Category: News & Announcements

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.

USPS will begin requiring HS Tariff Codes on all EU-bound shipments.

What will this mean for eCommerce sellers?

Starting on March 1st 2023, there will be a new set of guidelines for businesses that send packages to countries that are now following the EU customs regulations. If you are not prepared for these changes, this can significantly slow down and add confusion to your current shipping operations costing you money, valuable time, and negatively impacting customer satisfaction.

What changes are taking place?

USPS will begin to require HS Tariff Codes on all EU-bound shipments. Every item will now need to be listed and accounted for on your customs declaration forms.

The other significant change occurs on the item’s descriptions. This requirement will force you to be more descriptive on the items in the box. For example, instead of “clothing”, it must be “men’s shirts”, “boy’s vest” or “women’s jacket”.  More examples from the USPS website below:

Guidance for Acceptable Descriptions

What are these new changes designed to do for you?

For Businesses

• Prevent loss of international outbound revenue
• Follow new EU regulations, reducing fraud and increasing accountability
• Improve speed and efficiency of cross-border ecommerce
• Meet safety and security requirements, preventing delays, fines, and penalties for noncompliance
• Increase competitiveness

For Consumers

• Know EU rules and how to properly describe contents in international shipments
• Send packages with peace of mind, avoiding delayed, discarded, or destroyed packages

What countries follow the EU custom’s rules?

Austria	Germany	Norway
Belgium	Greece	Poland
Bulgaria	Hungary	Portugal
Croatia	Ireland	Romania
Cyprus Republic	Italy	Slovakia
Czech Republic	Latvia	Slovenia
Denmark	Lithuania	Spain
Estonia	Luxembourg	Sweden
Finland	Malta	Switzerland
France	Netherlands

What steps can my eCommerce business take to simplify this process?

Whether you are selling on a single channel, or you are a multi-channel operation, these guidelines will have an impact on your shipping processes unless you are fully prepared. 

Innovative software solutions such as SKULabs can help you streamline this process by automatically filling out the required forms, and sending electronic trade documents to your supported carriers.

Your time is too valuable to manually complete these forms for each of your international shipments. Let SKULabs do the work and  save you both time and money! 

Contact Us to find out how to get your international shipping on track before March 1st!

Experiencing success in online sales is no easy task. But if you want to stay ahead of the competition and maximize your earnings, consider switching to Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP).

Joining this powerful program will help you sell your products with the coveted Amazon Prime badge from your own warehouse. Unlike when selling your product through the Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM) method, SFP will give you access to over 200 million Prime members, so you can sell more and ship faster.

However, the SFP order fulfillment method isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Several challenges come with this fulfillment model. This article delves deeper into the SFP fulfillment method, its benefits, challenges, and how the right software can make it much easier to manage.

What is seller fulfilled prime?

Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) is an Amazon fulfillment program that allows qualified sellers to display the Prime badge on their products and deliver directly to customers from their own warehouses. This program enables sellers to provide a fast and reliable delivery service without shipping their products to Amazon’s warehouses first. With SFP, you can keep all your stock in your warehouse or the warehouse of your choice via a third-party provider.

To qualify for SFP, you must meet certain criteria, such as providing free two-day shipping and maintaining a low order cancellation rate. Amazon also requires you to meet a threshold of 50 orders within 90 days. Once approved, you can take advantage of the increased visibility and sales that come with displaying the Prime badge on your products.

The benefits of seller fulfilled prime

With all the requirements to qualify for SFP, is it worth it? Absolutely. Here are some of the key benefits:

Increased visibility and sales

Amazon boasts over 200 million Prime members who pay a flat annual fee to enjoy benefits like free delivery of their orders within two days. These customers are interested in fast, free, and reliable delivery.

So, displaying the Prime badge on your product listings drives more traffic to your products. You’ll gain access to this massive marketplace of shoppers and increase your sales potential.

Better control over your inventory

SFP gives you better inventory control than other fulfillment methods, like Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). With SFP, you can store your stock in your warehouse or the warehouse of a third-party provider and manage it according to your preferences. You can decide when and how much stock to order and when to ship orders out.

You also have the flexibility to adjust your inventory levels based on demand and customer feedback. This allows you to keep up with customer needs while minimizing the costs associated with excess inventory.

Saving you money

With SFP, you can fulfill orders directly from your warehouses or third-party providers, rather than shipping them to Amazon first. You can save money on shipping costs and avoid the need for costly storage fees that Amazon usually charges for the inventory stored in their warehouses.

This fee can be high during busy shopping seasons or if your items stay in the warehouse for a long time. If you’re using the FBA fulfillment method, Amazon will also charge you order removal fees if you need to remove stock from their fulfillment centers. SFP helps you avoid these extra costs.

Better tracking of packages

Since Amazon doesn’t take the reins for order fulfillment, you have more control over tracking packages. You can see what stage of fulfillment a package is in and determine if it will be delivered on time. This allows you to quickly address customer service issues related to order fulfillment and ensure that your customers are satisfied with their purchases.

Challenges of seller fulfilled prime

Despite its benefits, SFP is not without its share of logistical challenges. The most significant challenge of SFP is meeting Amazon’s strict requirements for timeliness and order cancellation rates. To maintain your Prime status, you must ensure that you ship orders within two days and maintain a cancellation rate of less than 0.5%.

So, you’ll need to select a reliable carrier that can handle the quick turnaround time and provide real-time tracking. You’ll also have to manage carrier invoices and track shipping costs to stay profitable.

The other key challenge is managing inventory levels in your warehouse or through a third-party provider. You must ensure you have enough stock available to fulfill orders quickly and accurately while avoiding overstocking or running out of items too often.

Inventory management can be challenging if you have multiple warehouses and 3PLs. In this case, you need a system that gives you a seamless view of your inventory across all locations so that you can make the best decisions for your business.

Finding the right software to support SFP

Having the right software in place can help you overcome the logistical challenges of SFP. For instance, a solution like SKULabs will help you meet the two days delivery requirement and manage inventory in multiple locations. This multi-channel inventory and order management system (OMS) will help you manage your shipping and inventory under one cloud-based system.

SKULabs will help you meet the shipping requirements by automatically prioritizing the seller-fulfilled prime orders when shipping in batches. The system will also sort orders by the guaranteed shipping date to ensure you ship everything on time. It will also select the cheapest rates to help you keep shipping costs low.

On top of that, SKULabs will automatically link your FBM and SFP listings to give you a single view of your inventory across multiple locations. The stock sync feature will keep your listings up to date on Amazon, even during busy seasons. As such, you can avoid overselling and ensure you have enough stock to fulfill orders.

Overcome the challenges of seller fulfilled prime with SKULabs

Seller Fulfilled Prime is a great way to save money on shipping costs and avoid costly storage fees. However, it comes with its share of logistical challenges that can be difficult to manage. Fortunately, the right software can help you overcome these challenges and keep your seller-fulfilled Prime status intact.

SKULabs is one such solution that can help you ship orders on time, reduce shipping costs, and monitor your inventory levels through a single interface. With SKULabs, you can easily keep up with Amazon’s selling requirements and take advantage of Prime status without the hassle. Get started with SKULabs and see how it can supercharge your ecommerce inventory and order management processes.

Ecommerce order fulfillment can be complex and time-consuming. You have to juggle numerous orders from different customers and ensure that each order’s products are picked, packed, and delivered correctly. All this while also trying to make the fulfillment process as efficient as possible.

But what if there was a way to make the process more seamless and less stressful? That’s where kits and bundles come into play. Kits and bundles are combinations of products you sell as a single item.

It’s a clever way to change the value proposition of your product without making any changes to it or offering discounts that could harm your bottom line. While kitting has its fair share of benefits, it also poses some challenges. The most common one is tracking inventory and stock levels for each kit, as it can be difficult to keep up with the components that make up the final product.

This article delves more into kitting, its benefits, challenges, and how the right software, like SKULabs, can streamline the process.

What is product kitting?

Product kitting is a process in which separate but related items are grouped, packaged, and sold together as an individual item. This technique allows you to bundle multiple products into one SKU (stock-keeping unit) for sale or shipping purposes. A product kit can contain variations of a single product or complementary items that customers often purchase together.

Kitting streamlines the order fulfillment process by creating a single scannable SKU to represent multiple items.

When you have a software solution that has a native kit functionality, you minimize the number of items that need to be scanned for each order, thereby reducing labor costs, and time spent picking and packing orders. There are two types of kitting, just-in-time kitting, and pre-configured kits

The difference between just-in-time kitting and pre-configured kits:

The two concepts sound similar in that they both involve packaging multiple items together and selling them as a single unit. However, there’s a difference in the way inventory is handled for each type of combination.

Pre-configured kits require a lot of overhead and prep work. This is the old strategy of selling bundles online. Items must first be picked out of inventory, manually deducted, bundled together and given their own SKU, inventory count, and their own location in the warehouse. This method will need to be repeated each time a kit goes up for sale. Not only is this inefficient, it creates problems when you need to sell single items separately, and can cause confusion when doing inventory counts.

On the other hand, a JIT kit has a distinct SKU separate from the inventory of the individual items that make up the kit. Inventory is tracked for each component item as well as the kit itself. While this used to be a logistical nightmare in the past, today’s modern software solutions can do all of this for you in the background while you can focus on more important aspects of your business!

Benefits of product kitting

Now let’s explore the benefits of using kits and bundles in inventory management. Here are some of the most notable ones:

Improved Convenience for Customers

Bundling products together makes it more convenient for customers to purchase related items at once. When you put complementary items in a kit, customers don’t have to browse multiple product pages and add each item to their shopping cart. For instance, if a customer needs to buy body wash, shampoo, and laundry detergent, you can bundle them into one kit and make their purchase experience much easier.

Increased sales

Product kits are a great way to boost sales, as they offer customers more value. When selling on third-party marketplaces like Etsy, product kitting ensures you have more offerings for your customers since you can list the individual products and the kits. More listings increase the likelihood of appearing higher in search results, thus leading to more sales.

Minimal excess stock

Kitting allows you to pair inventory that doesn’t move quickly with inventory that does. This way, you can move inventory that would otherwise take longer to sell if it were listed as separate products. Furthermore, kitting creates a better value proposition for your slow-moving inventory, reducing the chances of having excess inventory.

Reduced packaging and shipping costs

Product kitting reduces packaging and shipping costs by eliminating the need for multiple packages and shipments. By bundling products together, you can save money on materials like boxes and labor costs associated with packing and shipping multiple items. Consolidating products into one shipment reduces the time spent in transit and can lead to lower shipping rates from carriers.

The challenges of dealing with product kits

Despite the benefits of product kitting, inventory management is more complicated with kits and bundles than with individual items. When selling on multiple channels, such as Amazon and Shopify, it can be difficult to keep track of inventory levels across all platforms. If inventory doesn’t sync across all marketplaces, you can oversell a product or bundle that is no longer in stock.

Without a native inventory management solution for kits and bundles, it can be difficult to know how much inventory you have available to advertise for sale. Furthermore, when a customer purchases a kit or bundle, you should deduct inventory from all the individual items that make up the product.

If you don’t have a solution that makes the deduction seamless, you must manually deduct inventory levels for each item. This can lead to discrepancies and inaccurate inventory counts, resulting in overselling or underselling. .

Finding a quality solution for your JIT kits

The best way to make inventory management simpler for kits is to use a solution with features specifically designed for JIT inventory control. A solution like SKULabs can help you manage multi-channel inventory for kits.

SKULabs will assign a single SKU to your kit to make it easy to track inventory, and push the correct stock to your channels for both the individual items(if sold individually), and the kit. 

The kits can comprise multiple quantities of the same inventory item, or various quantities of additional component items. SKULabs considers the stock for all your inventory components and calculates how many kits you can advertise for sale across all of your sales channels.

A single barcode scan will then automatically deduct all items in the kit from the inventory count. With such a solution, it’s easier to maintain inventory accuracy, picking efficiency, and your customers are able to buy kits without worrying about inventory discrepancies.

Manage your inventory better with SKULabs

Product kitting is a great inventory management technique as it reduces inventory levels, cuts packaging and shipping costs, and provides customers with a better value proposition. However, kit inventory management can be complex without the right software.

That’s why you need solutions like SKULabs to simplify inventory tracking and keep inventory accurate across all channels. Learn more about how SKULabs can supercharge your ecommerce inventory management and get started on your inventory control journey today!

Coming this summer 2023, USPS will be launching a new and much anticipated service, USPS-Ground Advantage.

Exclusively available to official USPS partners like SKULabs!

A light at the end of the tunnel to a long running plan for consolidating packaging options from USPS yet incorporating the best of each option, is finally coming to fruition. We expect to see this launched some time in Summer 2023. 

USPS will now consolidate First Class Package Service, USPS Retail Ground, and Parcel Select Ground, all into a simpler and more affordable method – USPS Ground Advantage. 

What does this mean for you?

Lower Prices

January 2022, the United States Postal Service implemented changes that reduced shipping USPS Retail Ground products by 7% and by 12% for Parcel Ground Select. These discounted rates will still continue for the new service incorporation.

Faster Shipping / Better Reliability

USPS – Ground Advantage will adhere to the standards of the First Class Package Service by ensuring all deliveries will be delivered in a 2-5 days window vs the previous 2-8 days as offered by Retail Ground and Parcel Select. Additionally the increase to 70 lbs that was instituted at the end of last year for the First Class Service, will also be standard on this new method. This offers a much broader option for your shipments while still hitting those shipping deadlines with accuracy!

Reducing the Decision Making

We are all aware of the challenges of researching the best shipping methods. Will it make it there on time? Do my products fit the weight restrictions? Is it affordable? USPS-Ground Advantage eliminates these questions and reduces your decision making process by incorporating the best of all packages into one. This empowers you to focus on more important aspects of running your eCommerce single or multi-channel operations! 

SKULabs is proud to announce that we will be the front-runners of this new incorporation from USPS, and we will be ready to launch this coveted new service as soon as it is available!

Click here for more information on how to set this up in you SKULabs account.