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By now, you might’ve already gotten an idea that it isn’t easy selling to wholesale customers!
It is a BIG DEAL, and we get it! Even though, in essence, it is not all that different from retail. WooCommerce provides you all that’s needed to sell in bulk. But when it comes to negotiating prices, and offering wholesale buyers a good deal, WooCommerce does not provide you an option to play with the quantity based pricing out-of-the-box.
Setting Up Your WooCommerce Store for Wholesalers
Now, when you’re selling to both, wholesale buyers and regular customers, there’s certainly no telling if a regular shopper might be interested in making a bulk purchase. Of course manually evaluating and creating wholesale customers might give you the most control over your wholesaler program, and requires no additional plugins or integrations to create your wholesale customers.
But as you can imagine, this can become rather tedious. Registering a customer as a wholesale buyer might not be a problem. However, adjusting prices for each product individually for these customers will be.
The solution?
Well, you’ve probably guessed it! 😀 Why go through all the hassle when there are dedicated plugins for the same to give you a leg up in the world of online business?
Get your WooCommerce store rollin’ with a couple of WooCommerce plugins!
Selling Wholesale on WooCommerce = Pricing Plugin + Negotiation Platform
Well, first things first. You’re planning to cater to wholesale buyers online to make a profit. So setting the right price is critical to making sure you remain competitive while still offering some value to your customers. For this, you need a pricing plugin.
But hold on! That’s not all. You also need to allow interested wholesale buyers a window to negotiate, a sort of bargaining platform to reel in those who might be willing to purchase if you offered them a sweet deal.
For this, you need a negotiation plugin.
And the plugins for this task are- Customer Specific Pricing, WooCommerce Advance Product Quantities, and QuoteUp respectively. These plugins allow you to do all that’s mentioned above and a lot more!
Read on…
WooCommerce Pricing Plugin: Customer Specific Pricing
#1 Creating a WooCommerce Wholesale Customer
When anyone purchases an item in your WooCommerce shop and creates an account, they’re by default identified with the “Customer” role.
What you need, is to create a “Wholesale Buyer” role for your wholesale customers. If you have multiple wholesale customer tiers, you can create separate roles accordingly.
Now, to make sure Wholesalers purchase in bulk, you need the WooCommerce Advance Product Quantities plugin. With this plugin, you can set a minimum product quantity purchase rule for certain roles.
#2 Fire up Sales with Exclusive Product Prices
Now, the task to offer percentage discounts to these select customers has to be handed over to the Customer Specific Pricing plugin!
The advantage of using this plugin is that you can set up prices based on user roles. So you will have to setup prices for the wholesale buyer roles you’ve created, and they should be applied to all customers who belong to that role.
Best of all, you do not need to set up wholesale prices for your products manually. Customer Specific Pricing plugin takes care of this too. With the Pricing Manager, or CSV price import options you can set up prices for your products in one click. 🙂
WooCommerce Negotiation System: QuoteUp
Whenever we buy products in bulk, we always look for a good deal. Don’t we? What if you could give your online wholesale customers the real-time experience of bargaining or let’s put this in a better way, negotiating the prices of products they’re interested in?
The plugin to the rescue here- is QuoteUp!
QuoteUp is your price negotiation and quotation management plugin for WooCommerce. As the name suggests, interested buyers can request a price quote on products they are interested in. It is an easy to use the plugin with a simple interface.
What you can also do with the plugin, is hide the regular “Add to Cart” button on your WooCommerce store, to trigger quote requests only, and disallow direct purchases.
WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form: Product Table
Wholesale users have different needs and expectations from retail customers. They already know which products they need, and want to see all the wholesale products in a compact list. They don’t want to scroll through multiple pages with large product images and other marketing information.
The WooCommerce Product Table plugin is ideal for creating a wholesale order form layout. It lists the wholesale products in a table view with search, sort, and filtering features to quickly direct customers to the right products. The one-page wholesale table includes adding to cart buttons, variations, and quantity selectors. Customers can use it as a complete bulk order form, with no need to visit the single product page.
Even better, you can use the wholesale order form in a separate ‘Wholesale’ area of your store, while keeping the standard WooCommerce layouts for retail customers.
Conclusion
There are two main types of wholesale stores that exist: those that are solely dedicated to wholesale or those that are B2C sites but have a wholesale aspect.
Going wholesaling online is a great way to re-engage your clients whom you have lost touch with. Besides, online wholesale trashes the antiquated system of wholesalers having to buy from a catalog or worse — a line sheet.
The above-stated plugins can give you the perfect start to your online store on WooCommerce. Have any questions before getting started? Ask away, in the comment section below! 🙂