for professional use under your brand's own policy.
• Salon sizes and minimums. Back-bar litres and multi-packs are often sold with a minimum quantity.
• Accounts change. A licence can lapse or an account can be paused, so you need a quick way to take professional access away.

Recommended setup for a beauty brand

Step-by-step setup

1. Build the professional application

   Go to Registration → Registration forms → Add registration form and name it Professional account. Add Name, Email, Password, Phone, a Text field for Salon or business name and a Text field for Licence number. Add a File element labelled Licence or salon ID, set Allowed extensions to PDF, JPG and PNG, and tick Required.

2. Tag each applicant type

   Add a Dropdown called I am a, with Salon owner, Independent stylist and Beauty student. In Customer tag per option, give each option its own tag (pro-salon, pro-stylist, pro-student). Add an Accept terms element that links to your professional terms of sale.

3. Write the emails

   On the Email tab, edit Customer — Submitted to say you check licences within, for example, two working days. Edit Customer — Rejected to explain what proof you accept. Add your team to Admin — Received.

4. Publish the form and set manual approval

   Save, copy the Form ID and add the Registration form block to a page called Professional account. In Settings → Registration, set Approval mode to Manual.

5. Approve with tags

   Open Registration → Customer submissions, filter by Pending and open an application. Check the uploaded licence, add the shared tag pro, then choose Approve request and save. The account is created with the dropdown tag, pro and nb2b.

6. Create one price rule per group

   Go to Pricing → Wholesale pricing → Create new. For salons, choose By customer tags with pro-salon, pick your professional collections and set Percentage off to 40. Repeat for pro-stylist and pro-student. In each rule, add pro-paused under Exclude customers with these tags.

7. Lock professional-only products

   Tag the products professional-only in Shopify. Go to Restrictions → Catalog locks → Create lock, choose Hide product, set the scope to that product tag, and under Who can see choose By customer tags with pro. Edit the Unavailable message, for example: {{title}} is available to licensed professionals.

8. Add a back-bar minimum

   Go to Restrictions → Order limits → Create limit, choose MOQ — Order quantity (per product), set Minimum quantity to 6 and scope it to your back-bar collection. Target pro-salon and choose Block checkout. Add the MOQ Badge and MOQ Cart Enforce blocks.

Example: three professional groups on one store

Note that the paused salon still has the pro tag, so it can still open professional-only product pages. To fully remove access, remove the pro tag in Shopify as well, or require both tags on the lock.

Tips for professional beauty programs

• Use match all of for stricter access. On a rule's Customers card, choosing By customer tags with all of pro and licence-verified means both tags are needed. This helps when you verify licences in two stages.
• Decide on resubmission. When you decline an application, choose whether the person can resubmit. Allowing resubmission suits a blurry licence photo; blocking suits a clearly ineligible applicant.
• Keep tags short and consistent. Tags are matched exactly, so pro-salon and Pro Salon are different tags.
• Show the pro label. Turn on Show a label under the price in each rule so stylists can see that the price is their professional price. You can translate the label in Settings → Translations.
• Bulk-approve after a trade show. In Customer submissions, select several rows and use Add tags and Approve selected.

Frequently asked questions