The term Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) should be familiar to you if you run a wholesale store. An MOQ is the smallest order any customer in your store can make. Since we’re talking about bulk purchases, it’s essential that you set an MOQ so non-wholesale buyers can’t take advantage of your prices.
In this article, we’re going to talk about what an MOQ is and why should define one for your wholesale store. We’ll discuss different types of MOQs and show you how to calculate the perfect number. Finally, we’ll go over how to set an MOQ in WooCommerce using Wholesale Suite. Let’s get to it!
What Does MOQ Mean In Wholesale (And Why Should You Set One)?
With regular online stores, you can fill your cart with a single product check out and call it a day. That doesn’t work for you if you run a wholesale store, though. As a wholesaler, you probably offer customers a hefty discount so they make large purchases. If they only buy a handful of products, you can end up losing money.
With an MOQ, customers won’t be able to complete the checkout process until they meet a specific set of criteria that you configure. That may sound like a hard sell, but a lot of wholesale customers are accustomed to having minimum order quantities and values, so you’re unlikely to lose business. That is unless your MOQ is astronomically high.
In practice, you shouldn’t set an MOQ blindly. The perfect MOQ will depend on what products you’re selling, what their prices and markdowns are, and your bottom line. Let’s talk about some types of MOQs that you can use.
What Are the 3 Types of MOQ?
There are several ways to implement an MOQ in your store. What approach you use should depend on your clients, how large their orders tend to be, and what your products are. Let’s break down the three main types of MOQ that wholesale stores use:
- Minimum subtotal. This type of MOQ focuses only on the subtotal and ignores what products customers are buying and how many of them. As long as a wholesale customer is spending over X dollars, you can allow them to make a purchase.
- Order quantity. With this type of MOQ you tell customers they can only make a purchase that’s over Y items. If the size of their order falls short, they’ll need to add more items to their cart.
- Minimum product quantity. You can have individual MOQ for specific products if you want to micromanage your store. With this approach, you can set different MOQs depending on product values and what their markdown is.
In theory, you can implement multiple MOQ rules for your store. However, we recommend that you choose one approach and stick with it for simplicity’s sake.
To go over some scenarios, we recommend minimum product quantities for relatively cheap products, so you can force customers to buy them in bulk. Regular minimum order quantity rules should work well for almost any type of store. Finally, minimum subtotal rules work best if you don’t want to worry about product quantities, but just about the bottom line.
There are no MOQ formulas set in stone. In practice, you’ll need to calculate what’s the smallest order that you can fill without losing money due to either shipping costs or the markdown that you offer wholesale customers.
How To Set a Minimum Order Amount In WooCommerce for Wholesale
Out of the box, WooCommerce doesn’t include a feature that enables you to set a MOQ. However, if you check WooCommerce’s developer documentation, you’ll find some code that you can add to functions.php to implement that functionality.
Naturally, that’s not the best way to go about setting a MOQ. Your best bet is to use Wholesale Prices Premium, which is part of Wholesale Suite. Wholesale Prices Premium is a plugin that enables you to:
- Create multiple custom wholesale user roles
- Set unique wholesale prices for each product (and for each specific user role)
- Hide products from non-wholesale customers
- Set MOQ rules for your store
To use the plugin, you’ll need to install WooCommerce Wholesale Prices and buy a license for its premium version. There are also two other plugins that are part of Wholesale Suite, which are Wholesale Lead Capture and Wholesale Order Form. Together, all three plugins make up Wholesale Suite. However, you only need to use Wholesale Prices Premium for this tutorial.
Once you enable the plugin, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Prices > General. Right away, you’ll see several options that enable you to configure your store’s MOQ settings. First off, you can set a default MOQ and a subtotal requirement:
Wholesale Prices Premium enables you to enforce both types of MOQ or just one of them. To enable just one type of rule, select the Require Quantity OR Subtotal option and update one of the values above while leaving the other at zero.
There’s also an option called Wholesale Role Specific Minimum Requirements you can enable if you want to configure specific rules for each custom user role you create using the plugin:
You can configure unique rules for each custom wholesale user role in your store. If you use a lot of custom roles, you can use these rules to give specific roles more or less leeway when it comes to your store’s MOQ.
Keep in mind that Wholesale Prices Premium will display retail prices for products that customers add to their carts until they meet your MOQ. That’s due to the way that the plugin is built. However, you can solve that problem by explicitly telling customers what your MOQ is.
Conclusion
Setting a MOQ is standard practice for wholesale stores. Bulk buyers are used to MOQs and having clear minimums helps you protect yourself from losing money on orders or getting to deal with clients buying items one by one.
Although WooCommerce doesn’t offer MOQ functionality, you can easily implement it using Wholesale Prices Premium. That plugin is part of Wholesale Suite and it enables you to create multiple custom wholesale user roles, set custom prices for them, and much more.
Do you have any questions about how to set a MOQ for your wholesale store? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
