How to Sell to WooCommerce B2B and B2C Customers (Free Plugin)

If you’ve thought about using WooCommerce to sell to both B2B and B2C customers, then you’re probably familiar with the benefits. However, finding the right technology to support your sales strategy can be a challenge. 

Fortunately, there’s an effective and free choice at your fingertips. The Wholesale Suite plugin provides you with all the tools you need to add basic wholesale features to your website. From user roles to product-level pricing, this plugin can help you take your WooCommerce sales to the next level.

In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of choosing the right platform for your B2B and B2C sales. Then we’ll cover three easy steps for using those tools to upgrade your store. Let’s get started! 

The importance of choosing the right platform for your B2B and B2C sales

You may be familiar with the benefits that WooCommerce can offer for B2C sales, and how important a quality platform is for encouraging conversions. The technology you choose to support your sales directly impacts your strategy, helps you personalize each experience, and plays an important role in creating a positive customer experience.

Finding a platform that can deliver results in these areas is important. It should ideally be simple, effective, and affordable. You probably also want it to work well with the WooCommerce functions you’re familiar with.

The Wholesale Suite plugin checks all of these boxes. It offers customization, pricing, and user role creation functionalities in a streamlined way. Plus, they have a free plugin, making it accessible for experienced users and beginners alike:

As a bonus, this free plugin also comes with a premium option. That way, if you ever want to accommodate your growing sales with extra functionality, you can simply switch to a paid plan. There’s no need to find a new product or learn a new system – just upgrade and go. 

How to sell to WooCommerce B2B and B2C customers (in 3 steps)

The Wholesale Suite plugin can help you get started on diversifying your sales in just three simple steps. Let’s see how it works!

Step 1: Employ user roles to cater to customers

The first step in this process is to give your wholesale customers access to wholesale prices. To do that, you’ll want to set up user roles.

Customers with accounts will start with the default role of “Customer”. The Wholesale Suite plugin lets you add a new role specifically for B2B customers:

To do this, navigate to the left-hand menu and click on Wholesale Roles. The free version of the plugin comes with one level of customers, named “Wholesale Customer” by default. 

You’ll also need to create a unique role key. We recommend making it closely match the name you’ve given the role, in order to avoid any confusion. Adding a description is optional, but may be helpful if you plan on expanding to more user roles with the premium add-on. 

Once these things are set up, you can navigate to your user list. From there, you can adjust the roles to provide wholesale prices to certain users. Select Wholesale Customer from the role drop-down for those users, and choose Update User:

That user will now have access to your wholesale prices. If you want to do this with multiple accounts,  select each user you’d like to change on the All Users page. Choose Wholesale Customer at the top of the screen, and click on Change to apply the new roles. 

Step 2: Set prices to appeal to WooCommerce B2B and B2C Customers

Now that you have your user roles all set, we can move on to the reason for making them in the first place: setting your new wholesale prices in WooCommerce. Setting wholesale prices for each product is a basic function. It’s also the heart of what makes B2B and B2C sales different.

Having a platform that lets you get this done simply and correctly is vital. The free version of Wholesale Suite enables you to add a fixed wholesale price to individual products – for example, by manually setting the wholesale price for a $15 product to $12. The premium plan gives you more flexibility in this area, such as by taking a percentage off the original price. 

To set your wholesale prices, navigate to your Products page. Select a product to edit:

Enter the price you want to charge wholesale customers, and save your changes. This is the price that will appear to users you’ve assigned the Wholesale Customer role to:

If you want to make sure this will appear just the way you want it to, you can create a test account through the Add New User page. Just set the role to Wholesale User, and then log in as that new user to get a preview of the prices that others with that role will see.

Step 3: Customize your settings to boost your profits

Attracting customers may be the crucial first step, but it’s also important to retain them. You can take steps to satisfy your customers by using some basic customization options provided by Wholesale Suite: 

You can find these by navigating to the Wholesale Price tab in the WooCommerce settings. One important option on this page is disabling coupon use for wholesale users:

The Price heading also has customization options. Some are premium features, such as the “always use regular price” and “variable product price display” choices. However, there are plenty of options that are provided by the free version.

For example, you can change the text shown before the wholesale price. You can also remove the original retail price from the wholesale display altogether. Other options include hiding the wholesale price on the admins’ product listing, hiding the price and “add to cart” button, and creating custom display messages. 

The other two headings, Tax and Upgrade, have options for premium plugin users. They’re also good resources if you’re interested in learning more about the premium features. 

Once you’ve completed these steps and gotten your bearings, you can start implementing any number of other effective techniques to take your B2B and B2C sales to the next level. You could try using shortcodes to create curated content for your wholesale users. Another option could be making your prices available in multiple currencies to grow your potential market.

Conclusion

Finding the right technology to help you set up WooCommerce to sell products to B2B and B2C customers can be a bit tricky. Fortunately, the Wholesale Suite plugin is here to help, providing a free and powerful platform to support your WooCommerce sales.

In this article, we outlined three easy steps that you can take to start selling to B2B and B2C customers:

1. Creating crucial user roles to provide wholesale pricing to the right customers.
2. Setting wholesale prices for both B2B and B2C customers 
3. Tweaking your settings to match your brand and visitors.

How do you appeal to your wholesale customers? Let us know in the comments section below!