Getting bigger wholesale orders should be a huge priority for you as a business owner.
As the old saying goes, it’s cheaper to sell more to your existing customers than it is to find new customers.
So if you already have a good base of wholesale customers, the question quickly becomes “How do I get them to order more? And more often?”
Biggest and better orders are something you will need to work towards with your customers. The more you help them, the more they’ll help you.
But there are a few things you can do on your end to smoothen the process and make it a reality sooner rather than later.
1. Give Them A Great Ordering Experience
One of the big pain points of your wholesale customers is how hard or easy it is to order from you.
That’s what one of our products, WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form, aims to solve.
If an ordering process is slick and fast you are:
- Saving them time
- Making it easy to do business with you
- Making it less painful to make the orders
By saving time and making it less painful, I mean putting all that they need into one interface as our Order Form does. Wholesale customers already have a pre-existing relationship with you, so forcing them to browse your site as a retail customer would in order to make an order is counter-intuitive and annoying. It needs to be FAST and fluid and as easy as you can make it.
I put this point as #1 here for a reason.
Even by just addressing your ordering process you’re guaranteed to increase the flow of wholesale orders and make the whole experience a lot nicer for your biggest customers. This, in turn, leads to bigger wholesale orders.
2. Give Them Samples
Giving samples is a marketing technique used by the manufacturing industry and you can use it too as a wholesaler.
There are two ways you can use freebies/samples:
- As a recruiting tool
- To grow relationships
To grow relationships using sample you need to be a bit smart about your sample giving.
The main goal is to get them to try new product ranges and expand their buying.
Ideally, you should have a mechanism for knowing what a customer has NOT ordered in the past that you would like them to order. This might have to be done manually at first via a spreadsheet or some other method.
You want to only give samples for products they haven’t purchased yet.
If you can also include a coupon or special offer for their first order of that product range that will incentivize them on their next order to make a bet on that new product.
Another thing to keep in mind is they are there to serve their customers, not you.
What I mean by this is that they know what their customers will and won’t buy and it’s your job to know at least the basics of that as well.
You can get this insight by conducting catch-up calls with your wholesale customers.
3. Increase (Or Decrease) Your Minimum Order Threshold
Another lever that you can pull to get bigger wholesale orders is to increase or decrease your minimum order threshold.
Playing with the minimum order threshold can be a tricky balancing act with competing priorities.
On the one hand, you want to ensure your customers are ordering enough to earn their wholesale customer status.
On the other hand, if you set your minimums too high they might not order at all for fear of not making the minimum.
Finding that optimal minimum threshold is tricky, but when you get it right, it can do wonders for your bottom line.
At the end of the day, the minimum order threshold is there to protect your profit margins and ensure you can continue delivering large quantities at lower than retail prices.
But if it’s not working for either party then something about that figure might need to change.
4. Create Free Shipping Incentives
Free shipping is like a magical phrase that when you utter it to a customer their sensibility seems to just temporarily go out the window.
The same holds for wholesale customers, though as a store owner, you should be setting the threshold much higher than for retail customers.
It may or may not be possible for you to do a free shipping offer with your products, but if it is, I definitely suggest looking at it. Even if it’s only a temporary promotion.
5. Give Quantity Based Discounts
The final tactic I can suggest is to give your wholesale customers price breaks based on the number of products they’re ordering.
This is called a Quantity Based Discount and it is another one borrowed from the manufacturing industry.
The theory is that as you order a larger amount from a manufacturer, the part/ingredients/components of that item will become cheaper for the manufacturer to order. And because they are able to produce the item cheaper they can pass on a discount to you.
For wholesale orders, the economies of scale come in to play in the form of less admin overhead, easier packaging and overall the being better for your business. What’s not to love?
So are you able to give a large quantity discount for your product? Maybe you could repackage your product into larger multi-packs that you sell for cheaper per item?
Bigger Wholesale Orders
Now that you know the 5 tactics to get bigger wholesale orders, go and try them in your business.
Just remember the one thing that matters: working with your customers is the goal.
The more you focus on doing that well, the larger the orders will be.
