How to build a WooCommerce wholesale store

January 10, 2024

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. 

Why build a WooCommerce Wholesale store?

Understanding the Need for a WooCommerce Wholesale Store

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: 

  1. Growing Your Market: Selling in bulk through wholesale channels lets you reach new customers and businesses that you might not be able to reach through regular retail channels.
  2. Brand Awareness: When you sell to other businesses, your goods can reach more people, which makes your brand more visible and easy to recognize.
  3. Volume Sales: When you buy in bulk, you usually buy bigger amounts, which means you sell more and might make more money overall.
  4. Operational Efficiency: Managing supplies and sales in wholesale businesses is often streamlined, which makes them more efficient and reduces the amount of work that needs to be done by employees.
  5. Diversifying into wholesale can help lower the risks that come with depending only on direct-to-consumer sales, especially when market conditions change quickly.
  6. Customer Loyalty: Getting to know other businesses can lead to long-term partnerships and repeat sales, which makes customers more loyal and stable.
  7. Advantage over your competitors: If your competitors can only sell directly to customers, then offering wholesale choices can give you an edge.

Don’t have a WooCommerce wholesale store yet?

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. 

What you’ll need to start a WooCommerce store

How do you build a WooCommerce Wholesale store?

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.

What to look for in a WooCommerce 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:

Application forms

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.

Customer or user roles

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.

Dynamic pricing

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. 

The best WooCommerce whole store plugins

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. 

Wholesale Suite – WooCommerce Wholesale Prices & B2B Plugin

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:

  • Set wholesale prices on simple or variable products
  • Option to show or hide retail prices from wholesale customers
  • Disable WooCommerce coupons for wholesale customers
  • Multi-currency

Read more about WooCommerce Wholesale Prices here.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro by Barn2

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:

  • Unlimited B2B user roles
  • Offer different pricing for user roles
  • Order forms
  • Hide or show products depending on user role

To learn more about WooCommerce Wholesale Pro, click here.

WooCommerce  B2B by Code4Life

Another highly rated wholesale plugin, this one boasts the most complete solution for a B2B WooCommerce store.

Key features:

  • Different pricing for customer groups
  • Hide or show prices, products, or pages for wholesale users
  • User roles and customer groups

Learn more about WooCommerce B2B on Codecanyon.

IgniteWoo

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:

  •  Tiered role-based prices
  • Role-restricted prices
  • Dropshipping
  • Backorders

Learn more here.

Booster

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:

  • New wholesale pricing
  • Discount pricing based on quantity
  • Discounts can be enabled or disabled

Learn more about Booster here.

Final thoughts

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. 

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