WooCommerce wholesale: strategies and tools for wholesale sales

While B2C and C2C businesses are probably the most familiar to the average Internet user, thanks to portals like eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and social network marketplaces, it’s important not to underestimate B2B businesses.

This term refers to a wholesale model, from one company to another, and can cover both products and services. Alibaba’s marketplace falls into this category, but more and more manufacturers and suppliers are setting up their own eCommerce outlets so that they can run their business themselves.

The old sales model of phone calls and quotes is limited and outdated. You can create an online store with all the important features for your business in just a few clicks. In this article, we’ll see how to do this and what tools to use.

Offering wholesale with WooCommerce

To understand exactly how to set up a wholesale store, you need to figure out which tools to use. To do this, you need to identify the platform you will be using and find out what features you will need.

Let’s start with the platform: to create your site, we recommend the CMS (Content Management System) WordPress, because it is free, open source and supported by most hosting services, and to install on top of it the WooCommerce plugin, also free and open source, so you can turn your site into an eCommerce.

WooCommerce lets you create an online store with product pages, shopping carts, checkouts, shipping and payment management, and more.

It also allows the creation of special business models such as those based on dropshipping.

Clearly, a B2B reality requires specific functions, including:

• Allow customers to request a quote for products on the site.
• Automatically manage product prices based on the user’s role (to offer special promotions or introduce a B2C type of sales).
• Create a dynamic wholesale pricing system based on the quantity of items purchased.
• Ability to create a showcase with consultation or restrict access to certain products.

All these features can be easily implemented by using specific plugins, which we will discover in the next part of this guide.

Choose the right WooCommerce wholesale plugins

Just to let you know, none of the features we’ve mentioned above are included in the basic version of WooCommerce. There are a few plugins out there that can offer some of these, but we’d recommend going for one manufacturer so you can be sure the plugins work together properly.

The YITH catalog has all the plugins you need. Here’s a quick summary of the most useful plugins for a B2B store. We’ll look at them in detail later.

• YITH Request a Quote for WooCommerce – This is the plugin you need for a site like this. With Request a Quote, you can hide prices, disable the customer’s shopping cart, and let them interact with products only through quote requests. They can specify the quantity and ask for a custom price, which they may or may not accept.
• YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode – This plugin lets you turn your store into a showcase for all your products, and it also has a communication and quotation system built in.
• YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts – This plugin is the perfect way to create a truly advanced pricing and discounting system. You can use it to create rules that influence the price of products based on customer behavior, the number of products purchased, their characteristics, and even special rules like BOGO (Buy One, Get One).
• YITH WooCommerce Minimum Maximum Quantity – It allows you set minimum and maximum limits on what you can buy, which is a big plus in the wholesale world.
• YITH WooCommerce Role Based Prices – This plugin lets you assign different roles to customers and show them different wholesale prices based on their role. This makes it easy to have different wholesale and B2C categories.
• YITH Dynamic Pricing per Payment Method for WooCommerce – This plugin lets you add extra fees based on the payment method the customer chooses.

All of these plugins work together to provide more advanced functionalities.

This isn’t a complete list, though. There are lots of other plugins out there that can meet all kinds of needs. Check out the catalog to see what’s best for your eCommerce.

Visibility and site access

Let’s start with the most important feature. In general, there are two types of wholesale stores:

• Catalog with request for quote.
• Store with dynamic pricing based on the quantity bought, so that the more products are added to the order, the less they cost individually.

If we get to the second option later, we’ll see how to create a catalog with quotes using YITH Request a Quote for WooCommerce.

Create a catalog with quotes

All YITH plugins are easy to use. Once installed and activated, you can manage the settings in the control panel to your liking.

The first page you see in the plugin’s control panel contains all the quotes sent to you by customers:

To figure out how the plugin works, just go to “General Options”:

As you can see, you can decide:

• Whether to show the add button to all customers or only to certain roles or registered users.
• On which products to show the button.

You can either create a catalog that works exclusively in quote form or go for a hybrid solution. This means selling products normally and activating the quote request on specific products that require more communication and customization.

This store will look like this:

As you can see, it includes both regular items that can be added to customer purchases and products that require a quote. Of course, the plugin has lots of other functions, but this is just a quick overview of what you can achieve with it.

Manage your store’s visibility and access to wholesale products

If you’re tied in a double-bind with the plugin we mentioned earlier, it’s YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode. Its combined use with Request a Quote allows you to manage various products in one place, rather than creating a general rule for all items in your store.

Dynamic pricing and user roles in your eCommerce

Once we’ve figured out how visible the products are and how they’re bought, we start thinking about pricing. Once more, we have two options: we can define costs based on the user’s role, which is ideal if you plan to offer both B2C and B2B pricing, or we can create a dynamic pricing system based on the quantity purchased. We can do both with two plugins.

Create Wholesale User Roles and Pricing Structures

Once more, we’re talking about a plugin that’s really easy to use. Let’s take a look at YITH WooCommerce Role Based Prices. Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, head over to the dashboard and click on the “Price Rules” section. From there, you can customize the discount value that will be offered to each type of user:

This way, you can have both retail and wholesale customers without having to create two different portals.

Note: We also suggest the YITH Automatic Role Changer for WooCommerce plugin. This lets you change the role of users automatically based on their actions.

Implement Dynamic Pricing and Discount

As we said before, one of the most important plugins for your wholesale business is YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts. It lets you change the cost of products based on how many you sell. After all, a customer who buys 100 products and one who buys 1,000 will have to pay different prices.

Dynamic Pricing offers many types of promotions, but let’s see how to create a quantity-based pricing rule. Once the plugin is installed and activated, open its control panel and go to the “Dynamic Rules” tab. This is where you will create your discount and promotion rules.

Click “Add Rule” at the top to choose from the various options:

Once you click on Quantity Discount, you’ll be taken to the customization page, where you can decide how the rule will work, which products it will apply to, and what kind of discounts it will apply:

Here’s how the rule will be applied to the products in question:

Advanced Features of WooCommerce Wholesale

While it’s important to change the unit price based on the number of items purchased, that’s not enough. It’s also important to set minimum purchase limits so that no retail buyers can get a single product at the wholesale price.

To do this, we will use the YITH WooCommerce Minimum Maximum Quantity plugin. As its name suggests, the plugin’s functionality is easy to understand: it allows you to set a minimum and maximum value of products that can be purchased.

This can be done either universally in the plugin settings (e.g. if you want to set the same minimum number for all products) or individually for each product:

This way, if the wholesale buyers try to get a product below or above the set limits, they will be blocked from the site:

Plugins to improve the shopping experience

Let’s move on to a plugin that can be useful to create a wholesale WooCommerce store.

Improving the Checkout and Payment Process for Wholesale Users

Some payment methods can be pretty pricey, especially when it comes to high-value orders. Rather than getting rid of these methods, you might lose the customers who only use them. You can use the YITH Dynamic Pricing for Payment Method for WooCommerce plugin to add a little extra cost that will help you make up for the losses.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can just go into its settings and create rules related to payment methods. You can either add or reduce the total cost by a fixed amount or percentage.

Conclusion

As you can see, setting up a B2B store with WooCommerce is very straightforward. But to get the most out of your portal, it’s important to use the right tools to make it as optimized as possible.

When you’re setting up your business, it’s important to think about what your customers need, how your competition is doing, and to be ready to make decisions that will make your store better even years down the line. The search for the perfect, optimized portal is an ongoing process.

Choose the best options for your business and make your mark on the market!