Thomas Griffin April 29, 2021 Are you interested in adding a wholesale service to your WooCommerce website?
You can do this easily with a plugin to add wholesale features to an already existing retail store.
There are several benefits to creating a wholesale store:
- You can sell more of your products at wholesale
- When you optimize your product manufacturing by making enough products, you reduce costs
- You increase your business’s scope of work
So, what are the practical steps you need to take to turn your retail eCommerce website into a wholesale one? We’ll explore the answer in this post. Here’s what you need to do to set up your website to sell products in bulk online.
Creating a wholesale online store
In this post, we’re assuming that you already have a WooCommerce store set up. If you don’t have a WooCommerce store yet, you should consider creating one because it has several advantages.
One benefit is that WooCommerce requires lower financial investment and is ideal for small businesses and individuals. Also, since WooCommerce is a plugin, you can add to your existing WordPress website and still use other plugins to offer more features.
Add wholesale pricing to your site
While WooCommerce is a powerful selling platform, it is mainly set up to help B2C businesses. And its main offering doesn’t come with the features that support wholesale pricing.
So, if you’d like to just add wholesale pricing to your website, then you’ll need a Wholesale Prices plugin.
Just like you can add a Contributor, Author, Editor, or some other role through WordPress, a wholesale price plugin will let you add another user profile – a wholesale buyer.
And this user, once they log in to your website, will be able to view wholesale prices for your products and buy in bulk quantities.
- Add special pricing for select wholesale customers
If you’d like to add finer controls like shipping and tax calculators, different payment gateways, minimum buying quantities, and more roles, then you’d need to opt for a premium version to get these features.
Build easy-to-use order forms
If you offer a larger number of products for wholesaling, then your usual retail setup will not provide a good user experience for wholesale buyers. Your wholesale customers will not need to browse through pages of products and add each item to a cart.
Instead, you need to build an order form that displays your catalog, the rate for each item, the quantity in which these items should be ordered, and the discounts your user gets.
A Wholesale Order Form can simplify the buying experience for your customers. Your wholesale buyers can buy multiple items from a single form, vary the quantities for different items, and see the shipping and tax information they need all at once.
- A wholesale order form
These are more complex steps and features that a good wholesale business needs to provide to create a positive user experience for their customers.
Manage multiple customers
As your wholesale business grows, it becomes more challenging to manage more users or customers. When you have a few customers, it’s easier to manually approve your customers so that they get access to wholesale prices. And you can communicate with them directly using email marketing and other means.
However, as the number of customers grows, it will be inefficient to manually approve each new user, send the right information, onboard them, and carry out other tasks.
This is where a lead capture extension comes into play. By using a lead capture and user management tool, you can set up your website so that it automatically carries out multiple activities including:
- Auto-approving customers as wholesale buyers
- Assign users to access different tiers of wholesale offers and restrict them from viewing prices or products that they shouldn’t have access to
- Send onboarding and confirmation emails automatically once a sale has been made
- Manage tiers of customers
With this tool in place, you can focus on managing extraordinary situations and provide better customer service.
Back to you
The benefit of using three different plugins mentioned above to set up your wholesale business is that you can grow your business based on what suits you right now.
If you’re an individual or small business dipping your toes into wholesaling, you may not want complex tools. But as you grow, you’ll need more features to support your growing number of customers and the variety of products you offer.
While you could use WooCommerce’s own wholesale addon, you’ll benefit from the customizations, dedicated customer support, and specific features offered by the tools mentioned here.
We’ve looked at some simple ways to transform your usual retail online store into a wholesale one. Adding wholesale options can help you change your business model or cater to different tiers of customers, giving you a greater scope of growth in your business. Use the ideas given in this post to create a positive change in your website and to help your customers have a better wholesale buying experience.
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