Did you know the wholesale trade industry is worth $12.3 trillion in 2023? If you’re an eCommerce business owner on Shopify, you’re likely wondering how to tap into this lucrative market. The good news is that Shopify makes it easy to offer wholesale pricing to your customers.
With a highly competitive and ever-evolving online retail landscape, leveraging wholesale is a great way to remain relevant and keep profitability high. It allows you to drive more revenue while passing some marketing burdens to other businesses.
However, making the leap to offering wholesale pricing on your Shopify store can be daunting. There are several considerations, including inventory management across multi-channels. Fortunately, Shopify offers several solutions, such as SKULabs, to help you manage this transition.
This guide will walk you through the various ways to sell wholesale via Shopify so that you can start offering your products at optimal tier pricing.
What is wholesaling?
Before we dive into setting up a wholesale store on Shopify, it’s important to understand the basics of wholesaling. Wholesaling is the practice of selling products or services in bulk at low prices directly to other businesses, who then resell them to consumers. You can wholesale almost everything, including home décor, apparel and related accessories, food items, kitchenware, party supplies, health and wellness products, and more.
Wholesaling doesn’t mean that you should stop selling to direct consumers. Instead, it allows you to expand your reach by selling to both retailers and consumers.
Various ways to sell wholesale via Shopify
When it comes to setting up a wholesale store on Shopify, there are a few different approaches you can take. Let’s take a look at the various options:
Create a password-protected storefront
If you want to start selling your products wholesale through retailers, you can create a separate, password-protected page so only approved buyers (retailers) can access your discounted prices. This method allows you to control who can access your special pricing offers. It also protects against unauthorized purchases from non-wholesale buyers who may try to take advantage of discounted prices meant only for approved customers.
It’s easy to password-protect your wholesale store on your eCommerce platform. If you own a Shopify store, the Shopify admin section has this protection feature. Once you create your store, you can add all the products you’re offering at a discount to retailers.
If your wholesale business is large, you may be worried that unapproved retailers will access your password. In that case, you should consider a more secure password-protection app like Locksmith. This app will require passwords for your individual collections, products, and variants.
With Locksmith, customers will create accounts and set up their preferred unique passwords instead of using a generic ones. You can determine which retailers can access the different parts of your store and how you want to share access with them.
Open a separate wholesale storefront on Shopify
This option is perfect if you already have a Shopify store that sells directly to consumers and you want to create a wholesale store targeting retail businesses. It requires you to set up another Shopify store featuring a different URL and password-protecting it.
You can use apps like Shopify Plus if your sales volumes are high. This app has a wholesale channel feature that you can use to create your wholesale store and protect it using a password. The wholesale channel will use your existing products to create a new storefront, requiring minimal effort.
You can customize your prices based on customer groups and use volume-based discounts. Even better, you’ll get separate sales reports distinct from the report of your B2C sales.
Create a wholesale channel using a wholesale app
Shopify has apps that allow you to offer wholesale pricing without establishing a separate store. An example is Wholesale Club, an app that allows you to segment your retail customers into different tiers. You can assign each tier a specific discount off the regular price for your retailer customers.
The best thing about Wholesale Club is that it comes loaded with marketing features that make it easy to woo customers into buying more to get bigger discounts. You can give discounts to your wholesale customers based on the quantity of items they buy or their cart totals. The wholesale pricing in Wholesale Club is only accessible to customers who log in using their approved retailer accounts.
Leverage Handshake marketplace
Handshake is a wholesale marketplace created by Shopify to connect approved Shopify merchants selling wholesale with retailers. To get started, you should first apply to sell your products on this marketplace.
Once you get approval, you can install Handshake on your Shopify admin. You can then list your wholesale products and business on the Handshake marketplace.
Retailers looking for products can search the marketplace and place orders. You’ll receive notification of the orders, process them, and fulfill them.
Inventory management challenges when wholesaling
Wholesaling presents unique inventory management challenges. One of the key challenges is order management, as you need to be able to track orders from retailers, manage invoices and payments, and ensure product availability at all times.
Additionally, you need to be able to streamline your warehouse operations and ensure product accuracy, which can be difficult in multi-channel environments. Finally, you must be able to track sales across channels and optimize pricing accordingly, which can be complex if you sell products across multiple marketplaces.
Use SKULabs for streamlined inventory and warehouse management
SKULabs is the perfect app to help you stay on top of all the above challenges when wholesaling on Shopify. This multi-channel inventory, warehouse, and order management solution allows you to track multi-channel orders in one place.
The app has a multi-channel order syncing feature that integrates all your wholesale and retail stores, physical sites, and marketplaces in one place. With SKULabs, you have granular control over the inventory levels for each channel. As a result, you can accurately determine how much of a single product you would like to advertise between B2B and B2C stores.
The real-time inventory control and sync give you a real-time count of your items across all your sales channels. You can search or scan to determine the product counts and even set low-stock alerts to help you restock items in time.
Sign up for SKULabs and get your store ready for wholesaling today.
