Are you looking to expand your business in the coming year by catering to wholesale clients? Being a WooCommerce wholesale pro requires more than a penchant for online sales. You might be able to attract retail customers but if you don’t know what wholesale buyers are looking for, you might not have that much success selling in bulk.
To be a WooCommerce wholesale pro, you need to optimize your store to cater to your best buyers. We’re here to help you out! In this article, we’ll talk about what that means and how to do it.
So, let’s get started!
What Are The Key Attributes Of A Wholesale Professional?
Wholesale buyers are different than retail customers. In most cases, there’s a long customer journey leading to regular users making a purchase. Once they’re a customer, they might keep coming back to your store, but it’s rare for them to buy products in bulk.
With wholesale customers, you don’t have to do as much convincing. Usually, they’re buying from you for re-selling purposes, so they know precisely what products they want and how much they’re willing to pay for them.
To be a WooCommerce wholesale pro, you need to rely less on copy and marketing and more on optimizing your online store. You want the bulk purchasing process to be as seamless as possible, and there are plenty of ways that you can improve WooCommerce to get there.
How To Be A WooCommerce Wholesale Pro (3 Key Tips)
Although WooCommerce is a powerful platform on its own, there are plenty of ways to optimize it for wholesale operations. In this section, we’ll explore three tips and tools to help you become a wholesale pro.
1. Keep your prices up to date
Updating prices using WooCommerce is simple. All you have to do is edit specific products and change their prices when necessary. The same applies to wholesale prices if you’re using Wholesale Prices for WooCommerce:
What this plugin does is create a custom wholesale user role within your website. Then you get to update both regular and wholesale prices when you edit WooCommerce products:
Although that process is simple, it’s not scalable when you have hundreds or thousands of products in your inventory. In that case, updating prices when you run offers or need to move specific products becomes a chore.
That becomes a big problem if you happen to get a wholesale purchase order before you update prices. However, WooCommerce enables you to export your inventory list in spreadsheet format:
Once you have that CSV file, you can edit it and update elements in a matter of minutes, including wholesale prices.
That efficiency becomes even more important if you use Wholesale Prices Premium. With that extension, you can create as many wholesale customer user roles as you need. The more roles there are the more prices that you’ll need to update each time, which can take days without a CSV file.
2. Set up a bulk order form
Ordering products in bulk from a ‘regular’ WooCommerce shop page can be a hassle. In most cases, you have to add products one by one and jump from one page to another to put together a cart. When you’re ordering dozens or hundreds of products, that’s too much work.
If you’re already one plugin from Wholesale Suite, then we recommend you check out another one of its components, Wholesale Order Form.
What this plugin does is create a wholesale order form page for your bulk customers to use. You can configure that page to enable visitors to add the number of products they want using a text field, to display inventory numbers, and more:
That’s a quick example of a wholesale order form page created using the plugin.
If you offer product variations, you can also enable customers to switch between them and add multiple products to their cart, all without leaving that page.
By simplifying the order process, you increase the chances that wholesale customers will want to come back instead of dealing with other, less user-friendly stores.
3. Recruit wholesale customers on autopilot
Enabling users to register for your WooCommerce store is simple. WordPress includes registration functionality out of the box and WooCommerce sets up additional customer user roles that you can use.
However, once you get into the realm of wholesale orders, user registration gets a bit more tricky. As we mentioned before, Wholesale Prices enable you to add a new wholesale customer user role to your store.
If you’re using Wholesale Prices Premium, then you can add as many wholesale user roles as you need:
However, if you want customers to be able to register using those roles, you’ll need to set up a custom form. With Wholesale Lead Capture, you can set up a user registration form for your wholesale customers only.
The plugin creates that form for you and it enables you to configure what fields to include and what information you need from customers:
More importantly, the Lead Capture plugin enables you to decide whether to approve wholesale user registrations manually or automatically. If you opt for the automatic route, customers will be able to start buying from you right away.
Conclusion
Being a WooCommerce wholesale pro means finding ways to improve your store’s customer experience so much, that even buying products in bulk becomes simple.
If you’re using Wholesale Suite, here’s how you can optimize your WooCommerce wholesale operation:
Do you have any questions about how to become a WooCommerce wholesale pro? Ask away in the comments section below!
Great Ideas with the solution to execute. Really helpful for those who wants to turn his retail shop into a wholesaling shop. is there any free version of the Wholesale Order Form plugin available? I just want to make a try before going for the Pro plan.
Hey Anthony, unfortunately we don’t have a free version of the Order Form plugin, but we do have a 14-day refund guarantee period. Hope this might be an option – just reach out to our team if you have any questions :)
Hello I’m having issues setting up proper wholesale shipping charges
How do I set up wholesale shipping abs tracking information for my customers
Need help ASAP
Hi Teresa, we have a great guide on setting up shipping mapping for wholesale, but please send us a support ticket here and we’ll gladly help :)