How to Create a WooCommerce Wholesale Store

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a wholesale store on WooCommerce. We’ll cover the following:

• Why WooCommerce is suited for wholesale stores. 
• What you should look for in a good WooCommerce wholesale store.
• Finally, how to go about adding these wholesale features to your online store.

Plus, we’ll show you how you to do all of this with one WooCommerce wholesale plugin, B2B Market.

But first, let’s take a look a why WooCommerce works so well for wholesale stores.

Why use WooCommerce for your wholesale store

WooCommerce is a versatile and free plugin that allows you to create any type of ecommerce business from your WordPress website. This includes both B2C and B2B (wholesale) businesses. WooCommerce works so well for wholesale stores because:

WooCommerce is great for you and your customers

WooCommerce is a great solution because it’s not only easy for you, as the store owner, but also for your customers.  

It provides you with all the tools you need to start a wholesale (B2B) store by default. With WooCommerce, you can get access to modern page templates, a checkout, control over your shipping, prices, and more.

With some WooCommerce extensions, you also get to create and manage multiple user roles. This is important when you want to offer role-based/tiered pricing and separate your wholesale and retail customers. Everything in the backend of your store is fully managed, so you only have to worry about the front end. 

As a legitimate business, you have a legal obligation to pay taxes. WooCommerce has many options to help you set up and collect taxes as required in your legal jurisdiction. As a result, you can easily create a wholesale store from it. 

For customers, WooCommerce is straightforward and uncomplicated. It presents the customer’s journey through your store in a clear and step-wise fashion. It also allows you to add features to enrich your customers’ experience with your store further. 

WooCommerce is flexible

Whether you want to add a wholesale section in your B2C WooCommerce store or you want to create an entire wholesale store, you can do both with WooCommerce. Because it’s open-source, it places no limits on what you can do. You can customize anything and everything, from how your store looks to how it operates.

It allows you to add unlimited products and users. That’s not all, you can also take unlimited orders. As your business grows, your WooCommerce store can also grow alongside it. 

You can also integrate your customer’s preferred payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) and manage your store’s security. Most importantly, it allows you to optimize its consumer-like experience for B2B. 

The best part is that you can do all this in WooCommerce alone, without installing additional plugins. 

With WooCommerce, you have the added advantage of installing additional plugins to add more features to your store. This is specifically good for a B2B store since it has additional requirements that cannot be fulfilled by the default WooCommerce install. 

Although WooCommerce single-handedly enables you to create a wholesale store, it lacks some critical features which are essential for a wholesale store’s success. 

What features does your WooCommerce wholesale store need?

To create an effective wholesale store, you’ll need to make sure it has the following features. 

Note: Keep in mind that these are just a few, there are many more that your wholesale business could need depending on how you want to operate or what you want to sell. 

Hidden prices and user role-based pricing

Wholesale user registration is a big part of a wholesale store’s operations. To ensure your customers register in your store, you can hide prices from certain wholesale user roles, especially guests. This way you can ask customers to register before they can access prices. 

When you have a B2B section inside your B2C store, you would want to separate retail pricing and wholesale pricing for your B2B and B2C customers. You wouldn’t want your B2C customers purchasing WooCommerce products using B2B prices, because they tend to be slightly lowered to incentivize wholesale buyers to purchase in bulk.

You can set up role-based pricing to separate these two groups and add different prices or dynamic pricing for your customers. Role-based pricing can also be useful if you want to offer tiered pricing for your wholesale customers.

Hidden products based on the user role or customer group

If you already have a B2C store and you want to add a wholesale section to it, hiding products based on the customer group would be crucial. Let’s say you want to start selling raw materials or other products that require further refinement (for example, assembly, polishing, etc.), you would want to hide these products from the B2C customers. 

Wholesale registration forms

Since you offer multiple user roles in your wholesale WooCommerce store, you will require wholesale customers to register as that, so that they can be assigned this role. In addition to wholesale registration for your customers, you can include VAT ID validation as your customers go through registration. Here’s why this is important. 

Since you have a legal obligation to pay taxes, you have to determine when you should charge taxes on a transaction. VAT ID validation enables you to do this while providing you with vital tax information required by the authorities, that will back your decision to charge or not to charge taxes on a given sale. This way, you will display gross prices for your products, inclusive of VAT. 

Minimum and maximum quantities

Setting minimum and maximum order quantities is important for your wholesale because, if your customer orders: 

• Too much, you won’t be able to fulfill the order. 
• Too little, your store won’t benefit. 

Setting these limits allows you to manage your orders and stock. 

So now we’ve seen what your wholesale store on WooCommerce needs, let’s see how you can create a wholesale store on WooCommerce with these features. To do so, we’ll introduce the best WooCommerce wholesale plugin, B2B Market.

How to create a wholesale store using WooCommerce

Creating a wholesale store on WooCommerce with these features can’t be done in a default WooCommerce install. To achieve this, you’ll need the help of a plugin. 

Introducing the wholesale prices plugin, B2B Market

B2B Market is a WooCommerce plugin that caters to all of your wholesale store’s needs. Apart from adding all of the features mentioned above to your wholesale store on WooCommerce B2B Market also enables you to do the following:

• Set up sophisticated discounts – you can offer customers specific wholesale discounts on their first order. 
• Include VAT number validation at registration – so that your customers can see gross prices inclusive of VAT. 
• Create custom user roles and offer role-based pricing – With B2B Market you can create custom user roles (such as Wholesale customer) that are different from the 8 user roles in the default WooCommerce/WordPress install. After creating these roles, you can add role-based pricing for the different customer roles available. 
• Connect with customers via Slack – B2B Market gives you the chance to easily send and receive notifications from your customers via its integration with slack. 
• You can also allow or restrict different shipping methods and allow customers to order in bulk. 

Now, let’s see how you can set it up with the following tutorial. 

Step 1: Create your customer groups/user roles

Start by purchasing and installing B2B Market on your WordPress site: B2B Market – MarketPress 

After the plugin has been installed and activated, follow these steps to create a customer group. 

NOTE: For this guide, we’ll create a Wholesale customer group. 

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce > B2B Market to go to the plugin’s Settings page. 
2. Then go to Customer Group > Create Customer Group. This will take you to an editing page for the customer group you want to create.

3. First, name your customer group in the Title field – Wholesale customer in this case. 
4. Just below the title field, you will see the next two pricing settings which you will need to set up. 

• Group Price – You can set a fixed discount for your wholesale customers. To do this, enter a value in the Group Price field, then select the discount type as either a percentage or a fixed amount. Finally, in the Product Category section, select All Categories. The price will be modified for each product assigned to this customer group.  
• Bulk Price – Bulk prices will only apply after a customer has a certain quantity of the same product in their cart. B2B Market enables you to set this up in three ways: 

• Discount(%) – For orders above the set limit, the customer will be eligible for this percentage discount for all purchases above the set limit. 
• Discount(Fixed Price) – For orders above the set limit, each item will incur a fixed discount price.  
• Fixed Price – Set a flat rate to charge products above the limit. 

Apart from Group and Bulk prices, you will also encounter the following fields. 

• Restrictions – Here you can exclude specific products or categories from this customer group. 
• Discounts  – A special feature in B2B Market that enables you to give new customers a one-time discount on their first order. You will need to give it a name, add a value (fixed or percentage), and select products or categories to be excluded (optional). 
• Tax Control – If you want your customers to provide the VAT ID at registration, you can click on the toggle that says ‘Use validation for the registration of this customer group’.

5. Next, click on Override and Activate for all products to finalize your settings. 
6. Once you’re done click on the Save Customer Group button at the bottom.   

After creating customer groups, you can hide prices from visitors and request them to register before they can access the prices. 

Step 2: Hide product prices from site visitors

To hide product prices from site visitors or specific users, take the following steps: 

1. Go back to the B2B Market settings page and click on the Options tab. 
2. Look for the Price Display link at the top and click on it. 
3. On the next page, scroll to the bottom to reach the Hide Prices for Customer Groups section.  
4. You will see three toggles on this page: Wholesale, Customer, and Guest. Click the guest toggle to switch it on. 

5. Below these toggles, there is a field for adding the message to be displayed where the price should be when guests browse your products. 
6. Add a clear message here and include a link to the registration page. 

Doing this doesn’t completely set up user registration in your store. You will also need to activate wholesale registration and VAT ID validation.

Step 3: Set up wholesale registration

To activate wholesale registration and VAT ID validation in your store, take the following steps: 

1. Click on the Add-ons tab on the B2B Market settings page. 
2. Then click on the toggle in the Registration block to activate registration. A new registration tab will appear among the menu items on the left of the plugin’s Settings page. 

3. Click on the Registration tab and find the wholesale customer group. Click the toggle under this section to activate registration for wholesale customers. 

4. When you’re done scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes. 

After activating registration, you need to make one more setting to display the registration button on the WooCommerce login page. 

To do this: 

1. Go to WooCommerce > Settings from your WordPress dashboard. 
2. Next, click on the Accounts & Privacy tab at the top of this page. 
3. In the Account Creation section, check the box that says Allow customers to create an account on the “My Account” page. 

That’s it. Your customers will see the register button that will direct them to where they can create their accounts.

That’s how you can create a WooCommerce wholesale store using B2B Market. However, this is just a subset of what you can do with B2B Market to create a competent wholesale store on WooCommerce. 

You can take additional steps to customize your Wholesale store to:

• Implement role-based pricing for individual products (including variable products), on the products section of your WooCommerce dashboard. 
• Set maximum and minimum quantities that wholesale customers.
• and more.

Create your WooCommerce wholesale store today

On its own, WooCommerce works well for wholesale because it’s easy to use and flexible. However, it lacks the fundamental features required to build a competent wholesale store.  

So if you’re looking into wholesale for WooCommerce, look no further than the WordPress plugin, B2B Market. B2B Market makes creating your wholesale store simple, allowing you to add these features in just a few steps.

It utilizes the features available in the default WooCommerce install and enhances them for B2B businesses. Combining B2B Market with WooCommerce will give you control over a powerful and flexible ecommerce store.