Selling wholesale on Shopify

shopify wholesale

Wholesale is selling your products in large quantities to other retailers (or wholesalers) and not directly to an end consumer. What is the best way to do this within the Shopify universe? Set up a separate store, use discount codes, or use a wholesale app?

Why sell Wholesale?

Wholesale is a business-to-business sales strategy where another store carries your products and markets them to potential future customers.

Selling your products in bulk at a lower price can help diversify your revenue. By allowing smaller gross margins, you allow re-sellers space for their marketing and promotion of your products. They are pushing you further and more extensive, which in turn is an excellent way to increase your brand recognition and generate more cashflow.

Selling wholesale on Shopify

Although Shopify does not have an out of the box solution for selling wholesale, there are alternatives available. Depending on the products you sell and how you sell them, your wholesale method could vary - but it should fit your business model. The three most common options are setting up a separate store, using discount codes, or a wholesale app.

Separate online store

By simply adding a sub-domain or using a separate domain, you can create another store aimed at wholesalers. You can set up an independent store by duplicating your existing online store, password-protecting it, and customizing it to the exact shopping experience you want for your wholesale customers to have.

Advantages

  • Easy to set up without extra customization.
  • A unique wholesale experience.
  • The possibility to tailor your payment methods, tax and shipping options.

Disadvantages

  • You have to pay and manage two stores.
  • Keeping track of inventory in two separate systems.
  • Double the workload when making changes to product lists.

Discount codes

Discount codes can be easily generated for a variety of discounts and distributed to your target customers without the hustle of creating complicated additional systems.

Advantages

  • Very simple to set up.
  • Inventory tracking works for both retail and wholesale.
  • Easy to restrict discounts to certain groups of products.

Disadvantages

  • Individual items within a collection can’t have different price reductions.
  • Discount codes can be shared or leaked within customer groups.
  • Only one discount code can be used per purchase.

Shopify wholesale apps

The Shopify App Store has several apps that allow you to start selling your products to wholesalers at different rates. This option is highly recommended, especially for those who want to increase their wholesale customer base actively.

Bold Custom Pricing, SparkLayer B2BWholesaler, and Supple Wholesale are apps that allow you to tag chosen customers as wholesale. They will then be exclusively offered lower prices for the products you want to sell in bulk.

Advantages

  • Your inventory and orders are tracked within the same store.
  • Possibility for logged-in users to see multiple levels/tiers of pricing.
  • Increased control over pricing for your product portfolio.

Disadvantages

  • It takes a bit more time to set-up.
  • The additional cost of running another app.

Sufio Invoices for Wholesale Customers

Invoices for wholesale customers

Issuing invoices is one of the core elements to fostering a good relationship between retailers and their customers, but they do more than just detailing what you have bought and for how much.

Wholesale customers are mostly businesses just like you, so receiving a valid invoice is essential for their accounting.

Sufio does the invoicing for you, by automatically creating invoices when wholesale orders are created, paid, or fulfilled, taking the stress out of invoicing for your online store.

Invoices are sent via email and can be paid directly by credit card; however, your wholesale customers can pay even after the checkout stage. You can get paid faster and improve your cash flow by receiving payments from anywhere.