Being able to sell to both retail and wholesale customers is a good way to make the most out of your WooCommerce store. However, navigating the intricacies of WooCommerce product management can be a challenging task. Understanding how to optimize your product visibility is crucial for a seamless retail and wholesale experience.
Fortunately, it’s not necessary to have an entirely separate website for your wholesale customers. With Wholesale Suite for WooCommerce, you can take advantage of highly customizable wholesale settings within your existing retail website.
In this article, we’ll take you through essential WooCommerce product management steps to manage wholesale product visibility in your online store. We’ll also discuss why you might want to hide your wholesale pricing from your retail customers. So, let’s jump right in!
WooCommerce Product Management: Why Optimize Wholesale Product Visibility?
If we look at e-commerce globally, it is projected to continue to trend upward over the next few years. This is in addition to its already stable footing with internet users. In fact, 40 percent of worldwide internet users have also made purchases online.
This means it’s more important than ever to make sure your sales website is serving your customers. You might already have a well-established retail business but if you’re also serving wholesale customers it’s best to keep your wholesale pricing hidden from your regular customers.
Wholesale pricing is typically quite a bit different from your retail options, you’ll want to avoid causing any confusion for your customers. Hiding your wholesale products from retail customers keeps everyone on the right page and can help wholesale customers navigate quickly through your products.
WooCommerce Product Management Guide: How To Manage Wholesale Product Visibility
For optimal WooCommerce product management, you can use both Wholesale Prices Premium and Wholesale Order Form. These plugins empower you to seamlessly manage wholesale visibility. So, let’s delve into the details.
1. Restrict access to wholesale items via global user settings
This is one of the easiest ways to create a blanket rule for wholesale product visibility. In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Pricing:
Checking this option will hide any non-wholesale items from your wholesale users. However, this means you’ll have to make sure you’ve assigned the appropriate user roles to your customers.
2. Use wholesale roles to manage visibility per product
If your business model requires customization at the product level, you can use Wholesale Roles to fine-tune visibility for wholesale customers. Firstly, you’ll need to navigate to WooCommerce > Wholesale Roles:
Then, once you’ve created all the roles you need, you can go to Products > All Products and specify which roles should have access to each product:
You can access these settings via the Quick Edit option in the product list. This makes it a quick way to make important product visibility changes. You can also access this setting underneath the Publish button once you open a product page.
3. Create variations for wholesale-only products
Within each product you create with WooCommerce, you can also create variations of that product. This might be the available patterns or colors of a product or the size.
If you want to create one that is only for wholesale customers, you can use the Wholesale Exclusive Variation setting that’s available within each variation:
You can access this by going to Products > All Products in your WordPress dashboard. Once you select the product you want to adjust you can find this setting under the Variations tab.
You’ll need to have variations already set up for the product in order for the tab to be visible. If you don’t, you can also set up your variations from this menu.
4. Configure user permissions for order form
Wholesale Order Form can help you create a user-friendly order form for your wholesale customers:
To set custom permissions for your Wholesale Order Forms, you can go to Wholesale > Order Forms. Then, you’ll see a list of all the order forms you’ve created. Under Action, click on Edit to access the settings of your order form:
Click on Edit beside Form Permissions to manage who can access your order form. With this feature, you can ensure that only designated users can access and place wholesale orders through the form.
Additionally, you can scroll down the settings page and choose which wholesale products and categories are included (or excluded) on your order form. This gives you the flexibility to tailor the form to perfectly align with your WooCommerce product management strategy.
Conclusion
Managing both wholesale and retail customers can sometimes mean you’re juggling resources. Fortunately, with Wholesale Suite plugins, WooCommerce product management can be a breeze. With our powerful plugins, you can tailor product visibility and create a satisfying shopping experience for your valued customers.
In this article, we’ve explored four easy methods to do this. Let’s recap them below:
- Restrict access by using global user settings
- Use wholesale roles to manage access per product
- Create variations for wholesale-only products
- Set user permissions for your order form
Do you have more questions about how to manage wholesale product visibility with WooCommerce? Share your questions with us in the comments section below!
