When you start doing business with wholesale customers you may get requests to put in an efficient wholesale ordering form. This is because there are some differences in the behavior and needs of wholesale customers.
For wholesale customers, time is money and an inefficient ordering process can cause headaches for the person ordering. For you, as the store owner, you might be wondering why re-orders are not coming as fast as expected.
Regular customers, on the other hand, are happy to browse your product pages to gather the information they need and eventually make an order.
Wholesale customers rarely want to linger and they already know about your products, so the priority for them is to get in and get out in as few clicks as possible and that is where a wholesale ordering form can help you.
The WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form plugin is the best solution for providing a form suitable for wholesale customers in WooCommerce. With very little effort store owners can set up an amazing ordering experience for their wholesale customers.
This guide will show you how easy it is to set up a wholesale ordering solution so that your customers will love placing orders with you.
Wholesale Ordering Form Plugin Set Up
When you purchase and install the plugin, the plugin generates a page on your site called “Wholesale Ordering”.
By default, this can be found at: http://[yoursiteurl]/wholesale-ordering/
This page will show the wholesale order form with a basic configuration.
Many e-commerce store owners use it like this straight out of the box and by default, the form will do it’s best to fit in with your WordPress theme and inherit any styles already present.
There is however a number of options available to customise and optimize your order form and that’s what we will be going through now.
Choosing The Look Of Your Wholesale Ordering Form
If you view the wholesale ordering page prior to adjusting any settings you will see that the standard layout has an Add To Cart button next to each product.
This has been designed with ordering efficiency in mind for averagely sized e-commerce stores and allows your customers to quickly and easily order multiples of the same product with a simple click.
It’s especially handy for products that have variations where the customer might want to order different variations of the same product.
To do this with the standard layout they just select their variation, choose their quantity and hit Add To Cart to add the first variation to the cart. This process uses AJAX to add the product variation to cart without any page reloading and means the customer is free to change the variation quickly and hit Add To Cart, again and again, making the ordering process very quick.
However, if you have a store with few products you might want to consider using the Alternate Layout option which presents a checkbox next to each product line and a single Add Selected Products To Cart button at the bottom of the form.
To change the layout style goto WooCommerce->Settings, Wholesale Ordering tab and select the “Use Alternate View Of Wholesale Page” setting.
Adding Extra Column Data
The next major setup decision is to choose what other data is shown about your products on the form.
You can easily show:
- A small product thumbnail
- Product SKU
- In Stock quantity
- … and even more, if you want to override the template and add the data yourself.
There are also various other settings available on the Order Form settings pages including the ability to restrict the view, add the cart subtotal to the form, use a lightbox to show extra product details and more.
View the settings area under WooCommerce->Settings, Wholesale Ordering tab and be sure to view the submenu links for additional settings pages (the blue links under the tabs).
Setting The Wholesale Ordering Page Template
The next step is to choose what page template you should use on the page itself.
By default, most WordPress themes have a couple of templates to choose from and as this varies theme to theme you might have to consult your theme’s documentation or ask your developer to assist here.
Depending on what your goals are you might want to choose a default template or a full-width template which would make the form take up the whole width of the page.
Note that while the form usually looks great straight out of the box, some CSS styling might be required to make the form look 100% right and this is something you will have to do to integrate it with your site’s theme.
Personally, I like using a page template that allows for a sidebar and the reason for this is so we can use the WooCommerce Cart Widget to provide users with instant feedback about their order progress.
Adding A Cart Widget Can Be Helpful
Not all themes have a special blank sidebar that you can style up to be different to the other sidebars on your site, so if you don’t want to use the same sidebar as the rest of your site there’s a simple solution which works well across different themes.
We recommend installing the Custom Sidebars plugin which is free from WordPress.org and allow you to add additional sidebar areas to put widgets in and choose what pages they appear on.
It’s the perfect solution for this because you don’t want your wholesale-only sidebar, which will only have the Cart widget in it, to take over the whole site and likewise you also don’t want to use the site-wide sidebar, which has all your other widgets in it, on the wholesale ordering page either.
To set up a wholesale only sidebar in Custom Sidebars:
- Create a new sidebar area for wholesale only
- Add the WooCommerce Cart widget to the new sidebar
- Select this sidebar on the edit screen for your Wholesale Ordering page
Now your wholesale ordering page has a cart widget in the sidebar and the Order Form will update the sidebar cart every time your customers add a new product to the cart.
Remember: Your Wholesale Customer’s Time Is Precious
One of the golden rules when setting up a wholesale ordering system is to remember that their time is precious. The quicker they can make an order and get on with other business the better.
Quicker, more efficient, ordering systems have been shown to increase re-orders and reduce customer frustration which in turn means happier wholesale customers who are more willing to do business with you time and time again.
Click here to purchase a copy of the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form plugin.
Or if you’re just getting started setting up wholesale on your WooCommerce store be sure to see the full Wholesale Suite Bundle which also includes solutions for wholesale pricing and wholesale registration and is available at a discount when you purchase them all together.
