A reliable wholesale management system is important to the smooth operation of your e-commerce business. In addition to maintaining profits, it ensures that every sale or delivery is executed to a high degree to guarantee client satisfaction.
Wholesalers like you face a range of challenges in a competitive market like e-commerce. On top of the dynamic market conditions, there’s always this underlying pressure to remain consistent and efficient to position your business for long-term success.
That’s why it’s important to have a system that will hold you down. In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of a complete wholesale management system and the four major parts you need in your WooCommerce store. We’ll also discuss the best wholesale management tools that you can use!
What Is A Wholesale Management System?
Essentially, a wholesale management system is a set of processes or tools that allows wholesalers to sell or distribute their products in bulk effectively. To best understand how this system works, let’s first discuss what wholesale management is:
The management of a company that sells items wholesale, or in large quantities for less than retail, is referred to as wholesale management. After accounting for profit margins, wholesale buyers often resell the products to end users.
Usually, wholesale businesses run in two ways:
- The wholesaler buys goods in bulk from producers and then resells them to a retail establishment.
- The wholesaler manufactures its goods to sell directly to retailers, who subsequently redistribute the products to customers.
Importance Of A Complete Wholesale Management System
There is a lot to manage in a wholesale business. This includes, for example, the requirement to satisfy constantly shifting consumer demands and needs; managing and expanding a wide range of product industries; handling supply chains; monitoring margins, and the like.
An all-in-one wholesale management system gives you total visibility over your whole company, empowering business owners to handle difficult situations, similar to what effective systems integration would achieve.
Basically, it enables transparency and control over purchases, stock control, logistics planning, packaging and shipping, and many more. Additionally, it removes the need for data to be manually entered into several systems, lowering the possibility of mistakes.
Here are more reasons to consider a complete wholesale management system:
- You gain more business and planning insights
- Produces better accounting and financial processes
- Increases your store’s retention and brand visibility
- Improves your inventory management
4 Parts Of A Complete Wholesale Management System
Now that you know the benefits of having a solid wholesale management system, let’s jump into its 4 major parts:
1. Wholesale pricing
Pricing is the process through which a company determines the best price for its products.
You may compute wholesale prices using a number of mathematical methods. Fortunately, though, there are only a few factors to keep in mind when pricing products for wholesale:
Essentially, the wholesale price is what you charge for a product when you supply it in bulk to important trade or distribution groups as opposed to what you charge to consumers. This can be calculated by multiplying the cost of the item by the manufacturer’s profit margin.
To operate a wholesale business, you must obviously set wholesale prices. Otherwise, you will lose a great deal of money. The issue is that Woo’s built-in features aren’t adaptable enough for this level of pricing.
Therefore, you’ll need a sophisticated third-party plugin like Wholesale Prices (Free) to easily set wholesale pricing.
Wholesale Prices gives you the option to add a fixed wholesale price to your individual products:
On the other hand, if you’re looking for more advanced wholesale pricing functionalities, you can always check out Wholesale Prices Premium!
This powerful plugin lets you effortlessly manage wholesale pricing across various user roles, adapt your product catalog for wholesale customers, comply with the strictest tax regulations in your country, and many more.
More importantly, it also provides you with two additional wholesale discount options:
2. Order form
Once your prices are finalized, it’s time to start accepting orders!
Basically, an order form is a document that captures and stores business transaction records. It is an indispensable aspect of purchasing, selling, and various other processes, especially for sizable purchases and/or high-value deals.
This is because, in many ways, it helps in managing sales volume and keeping things organized while simultaneously enhancing store productivity.
Whether it’s a simple online template, invoicing software, or a plugin, keeping a physical record of your transactions is essential if you want to streamline your store’s selling and delivery processes. This is especially true for wholesale store owners.
However, online stores are more challenging to handle than brick-and-mortar shops. Therefore, adding a superior order form plugin, such as Wholesale Suite’s, is the best option for efficiently managing your transactions in WooCommerce!
Wholesale Order Form is an easy-to-use and effective solution to provide fast ordering options for your WooCommerce products. What’s more, we have completely rebuilt this tool to bring you a superior order form program that will improve customers’ purchasing experiences from your store.
Here are a few features we upgraded that will surely improve how you manage orders in your store:
- Multiple Order Forms – you can create several order forms all at once.
- New Form Builder – customize the look of your order forms with the new drag & drop form builder.
- Order Forms May Be Placed Everywhere – modified to increase the forms’ adaptability.
- API Integration – most recent version makes use of both WooCommerce’s Product API and our Wholesale Suite API to deliver lightning-fast performance.
3. Lead capture
To sustain your wholesale business, you also need a strategy for growing your consumer base or retaining current ones. Keep in mind that WooCommerce has an unending cycle of persuasion! So, if you stop after the sale, you can’t set yourself up for the long run.
One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to grow your customer base in WooCommerce is through lead registrations. This is why many marketers today put a lot of effort into generating traffic for their websites, from SEO to PPC ads and social media initiatives.
However, truth be told, turning their hard-earned visitors into sales is not a walk in the park.
Although the majority of lead generation tactics still revolve around the standard in-page forms, customers these days are more skeptical, demanding, and protective of their personal information.
Static forms simply don’t function as effectively as they previously did. Long forms may even be damaging your potential to generate leads because they no longer offer visitors significant value.
So what do successful business owners use to onboard leads into their systems? A simple registration form that’s readily adjustable so that it’s easier to respond to dynamic market trends.
Downloading Wholesale Lead Capture is the first step in designing and installing a straightforward registration form for your wholesale store. This premium plugin comes with a registration form builder that makes it simple to add and alter form fields:
In addition, you can enable spam prevention and pre-fill checkout forms with registration information. Best of all, it has an extensive user approvals system that, if users have approval, automatically assigns them the wholesale job.
4. Flexible payment terms
In the wholesale industry where transactions are in bulk, larger, and more complex, it’s also a must to offer flexible payment terms. If you don’t meet these expectations, wholesale customers may shop elsewhere.
This entails offering terms like:
- Net payment terms: These are standard in the B2B industry, giving wholesale customers a specific number of days to pay after the receipt of an invoice. The most common terms include Net 30, 60, or 90.
- Installment payments: This option allows customers to pay for their wholesale purchases in a series of scheduled payments, making large purchases more manageable. Terms usually outline the number of installment payments, amount, and specific due dates.
- Deferred payment terms: With a deferred payment term, customers can delay payment for a specified period. Payment terms outline when the amount is due, and any interest or fees associated with late payments.
- Deposit payments: This option requires customers to pay a certain percentage of the total invoice upfront. Depending on the terms, the remaining balance can be paid in installments or at a specified date.
- Custom payment plans: These payment plans are designed to cater to the needs of individual wholesale customers.
Meeting these expectations for flexible payment terms is crucial to stay competitive in the wholesale industry. Fortunately, wholesalers can leverage plugins like Wholesale Payments to easily offer wholesale payment terms in WooCommerce.
This powerful plugin comes with pre-configured commonly used payment plans and allows you to create custom payment plans for wholesale customers:
What makes Wholesale Payments an absolute game-changer is that it streamlines the process for you and your customers. It automates invoicing right after purchase, sending out email invoices where customers can settle their payments directly. What’s more, it allows you to monitor outstanding invoices and payments right within the WooCommerce dashboard:
Wholesale Suite Bundle
Knowing the four main elements of a comprehensive wholesale management system is one thing; having them all function equally in your store is quite another! So, why not choose a comprehensive yet user-friendly solution if you want to have these four key systems to maximize the potential of your store?
Wholesale Suite Bundle is a comprehensive wholesale solution jam-packed with four #1 rated WooCommerce plugins. Here what you can do with our full suite of plugins:
- Make B2B registration simple with Wholesale Lead Capture: With this plugin, you can easily set up a custom B2B registration form on your WooCommerce store. Choose your preferred lead approval process, automate onboarding emails, and assign wholesale user roles to new leads.
- Set wholesale prices easily with Wholesale Prices Premium: This powerful tool allows you to implement B2B bulk discounts, create tiered wholesale pricing, implement minimum order requirements, and tweak product visibility for B2B customers.
- Create bulk order forms with Wholesale Order Form: With this plugin, you can easily create customized and user-friendly wholesale order forms for B2B buyers. It also allows you to enable search and filtering capabilities, modify item numbers per page, or allow lazy loading for a streamlined purchase experience.
- Offer flexible payment terms with Wholesale Payments: Give your B2B clients the options they crave! With Wholesale Payments, you can offer installment plans, deferred payment options, and custom payment plans to meet the needs of your wholesale buyers.
Plus, it allows you to access these premium plugins at a lower cost. Talk about convenience and efficiency in one, right?!
Conclusion
For your e-commerce business to run smoothly, you need a solid wholesale management system. In addition to maintaining profits, it makes sure that each sale or delivery is carried out to a high level to ensure customer satisfaction.
In this article, we discussed the importance of a complete wholesale management system in your store. We also shared four major systems you need to have. To summarize, let’s walk through these key parts below:
Do you have any questions about the wholesale management system? Let us know in the comment down below or send us a message!
