If you run a small wholesaling business, you need a software solution that’ll enable you to keep track of inventory and process orders. Doing everything by hand isn’t only impractical, but also wholly unnecessary considering how many budget wholesale software for small business options are available to you.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to the best wholesale software for small business owners like you. We’ll also cover both free and premium options so you can pick a solution that fits your budget. So, let’s get to it!
3 Best Wholesale Software For Small Business Owners
Below, we reveal three of the best wholesale software for small business that you can leverage to grow your wholesale venture.
1. Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets
A lot of modern businesses run on spreadsheets and wholesale operations aren’t the exception. Spreadsheet software can enable you to manage almost every aspect of a wholesale business, including:
- Inventory management
- Calculating wholesale prices
- Sharing up-to-date documents with multiple customers
As you may know, Excel is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, which works under a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. However, its prices are accessible for businesses, which makes it a great option for wholesale operations on a budget.
Google Sheets, on the other hand, is free to use and it includes almost all of the same features as Excel. That makes it our recommended option for small businesses that want to sell wholesale.
However, the major downside of the spreadsheet approach is that it doesn’t enable you to process orders automatically. To process purchases, customers will need to contact you and then you proceed to payment and shipping. All of that is work that you could automate using wholesaling e-commerce software.
2. WordPress Form Builder Plugins
Every wholesale business should have its own website. A website is a perfect place to share your product catalog with customers, take orders, and provide visitors with information about your business.
WordPress is our favorite Content Management System (CMS) for small businesses and B2B operations because it’s a cost-effective solution. The software itself is free, which means that you only have to pay for hosting and a domain to get your wholesale website up and running.
Additionally, WordPress is incredibly customizable. The CMS offers a wealth of e-commerce plugins that you can use to add online store functionality to your website.
For example, you can use the WooCommerce plugin to list products in catalog mode. This powerful wholesale software for small business also provides features like inventory management, order processing, and customizable pricing options.
Combining WooCommerce with an online form builder plugin
Although WooCommerce can handle sales, it doesn’t offer the best experience for wholesale customers. That’s why we recommend combining WooCommerce with an online form builder plugin to handle bulk order processing. These are our two top picks:
- WPForms: This plugin includes a drag-and-drop builder that enables you to add and re-arrange dozens of field types to your forms. It’s perfect for price requests or payment processing forms (and it’s the plugin that we use for our website).
- Formidable Forms: This plugin is very similar to WPForms in terms of functionality, but it also integrates with WooCommerce natively. That means that you can use Formidable Forms to create product purchase forms for your wholesale website.
Combining form plugins with WooCommerce makes it much easier to process orders than relying on spreadsheets. Customers will be able to reach out directly from your website. Additionally, you can design forms that ask customers for all of the information that you need to process orders and provide quotes.
Although this approach is much more user-friendly than using spreadsheets, it’s still not as automated as it could be. If you want to create a store that more or less works on its own, you’ll need to use a more specialized wholesale software for small businesses.
3. Wholesale Suite
If you want your wholesale operation to be as efficient as possible, your best option is to create an online store with features that cater to your very specific clientele. As we mentioned before, WooCommerce doesn’t include wholesale functionality out of the box. However, that’s something that you can fix with the right plugins.
Wholesale Suite includes four plugins that expand WooCommerce’s functionality and offer a better experience for your wholesale customers. Each plugin simplifies a different of running a wholesale store, so let’s introduce you to them:
- Wholesale Prices Premium: This plugin enables you to add multiple custom wholesale user roles to WordPress and set different product prices and discounts for each role.
- Wholesale Lead Capture: With this plugin, you can create custom user registration forms. You can also enable auto-approval for new wholesale users or review applications manually.
- Wholesale Order Form: This plugin enables you to set up a shop page that’s optimized for wholesale customers. Buyers can see how many units of each product are available, type in the number of units they want to buy, and much more.
- Wholesale Payments: With this plugin, you can seamlessly offer flexible payment terms like NET 30/60/90, create custom payment plans, and streamline invoicing right within your WooCommerce store.
Wholesale Prices Free
If you want to get access to wholesale software with a free download, you can try the basic version of the Wholesale Prices plugin. The free plugin also enables you to create one wholesale user role and set custom prices for it:
You’re free to decide which of the other components of Wholesale Suite you want to use in your store. However, we recommend that you use the full Wholesale Suite if you want to offer the best possible experience for your wholesale customers.
Conclusion
There are a lot of options when choosing the best wholesale software for a small business. In this helpful guide, we’ve covered three solutions you can explore. To summarize, let’s review them below:
The most efficient solution for wholesale businesses is to set up an online store that includes all of the functionality that you need. Using Wholesale Suite alongside WooCommerce will enable you to grow your wholesale business far beyond what you can accomplish with spreadsheets alone.
Do you have any questions about wholesale distribution software for small businesses? Check out our free guide on how to use WooCommerce to set up a wholesale operation!
