Choosing the right wholesale management software for your business can make running a store much more straightforward. After all, such software can make it easier for you to offer wholesale discounts, approve customers, send invoices, and much more.
Thankfully, depending on what type of website you have, there are lots of wholesale software solutions you can choose from. For example, WordPress users get to enjoy a broad range of options, among them WooCommerce, Wholesale Suite, and Formidable Forms.
In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of using the best wholesale management software solutions. Then we’ll compare our three top software suggestions and help you pick the right one for your needs. Let’s get to it!
Why You Should Use Wholesale Management Software
Technically, you don’t need any special software to run an online wholesale operation. In fact, you can use any online store software such as WordPress with an e-commerce plugin or Shopify. You could even run a store taking orders via Instagram!
Although all of those approaches can work, you make your job tougher when you don’t use wholesale management software. This is because the right wholesale solution will streamline your work by offering features such as:
- Setting both retail and wholesale prices
- Managing wholesale user registration
- Offering multiple tiers of wholesale customer roles
- Enabling you to set up automatic invoicing
- Integrating the payment options you prefer
Using just any e-commerce solution is not the best option for wholesale operations. Since you deal in bulk sales, you need to use wholesale management software that adapts to your unique needs.
Depending on which software you use, you’ll get to save a vast amount of time in performing management tasks. That’s time you can better spend taking care of your customers!
3 Best Wholesale Management Software Solutions Compared
In this section, we’re going to compare three of the top wholesale management solutions for WordPress. We’ll discuss how each solution works, what wholesale features it offers, its limitations, and who should consider using it.
1. WooCommerce
The popular e-commerce platform WooCommerce is not precisely a wholesale management software solution. Instead, it’s a WordPress plugin that transforms the Content Management System (CMS) into a full-fledged e-commerce solution.
With WooCommerce, you get to set up product and shop pages. The plugin lets you publish as many products as you wish, both physical and digital.
This e-commerce tool is incredibly customizable. You get access to hundreds of extensions that enable you to add almost any feature that you want to your store. Moreover, WooCommerce lets you integrate the most popular payment methods around the world.
Unfortunately, although WooCommerce works great for most types of online stores, it’s not optimized for wholesaling. In fact, it’s more geared towards retailing; as such, it doesn’t offer features designed specifically for wholesale customers. For example, the default shop page design doesn’t allow customers to add products to their carts in bulk.
Overall, WooCommerce can be a decent option if you’re launching a wholesale operation and you don’t have the budget for specialized software. The e-commerce plugin works, but you’ll need extra effort to service wholesale customers properly.
Price: Free
2. Wholesale Suite
A collection of WordPress plugins, Wholesale Suite is designed to work with WooCommerce. If you’ve tried using WooCommerce to run a wholesale store but found it frustrating, these plugins will offer a better experience.
Although all three plugins in Wholesale Suite are designed to work together, you can use any of them separately. Here are the three plugins that make up the suite:
- Wholesale Prices: This plugin allows you to set wholesale prices for the products on your WooCommerce store. You get to create new wholesale customer roles and decide which roles get access to different price tiers.
- Wholesale Order Form: With this plugin, you get to build product order forms that are ideal for wholesale customers. Each order form lets customers see a list of your products, check how many items you have in stock, add products to their carts without refreshing the page, and more.
- Wholesale Lead Capture: This plugin enables you to set up custom user registration forms for wholesale shoppers. These forms can include any fields relevant to your business. In addition, you can approve users manually or automate the customer recruitment process.
It’s worth noting that there’s a free version of Wholesale Prices, which limits you to a single custom user role for wholesale customers. However, it’s a fantastic upgrade for WooCommerce users who want to offer their wholesale customers a better shopping experience.
You can either purchase Wholesale Suite plugins together or add them one by one to your store as your needs change. This flexibility makes Wholesale Suite one of the best wholesale management software solutions available for WordPress.
Price: The Wholesale Suite bundle starts at $148.50 per year. Individual plugins within the suite cost $49.50 per year.
3. Formidable Forms + WooCommerce Forms
Neither an e-commerce plugin nor a wholesale management software solution, Formidable Forms is, in fact, a WordPress forms tool. However, when you think about it, most e-commerce websites rely heavily on forms to get anything done, including collecting payment details, shipping information, customer private data, and more.
Although Formidable Forms is not an e-commerce solution, it does offer several add-ons that allow you to use it as one. WooCommerce Forms is one of those add-ons.
With WooCommerce Forms, you get to add custom forms to WooCommerce product pages. These forms are perfect for collecting the data you need from wholesale customers and then getting in touch with them to arrange product orders.
Formidable Forms together with WooCommerce Forms offers a great solution if you want to offer your wholesale customers a more hands-on service. You can create custom forms to collect leads and then reach out to customers directly to help them complete their purchases.
Price: Formidable Forms is free. However, the WooCommerce Forms plugin requires you to pay for an Elite license that starts at $299.50 per year.
Conclusion
You can run a wholesale store off an Instagram page if you want to. However, using wholesale management software and e-commerce solutions will make your life a lot easier. It will also allow you to scale up your operation far beyond what you can achieve using Excel sheets only and asking customers to send bank transfers manually.
If you’re in the market for the best wholesale management software solutions for WordPress, here are our top three picks:
- WooCommerce: Although this isn’t a wholesale solution, it’s a perfect starting point if you’re on a budget. You can use it to create any type of online store and offer deals to wholesale customers.
- Wholesale Suite: This group of plugins transforms WooCommerce into a full-fledged wholesale platform. You can use the bundle of plugins together or pick and choose which ones you prefer.
- Formidable Forms + WooCommerce Forms: This combination lets you add custom forms to WooCommerce products, which you can use to take orders and collect leads.
Do you have any questions about which wholesale management software solution to use? Ask away in the comments section below!
