Guest Checkout and Customer Groups that require approval

I set up my cart with two customer groups - Retail (Default) and a Wholesale group.

The Wholesale customer group requires approval when they create an account.
They also get a discount wholesale price on my products. But this discount price should only be available to customers with an approved wholesale customer account, and who login.

Now, I had a problem when I enabled Guest Checkout.

When this Guest Checkout is enabled, and a non-logged in customer enters checkout and selects Guest Checkout, they move to Personal Details section to fill in their info, and at that point they can just select Wholesale as their customer group, and to my surprise the product in their cart gets switched to the Wholesale pricing (which I wanted to restrict to only approved wholesale customers). And they can just move ahead and complete checkout getting the wholesale price they are not supposed to get.

On top of that, it seems to convert them to a "Wholesale customer" and all the products in store are now being shown at my discount wholesale prices to someone not logged in.

I did figure out if I turn OFF Guest checkout it will prevent a non-approved customer from checking out as a wholesale customer.
But, this takes away the option of letting casual retail customers the ability to check out without having to register.

Is this normal behavior for an e-commerce checkout? Is there any workaround?

Could I just do something simple, like edit and remove the wholesale customer group option on the form that is presented to Guest shoppers in checkout? But maybe a sneaky customer could still find away to have cart recognize them as a guest wholesale customer? I really can't afford to let guest shoppers get the wholesale pricing.

Well, the most blunt way is to hide group selection section for guests. As far as I know, you can't do it by simply selecting a certain option, so VQMod it is.

I am on OC 2.3.0.1 and i have the same issue. Was anyone able to fix this issue.. In my case, i simply want to remove the option on wholesale login in guest checkout.

Hi funguru
please, could you share with us if you solved this issue?

Thanks you very much
siscopel