How do you hide prices on an online store in India?
There are four working methods, and which one you use depends entirely on what your ecommerce platform supports. Method one: login-gated pricing — the storefront shows products to everyone, but the price and the buy button appear only after a buyer logs into an approved account. This is the true "B2B catalogue mode" and it requires a platform with customer accounts plus either a built-in visibility setting, an app, or theme-template editing. Method two: an enquiry catalogue — you publish product pages with photos, specs, minimum order quantity and pack size, but no price at all, and you route buyers to a WhatsApp or email enquiry instead of a checkout. Method three: two separate stores — a public retail store with prices, and a second store on a different domain or subdomain that you only share with dealers. Method four: a downloadable rate list — a public catalogue with no prices, and a PDF price list you send to buyers after you have qualified them.
For most small Indian B2B sellers, methods two and three are the ones that actually get built, because method one depends on a specific feature that not every platform exposes. If your platform documents a "hide price until login" setting, use it. If it does not, do not spend weeks trying to force it — an enquiry catalogue plus a dealer-only store achieves the same commercial goal, which is that a competitor cannot read your wholesale rates off a public URL. On HOD Media, hosted online stores come with custom domains, WhatsApp and email order automation, courier integrations for Indian pincodes, GST invoicing, and COD, UPI and card payments; where a specific price-visibility control is concerned, ask us directly what is available on your plan rather than assuming it from the feature list, because we are not going to describe a toggle here that your store may not have.
Why do Indian B2B sellers want prices hidden in the first place?
The usual reason is that wholesale rates are negotiated per dealer. If a distributor in Surat pays a different rate from one in Coimbatore, publishing either rate creates an argument you cannot win. Hiding prices keeps the negotiation where it belongs.
The second reason is competitor intelligence. A public price list is a gift to anyone selling the same SKU. Retail MRP is public anyway; landing cost and slab pricing usually should not be.
The third reason is that B2B pricing is rarely a single number. It is a slab — one rate at 50 units, another at 500, another for a full carton. A single price field on a product page misrepresents the deal, so sellers often prefer to remove it and quote properly.
Be honest with yourself about which reason applies. If your rates are the same for every buyer and you just do not want them compared, hiding prices costs you discovery and rarely helps. Buyers searching for a product and finding no price often leave.
How does login-gated pricing actually work?
Login-gated pricing works in three parts, and all three have to be done or the gate leaks.
First, customer accounts have to exist and be approvable. A public signup that instantly grants price access is not a gate — anyone, including a competitor, signs up in thirty seconds. Real B2B gating means a buyer registers, you verify them (usually against a GST number, a shop photo or a phone call), and you approve the account manually.
Second, the price and the purchase action both have to be suppressed. Hiding the price but leaving "Add to Cart" live means a buyer can add the item and read the price in the cart. Both have to go behind the same condition.
Third, the price has to be removed from everywhere it repeats. Prices appear on collection listings, search results, related-product carousels, structured data in the page source, and product feeds. A gate that covers only the product page is the most common failure. Structured data in particular can surface a price in search results even when the visible page shows none.
On platforms where this is a documented setting, all three parts are handled for you. On platforms where it is done through template editing or an app, you should test it yourself in a private browser window: open a collection page, use the site search, open the cart, and view the page source looking for the number.
What is the enquiry catalogue approach, and when is it better?
An enquiry catalogue is a full product catalogue published publicly with no prices anywhere, where the call to action is an enquiry rather than a checkout. The buyer sees the SKU, the photo, the specification, the pack size, the minimum order quantity and your lead time. Then they message you.
This is often the better choice for a small Indian manufacturer or distributor for three reasons. It is simpler to build, because you are not maintaining a permission layer. It preserves search visibility, because the product pages remain public and indexable. And it fits how B2B deals close in India anyway, where the freight, the payment terms and the slab all get discussed before an order is confirmed.
The tradeoff is manual effort. Every enquiry is a conversation. If you get a high volume of small repeat orders from known dealers, that conversation load becomes the bottleneck, and login-gated pricing with a live checkout starts to pay for itself.
Where order automation helps here is on the follow-through, not the gate. On HOD Media, WhatsApp and email order automation means the order that does come through generates its messages without you typing them, and GST invoicing means the tax invoice is produced from the order rather than re-keyed into a separate book.
Should you run one store or two?
Run one store if your dealers and your retail customers are the same audience buying at the same price. Splitting adds work for no benefit.
Run two stores if the two sides of your business look genuinely different. A retail store with MRP, COD and UPI payments serves walk-in demand and gets found on search. A separate dealer store on its own domain, shared only by link, carries the wholesale range, the pack sizes and the slab rates. Nothing on the dealer store is meant to rank, so hiding prices there is as simple as not publicising the URL.
The two-store route also sidesteps the leak problem entirely. There is no conditional logic to test, because the sensitive prices are on a property the public was never pointed at. It is not cryptographically private — a URL can be forwarded — but for most small businesses the threat model is a casual competitor, not a determined one.
If you resell store setups to other businesses, HOD Media also offers a white-label option, which is relevant if you are building dealer portals for clients rather than only for yourself.
What usually goes wrong?
Killing your own discovery. Hiding prices removes a strong buying signal. If a meaningful share of your orders come from people who found you on search and bought without talking to you, gate selectively — hide prices on wholesale SKUs and packs, keep them on retail units.
The half-built gate. Prices left visible in cart, search, listings or page source. Test in a logged-out private window before you announce it.
Approval that never happens. A registration form nobody reviews turns into a dead pipeline. Decide who checks new dealer signups and how fast, before you launch the gate.
No minimum order quantity stated. If you hide the price, state the MOQ and pack size instead. A buyer with neither number cannot tell whether you are worth contacting.
Forgetting GST on the quote. A hidden price becomes a quoted price, and a quote that omits whether GST is inclusive or extra causes disputes at invoicing. Say which it is in the quote itself.
How do you decide?
Ask how many buyers you have and how often they reorder. A small number of dealers reordering weekly justifies login-gated pricing with a live checkout. A long tail of one-off enquiries does not — an enquiry catalogue serves it with less to break.
Then ask what your platform documents. Do not choose a method your platform supports only through a workaround you cannot test. Ask the platform directly whether price visibility is a supported setting, an app, a template change, or not available. A straight answer to that question tells you which of the four methods is genuinely on the table for you.