Wholesale Club: The best app for selling wholesale on Shopify
It’s not a secret. It’s not a passing trend. And it’s not just for companies that package their products in shipping containers.
Wholesale pricing is a great way to grow your Shopify business without heavy investment in marketing or customer acquisition.
Unfortunately, selling wholesale on Shopify is also fraught with challenges. Do you go to the hassle of setting up a separate store or simply rig up some discount codes? Do you install a problematic app or try to piece together a homegrown solution using Shopify’s pricing and variants system?
Wholesale Club is the answer.
Formerly known as Wholesale Pricing by Supple, Wholesale Club is the latest addition to the Pixel Union family of Shopify apps built to boost engagement and conversions in your store. It’s also the best way to offer wholesale pricing on Shopify.
Like our recently revamped Bizzy Social Proof app, Wholesale Club’s core functionality remains intact. You can use it to create exclusive discounts for signed-in, tagged customers, as well as customizable order minimums and tiered discounts based on order quantities or value.
What’s new is the design—we’ve given it a complete overhaul, prioritizing a native Shopify experience and making it a whole lot easier to configure and manage your wholesale discounts. We’ve also made some under-the-hood improvements to price syncing and load tolerance, just in time for the Black Friday rush.
But before we dig too deep into this app, let’s take a minute to talk about wholesale and what it can do for your store. (Or, if you’d rather jump straight to the app, you can do that, too.)
The wholesale opportunity
Traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales in the U.S. alone hit $2.3 trillion last year. That’s pretty impressive, until you compare it to business-to-business (B2B) sales, which raked in a whopping $7.7 trillion. (The latter is currently on track to reach $9 trillion in 2018.)
The dominance of B2B means big things for merchants looking to diversify their sales strategy and grow their business.
For one, wholesale buyers have higher order values and conversion rates compared to their end-consumer counterparts. A recent survey by Forester Research found that while the average order value for B2C customers was $147, for B2B it was more than three times that at $491.
For another, wholesale customers often come with built-in marketing support and broad customer bases—two things that are a boon to Shopify stores trying to level up. As Shopify puts it: “Wholesale customers are some of the best a merchant can have.”
Wholesale buyer expectations
If you think spreadsheets and sales reps when you hear “wholesale,” you’ve got it all wrong.
Today’s wholesale buyers are actually a lot like regular customers. They want a fast, frictionless experience. They want product content that is thorough and easy to access. And, being wholesale buyers, they want specialized pricing and streamlined ordering processes.
Wholesale Club helps you meet these buyer expectations, while making it easier for you, the merchant, to configure and manage your wholesale discounts.
How does Wholesale Club work?
From the app’s fully updated dashboard, you can create multiple and flexible discount rates with the highest level of specificity—right down to the product variant and customer tag. You can set your custom prices from within the app, or mass import and edit them using a CSV template.
Using customer tiers, you can reward your best customers with your best discounts. Logged-in customers will only be shown the price you’ve set specifically for them—and you can incentivize them to spend more by showing how much they need to purchase to “unlock” the next discount level.
Wholesale Club also addresses the pain point of net payment terms. Customers can create an unpaid order directly from their cart, settling up with you within the negotiated time frame using the payment methods you prefer.
And, for repeat customers who know exactly what they’re looking for, Wholesale Club offers a single-page order form. Rather than being forced through the traditional multi-step order process, buyers can simply add items and quantities to their cart from a single, streamlined form.
Sold on wholesale?
Whether you’re selling subscription coffee off the side of your desk or doing brisk trade at your brick-and-mortar bridal boutique, wholesale is a great way to scale your Shopify business.
If you’d like to give Wholesale Club a try, we can set you up with a 7-day free trial. After that, it’s just $24/month. Get in touch and we’ll help you configure the app to ensure it’s tailored to your store.
If you’re already using Wholesale Club, we’d love to know what you think! How has it helped you grow your business? What do you think of the new design? Are there any features you’d like to see added?