Wholesale websites require a whole different set of features than regular e-commerce operations. First off, you don’t want just anyone to be able to register as a wholesale customer. If you want to ensure that you’re dealing with a serious clientele, you need a wholesale application form.
If you’re using Wholesale Suite, creating a wholesale application form is simple. In this article, we’ll talk about why it’s a good idea to set up such a form and show you how to do it. Let’s get to work!
Why You Should Have A Wholesale Application Form
Dealing with a wholesale clientele usually requires you to be more thorough when it comes to collecting new leads. With a regular online store, you can just ask users for their name, basic contact information, and that’s it. For wholesale customers, you’ll want their company name, to ask for documentation and a lot more information overall.
A lot of wholesale operations handle user registration manually, but that’s not an efficient approach. The best way to tackle wholesale user registration is with a custom application form.
With a custom sign-up form, you can ask customers for any information to help you run a more efficient operation. For example, you can inquire as to the new customer’s expected order volume:
There are plenty of tools that you can use to create custom forms in WordPress. However, since we’re talking about wholesale application forms, your best bet is to use Wholesale Suite.
Wholesale Suite includes Wholesale Lead Capture plugin, which enables you to create custom registration forms for your wholesale store:
Using this plugin, you can assign custom wholesale user roles to new customers. That means you can have a store with different sets of prices depending on customer levels.
Moreover, the plugin enables you to automate wholesale user registration or require manual approvals. With the latter approach, you’ll be in full control over who can order from your online store.
How To Make A Simple Wholesale Application Form (2 Steps)
To follow this tutorial along, you’ll need to set up Wholesale Lead Capture. Ideally, we recommend using the entire Wholesale Suite since the plugins are designed to complement one another.
Step 1: Customize your wholesale application form
As soon as you activate Wholesale Lead Capture, it’ll automatically generate multiple pages for you. Those include wholesale registration, thank you, and even terms and conditions pages:
Here’s what the plugin’s default wholesale registration form looks like:
If you want to edit the fields your wholesale lead application form includes, you can go to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Lead > Built-In Fields. Here, you can enable additional fields the plugin includes by default, such as Address and Company Name:
You can also add custom fields to your wholesale application form by jumping over to Wholesale Lead > Custom Fields section:
To add a custom field, you’ll need to set a name for it, a unique ID, and decide what type of values users will be able to input. You can also configure in which order fields will appear and set placeholder text for them.
Once your wholesale application form includes all the fields that you want, you can save the changes to it. Now it’s time to talk about lead approval.
Step 2: Configure your Wholesale Lead Capture approval settings
By default, Wholesale Lead Capture makes it so new customers require your approval before they can log in and start making purchases. You can see that setting if you go to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Lead > General:
Before you start letting users into your site, you’ll want to modify the New Lead Role setting. Change it to Wholesale Customer or whichever other wholesale user role you want to set by default:
When a new wholesale customer attempts to register, you’ll receive an email to your admin account. The plugin lets you tweak that email’s template if you go to WooCommerce > Emails section:
You can customize the content of your emails by clicking “Manage” and editing the default message, as seen below:
If you’re comfortable enabling auto approvals, you can select that option from this page and save the changes to the plugin. In any case, now you’re ready to start processing new wholesale leads on your store.
Conclusion
Wholesale application forms are fantastic tools to help you streamline customer registration and to collect useful information. In this guide, we discovered how Wholesale Lead Capture can help you leverage wholesale registration forms for your business in two easy steps:
- Create and customize your form using Wholesale Lead Capture
- Configure your wholesale user approval settings
Thanks to Wholesale Lead Capture, you can approve customer applications manually or make the process automatic. Plus, the plugin generates all of the forms that you need!
Do you have any questions about how to use Wholesale Lead Capture? Let’s go over them in the comments section below!
