Locksmith vs. BTB Wholesale.

Locksmith is Shopify’s dominant content-locking app, and a lot of wholesale merchants install it for one specific job: hiding wholesale pricing from retail shoppers. It does that job — one reviewer describes using it to “lock the public view out of the wholesale pricing and information.” But Locksmith is a general-purpose lock, not a wholesale app. Once a buyer gets past the gate, it has nothing left to offer — no wholesale pricing, no MOQ, no order forms. BTB’s Store Lock ships the same hide-prices toggle as one of 10 wholesale features in a single install, so what happens after the unlock is covered too.

What Locksmith is (and what it isn’t built for)

Locksmith is a general-purpose content-locking app. It can hide products, collections, prices, variant options, or entire pages, gated behind customer tags, passcodes, secret links, geographic location, purchase history, or date/time restrictions. It also includes Liquid and API access for custom logic, plus checkout bot-prevention. None of that is wholesale-specific — Locksmith locks the same way whether you’re gating a members-only blog post, a pre-launch product drop, or wholesale pricing. Using it to hide trade pricing from retail visitors, the way that reviewer did, is a workaround built on top of a general tool, not a purpose-built wholesale workflow.

The core difference: one lock feature vs. ten wholesale features

Locksmith costs $12–$199/mo on its own, priced to your Shopify plan tier, and all of it goes toward one job: locking content. It doesn’t touch pricing, discounts, MOQs, or checkout.

Store Lock & Hide Pricing ships the same core mechanic — hide prices only, or hide prices and Add-to-Cart — scoped independently per page type (product, collection, search, home, cart, quick-view), unlocked by customer login or a shared passcode with a configurable remember-duration. The difference is what it ships alongside: Store Lock is one of 10 features in a single install ($29/mo on BTB Advanced) that also handles wholesale pricing, B2B discounts, MOQ, and order limits — for the same tagged customers the lock is gating.

Built for wholesale, not configured for it

Locksmith’s flexibility comes at a cost: getting it to do anything beyond a basic lock — a custom unlock flow, conditional logic tied to your own data — means writing Liquid or calling its API. BTB’s Store Lock skips that because it was designed around one use case instead of general access control. Hide mode, per-page-type scope, and the unlock UI’s message, button text, colors, and font size are all no-code admin settings. There’s no development work between installing the app and having a working wholesale gate.

What happens after the lock — the workflows Locksmith doesn’t have

Locksmith stops at the gate. Once a wholesale buyer logs in or enters a passcode, they still need tiered, tagged wholesale pricing, a minimum order quantity, a Quick Order Form to fill a large cart fast, and a Quote Form for custom pricing requests. Locksmith doesn’t ship any of the four.

Pricing side by side

Locksmith is priced to your Shopify plan: $12/mo on Basic, $29/mo on Grow, $99/mo on Advanced, $199/mo on Plus, with a 15-day free trial. It’s rated 4.7/5 across 307 reviews — a strong general-purpose lock.

BTB’s price doesn’t depend on your Shopify plan: $8.99/mo on Growth or $29/mo on Advanced, with Store Lock and all 10 features on Advanced. On Shopify Advanced, that means the full BTB toolkit costs $29/mo, less than Locksmith’s $99/mo for locking alone.

When Locksmith alone is still the right call

If all you need is a simple password wall or a non-commerce content gate — a members-only blog section, a pre-launch landing page — with no wholesale pricing or ordering logic attached, Locksmith’s broader condition set (geography, purchase history, date/time drops, secret links) makes it more general-purpose than Store Lock. BTB is the better fit specifically when the lock is protecting wholesale pricing and you’ll also need the pricing and ordering features behind it.

Running Shopify B2B too? Store Lock gates the retail storefront independently of Company records either way — see Shopify B2B vs. BTB for the full comparison. Comparing wholesale apps rather than lock apps? See the best Shopify wholesale apps.