Tutorial: How To Create a WooCommerce B2B Store (3 Simple Steps)

WooCommerce is a highly popular solution for online store owners. Although it’s primarily used by retailers, the benefits of launching a WooCommerce Business to Business (B2B) store are hard to ignore.

Apart from maximizing your profits, a WooCommerce B2B store helps you to sell off your inventory faster. Fortunately, with the help of our WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium plugin, you can easily set one up without much hassle.

In this post, we’ll show you how you can easily transform your website to serve both B2B and Business to Consumer (B2C) customers using WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium. First, let’s talk about the benefits of combining your wholesale and retail e-commerce operations.

Why You Might Want to Serve B2B and B2C Customers With One Online Store

Given that wholesale and retail markets are often entirely different terrains altogether, it makes sense that you might think you should use separate online stores for these two purposes. However, several large enterprises have seen numerous benefits in combining both types of e-commerce.

For a clearer picture, let’s look at some of the key advantages of combining your WooCommerce B2B and B2C sites:

• You can reduce your administrative and technical load. Running a single website is challenging and resource-demanding enough. Having to deal with two only adds to the challenge. Apart from all the technical oversight required, you also have to deal with the administrative procedures that take place offline. Being able to organize things in one place is generally less work.
• All your operations are significantly simplified. Initially, when setting up a single site for B2B and B2C customers, there may be a lot of technical work to handle. However, once the site is up and running, you get to reap several operational benefits. Specifically, you can avoid dealing with components such as spreadsheets and custom price lists.
• You can manage all your products in one place. Having a unified database as a business has its various advantages. There may be situations when you want to display certain products only to some customers. You can easily do that with an e-commerce plugin. This tends to be much easier than managing multiple catalogs.

In a nutshell, the advantages of having only one site to maintain and promote cannot be overlooked. With the help of certain best practices, you can easily serve both your B2B and B2C customers faster and better.

How to Create a WooCommerce B2B Store (In 3 Steps)

Once you decide to make the switch and combine your WooCommerce B2B and B2C stores, the first thing you’ll need to do is get the right tools to help you go about it. Our WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium plugin is a perfect solution.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can follow the steps below to create your own WooCommerce B2B store.

Step 1: Set your B2B prices

The first thing you’ll need to do in your new wholesale store is set new prices specifically for your B2B customers. The logic behind this is very simple: the higher the volume the customer is purchasing, the lower the price. This is a general wholesale rule that encourages buyers to purchase in larger quantities.

In order to set varying prices for different types of customers, you’ll first need to assign them different user roles. Fortunately, WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium automatically creates a default wholesale user role once you activate it. You can find it by navigating to WooCommerce > Wholesale Roles:

For more flexibility, you can add additional custom roles that allow for more complex pricing structures and multiple pricing tiers.

Once you click the Add New Wholesale Role button, you’ll be able to add wholesale discounts on a per-role basis:

WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium offers you several options for configuring your B2B prices. Some popular ones include:

• Global percentage discounts. This applies a set percentage discount for wholesale customers to all products across your site.
• Product-based prices. You can also set specific wholesale prices for selected products. You’ll find this option in the Product data field of the product page editor.
• Category-based discounts. To apply a certain discount to a category of products on a per-role basis, simply navigate to Products > Categories.
• Quantity-based pricing. This is a feature you may want to use to create a tiered pricing system based on the order quantity.
• User-specific prices. This option lets you override all or specific wholesale pricing settings for individual users.

We also have a great guide on how to calculate your wholesale prices vs. retail prices here.

Once your B2B prices are in order, you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: Determine the product visibility settings for your WooCommerce B2B and B2C customers

After setting your B2B prices, you’ll need to determine which customers they’ll be visible to. You may want to make certain products visible to B2B customers but hide them from B2C customers and vice versa.

There are a number of reasons for this. For example:

• Some products may be more profitable when sold in bulk (to B2B customers) than individually (to B2C customers).
• You may want to market different types of products to your wholesale and retail audiences (e.g., you could sell tech products to B2C customers and clothing to wholesale customers).

Each time you add a product in WooCommerce, you can use the Wholesale Exclusive Variation setting to make it visible only to wholesale customers:

If you’ve created multiple wholesale user roles, you can select any of them from the dropdown menu.

To implement settings for retail-only products, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Pricing. You can then check the Only Show Wholesale Products To Wholesale Customers box:

Likewise, WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium enables you to hide entire product categories from retail customers.

However, if you simply want to get your site up in the quickest time possible, you can rest assured that the plugin automatically hides wholesale discounts from retail customers. Therefore, once you’ve set your site’s user roles appropriately, you really don’t need to worry about confusing your customers.

Step 3: Sign B2B buyers up for wholesale customer accounts

It is very important to note that for wholesale discounts to be made available to your WooCommerce B2B buyers, they must have accounts with the wholesale customer role. As the site administrator, you’ll need to assign them this role.

There are two ways to go about this. You can either:

• Add or edit each customer’s user role, or
• Make the wholesale customer role the default role for all new accounts

To add a new user or change an existing user’s role, simply navigate to the Users tab of the WordPress dashboard and select their account from the list. Then scroll down to Role and select Wholesale Customer from the list:

You can set the wholesale customer role as the default for all new accounts by navigating to Settings > General and changing the New User Default Role:

If you’re running a big store with a lot of traffic, either of these methods above may clog your system up quickly. Fortunately, our WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture plugin improves the whole procedure significantly. Among other features, it helps you to build a detailed registration form and provides customizable wholesale signup email sequences.

Conclusion

Managing separate wholesale and retail stores can be quite demanding. You would normally have to keep track of your pricing and inventory separately. However, with the right tool, you can set up your retail store to also serve B2B customers in no time.

Here’s a recap of the three easy steps involved in creating a WooCommerce B2B store using WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium:

1. Set your B2B prices.
2. Determine the product visibility settings for your B2B and B2C customers.
3. Sign B2B buyers up for wholesale customer accounts.

Do you have any questions about selling wholesale and retail on the same e-commerce site? Let us know in the comments section below!