Table of Contents
- Introduction
- What is Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel?
- Benefits of Shopify Plus for Wholesale Channel
- Custom Dashboard
- Separate Storefront
- Order Processing
- Automated Workflow
- Customized Pricing
- How to Create a Wholesale Store?
- Conclusion
Shopify Plus is an enterprise-level ecommerce solution with exceptional customization and customer service. It also includes features that aren’t available in the standard version of Shopify. With Shopify Plus experts, businesses can customize their storefront to meet specific needs which include separate storefronts for wholesale customers. Ecommerce stores can use progressive coupons that work based on the items in the cart or offers based on customer presets. These features have been proven to be effective and increase conversions.
For businesses looking to sell wholesale products, Shopify Plus is the recommended platform with wholesale customer oriented ecommerce benefits.
- 24.6% of Shopify Plus stores sell 250 – 999 different products
- There are over 5,300 Shopify Plus stores in 2021 (Source: Shopify)
- There are 10,251 live websites using Shopify Plus
With Shopify Plus designers, Businesses can experience 10x growth or 126% year over year, which is more than most other platforms. There are 24,283 domains running Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus has an extensive market including business ecommerce for b2b.
What is Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel?
Shopify Plus wholesale channel is a separate, password-protected storefront that is an extension of an already existing online store. Wholesale ecommerce refers to selling products to another business, in bulk and at a discount, online. Wholesalers make money by selling their products from their ecommerce site or storefront, usually to end consumers, at a higher price.
The wholesale channel of a business is based on its online store so that the same products can be offered to wholesale businesses but at different prices.
Benefits Of Shopify Wholesale Channel
Customer Dashboard
Shopify Plus enhances the customization features of its base plan Shopify. Shopify Plus gives businesses access to custom dashboards. Wholesalers require more support than retailers regarding sales support, product displays, and order management. Shopify Plus agency provide customers an option for a customer dashboard that can be used to purchase, track and reorder through account credentials.
Separate Storefront
The wholesale store of a business has a separate storefront and separate login credentials. Customers cannot access the online store of a business from their wholesale store. It entails that only wholesale and loyal customers can access the wholesale storefront and enjoy the benefits of wholesale pricing.
Pages and products in your Shopify Plus wholesale channel are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Bing. As a result, they don’t appear in online search results.
Order Processing
Over 10,000 transactions can be processed per minute. Website errors or downtime during peak sales periods are reduced to a bare minimum. Moreover, it comes with AI-driven features that improve the user experience and the checkout process.
When businesses receive orders from wholesale customers, the process can be customized in the following ways:
- Send an invoice to be paid using the payment provider that is set up in your Shopify admin
- Send a customized invoice email that allows the invoice to be paid using a different payment method, such as a wire transfer
- Accept payment by credit card or mark the invoice as paid as you receive payments.
Automated Workflow
With Shopify Plus wholesale channel, wholesale businesses get access to an advanced tool called Shopify Flow. Flow lets businesses automate repetitive tasks to save time. The automation “flows” can be as simple or complex with multiple paths for different states and decisions.
A Flow in Shopify is a collection of:
- Triggers – the events that occur in your Shopify store that start a Flow
- Conditions – defines the conditions when your automation should occur
- Actions – what changes should occur in your store when the Trigger occurs and your Conditions are met.
Customized Pricing
Businesses can reward wholesale customers by creating customized pricing strategies:
- Set percentage-based discounts across your entire store or collections
- Set fixed (flat) prices for products and variants in price-lists
- Provide different prices to different wholesale customers
- Set volume-based pricing rules for products and variants
How to Create a Wholesale Store?
Before creating a wholesale store, merchants need to consider the following:
- Shopify Plus plan is necessary to create a wholesale store
- Businesses must sign into their Shopify admin with either the Shopify store owner credentials or a staff login that has the Applications and Settings permissions.
Steps:
From Shopify admin, click the + button beside the Sales channels heading.
On the Add sales channel dialog, find Wholesale in the list of available channels, and then click Learn more.
Click Add channel, and follow the instructions.
The wholesale store is created.
After creating a Shopify Plus wholesale store, do the following:
- Make sure that there is at least one product in the store
- Create customer accounts
- Create wholesale price lists.
Conclusion
Despite the $2000/month subscription fees, Shopify’s B2B wholesale ecommerce solutions are worth considering. Businesses can create a customized, branded wholesale channel that enables them to tap into the most extensive online market.
The automatic process allows wholesale customers to create an account and login into their dashboard to place and track orders 24/7.
While Shopify Plus offers extensive functionality to larger businesses, it is not suitable for small and medium level businesses. Shopify Plus is a robust, high functionality ecommerce solution for enterprise-level businesses with more benefits and features for b2b organizations. It is designed for online businesses that either already have an established customer base or are planning to extend their operations. Ideally, the annual sales figure should be at least $10 million to make the usage of the platform costworthy for their business.
PROS, Inc. is a cutting-edge minority-owned information systems and web/mobile design and development company in San Diego, California.
At PROS, we have an expert team of Shopify development agency that help businesses migrate their business to Shopify Plus and customize it according to their preferences. Request a quote
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
