Everything you need to start selling retail to customers and wholesale to retailers, on the same Shopify store.
Sell directly to customers at price X
Sell cheaper to retailers at price Y
Building an online retail store, to sell directly to customers, and a wholesale store, to sell goods in large quantities to be retailed by others, was impossible without installing apps or hiring a developer for an expensive store customization. Today, we solve that pain.
Until recently, it was impossible to sell online, on the same store, to retail customers and wholesale customers.
Merchants had to create a second store for wholesale. Then came some apps, expensive, complicated, which results to a inefficient layer over the theme. This category of apps is one of the most popular category on Shopify’s App store. Because there is a huge demand for it. Yet no theme solve selling retail and wholesale on Shopify once and for all, hassle-free. Until today.
This article explains the growth of the B2B Market. It also reveals that building wholesale stores is a popular request to Shopify Experts. As Shopify Experts ourselves, we can testify. More and more people try to tweak their current theme to enable wholesale on their store, and they follow popular post like this one or take source code from Github like that
. The results are sometimes good, sometimes bad, but the process is usually painful, especially for a non-technical person, like at least 8 out of 10 Shopify merchants.
While Shopify Plus offers a Wholesale channel, all other Shopify plans rely on apps to make a wholesale store possible. Until today.
The Wholesale theme targets mainly B2C stores that want to open their market to B2B, which means to wholesalers. It could also serve the need of a pure B2B store, but the main focus of the features we build are for B2C stores that opens a B2B branch. Indirectly, that serves a similar and growing need: membership (VIP) stores. Because at the end of the day, wholesalers are one (or more) customer groups, the same way any membership stores could have one or more different customer groups.
The best way to explain the how is with a use case. HS Apparel is a clothing company launching their new store. Like many other retail company which want to also sell wholesale, they need to provide different pricing to the wholesale customers, cheaper than to the retail customers. They have 3 levels of wholesalers, that they call R, V, B (each one with a different price list).
To achieve this, the Wholesale store (or the Wholesale theme extension) offers 2 options:
Set a flat % discount per customer group. Eg. Group A pays 10% less
Allow to set a different price on each product, per customer group.
Option 2 is useful for HS Apparel, because the flat % also gives incorrect price like $19.34 and they want to be able to put $19.99, or they simply want more flexibility.
In the Wholesale store (or in the Wholesale theme extension), when Option 2 is set, it overwrites option 1. By default the theme does option 1, because Option 2 is limited by the 100 product variants/options limit of Shopify. Which means Option 2 works good only for stores with products with few options (few variants).
Go to /admin/customers and select a customer
Add a group name as a customer tag
Go to /admin/customers
Click “filter customers” at the left of the search field
Select the filter "tagged with"
Type the customer group name (eg. Wholesaler)
Click Add filter and “Save this search”
Provide a group name (eg. Wholesaler)
You get a new tab for this customer group
Go to /admin/discounts_next
Set the discount up
Restrict the coupon code to the customer group (eg. Wholesaler)
Save
Go to Online store > Themes > Customize theme > General Settings tab
Select the “Discount” section
Put the group name you used in steps 1 & 2
Put the discount code from step 3
Compared to Option 1, it requires a bit more work from your side but it's more flexible and easier to understand. It gives a whole new level of control over prices. Shopify currently allows 3 options for variants on a product. We use one of these options in order to achieve what we need.
Inside each product, scroll down to “Add variants” and create an option called "Customer Group". You can use this option to set different prices for different customer groups. It will look like this
See our Wholesale packagesCheck out our Wholesale store package or get the Wholesale theme extension.
Tabarnapp's mission is to help you get the most of each visit on your Shopify store.
E: support@tabarnapp.com
