Do you want to build a WooCommerce wholesale store alongside your existing retail store? WooCommerce is the most flexible ecommerce platform out there – it offers the most control over your online store, high-level customization, and it’s equipped to handle high-volume inventories. So whether you’re selling directly to consumers, selling to other businesses (or both) WooCommerce is an ideal solution.
Diversifying your sales platforms is important for business growth and survival in today’s competitive digital market. A WooCommerce bulk store is a smart way to get your business to more people. Setting up a WooCommerce bulk store is not only a good idea, it’s becoming more and more necessary to do well in the eCommerce industry.
Benefits of selling wholesale or bulk products include:
Thinking of starting a wholesale store on WooCommerce, but you don’t actually have a WooCommerce store yet? No worries. Setting up your WooCommerce store can be done in a few easy steps.
Operating a wholesale business requires a different setup than a B2C business.
Firstly, if you’re planning to operate a wholesale business, you should have the inventory to sustain it. If other businesses are going to purchase in bulk from you, you’ll need a bulk inventory. Here’s how to manage bulk inventories on WooCommerce.
On top of that, you’ll need the right tools to operate a wholesale store. For example, you’ll need to accept wholesale customer applications, assign them user roles, and offer them separate wholesale prices from your retail consumers.
You can use a WooCommerce wholesale plugin to take care of most of your needs. We’ll go over some of the best plugins in a moment, but first, let’s just take a look at what you should be looking for in your wholesale plugin.
Some of the plugins we’ll talk about have a plethora of different features – some of which you don’t really need but might make your life a little easier. You only need a few foundational features to successfully run your WooCommerce wholesale store:
If you’re operating a retail store and a wholesale store at once, it will be essential for potential wholesale customers to reach out to you. Since not just anyone can purchase wholesale goods, you will need to have some kind of application or vetting process before allowing a business to become a wholesale customer.
To sell both retail and wholesale, you’ll need a way to distinguish your wholesale customers from your retail customers so you can offer them unique pricing. Or, maybe you want to distinguish different tiers of wholesale customers. To do this, you need to classify or identify your wholesale customers on your WooCommerce store.
Likewise, to operate a WooCommerce wholesale store, you’ll need the ability to offer dynamic or tiered pricing based on your customer’s role. Your retail customers will pay a different price than your wholesale customers, and some of your wholesale customers will pay different prices from each other. Additionally, prices should vary depending on the number of products purchased.
Now that you know what tools you’ll need for your wholesale business, let’s go over some of the most popular or top-rated wholesale plugins that will allow you to operate your WooCommerce store successfully.
This five-star plugin is one of the highest-rated wholesale plugins. It offers a number of useful features for building a WooCommerce wholesale store, and the best part is that it’s completely free. They also offer excellent support, so you’re not alone when setting up your wholesale store.
Some of their key features include:
Read more about WooCommerce Wholesale Prices here.
Barn2 is a software company that specializes in WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. They offer a great selection of WordPress plugins, so you know they know what they’re doing. Their wholesale plugin is packed with useful features.
Key features:
To learn more about WooCommerce Wholesale Pro, click here.
Another highly rated wholesale plugin, this one boasts the most complete solution for a B2B WooCommerce store.
Key features:
Learn more about WooCommerce B2B on Codecanyon.
Another powerful plugin is IgniteWoo’s WoOCommerce Wholesale Pro Suite. This one is a little bit pricer, starting at $149 for a single site, however, they offer a rich feature list, and a year of email and phone support.
Key features:
Learn more here.
Listed in our best WooCommerce plugins to increase sales, Booster for WooCommerce does multitude of things. Some of its features are great for wholesale stores – however, because it offers many general WooCommerce features, this one may not be as in-depth as some of the others on this list.
Key features for wholesale:
Learn more about Booster here.
Setting up your WooCommerce store takes only minutes, and with so many options for wholesale plugins, creating a WooCommerce wholesale store is a piece of cake.
With so many options for customization, you can even set up your own system by creating it yourself, or installing the specific features you need for your wholesale store, as helpfully outlined by LearnWoo.
Likewise, if you’re selling in-store on top of operating an online wholesale store, a WooCommerce point of sale system like Oliver POS can handle bulk inventories, and syncs directly to your WooCommerce so you can manage your online and in-store operations.