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A Guide to Wholesale Pricing for WooCommerce

With everything going digital, e-commerce platform has turned out to be the best opportunity for the manufacturers, distributors, and sellers to connect with their customers. If you have products to sell, then you can easily use a platform like WooCommerce to reach out to potential customers. WooCommerce for wholesale is a great option as it offers various features when it comes to setting up and managing the products to be sold on a bulk quantity, i.e., on a wholesale price. As a beginner, you might find adding prices to your products to be difficult. But with WooCommerce, wholesale pricing is quite easy and can be done without any trouble.

The following section will enable you to gather all the relevant information about wholesale pricing. We will also show how to set up Wholesale for WooCommerce store in just a few quick yet simple steps.

What Is Wholesale Pricing For WooCommerce?

As the word implies, wholesale prices refer to the price of a product if bought in bulk. In such a case, the manufacturer charges a wholesale rate for it. The distributors, resellers, or retailers usually buy products sold at wholesale prices i.e., in a bulk quantity. Thus, as a manufacturer or even as a distributor, you can charge wholesale prices when you are selling goods in bulk.

Now, wholesale pricing for WooCommerce is the pricing that applies when you decide to sell your products on an e-commerce site. WooCommerce as well allows you to sell products on a retail price; thus, the pricing can be fixed accordingly.

Depending upon the buyer’s requirements, the wholesale or retail prices will reflect accordingly. For instance, the wholesale prices will only be shown to potential customers, i.e., retailers or distributors. To place an order, they may simply fill in the order form.

To attract more buyers, you can also offer discounts on a bulk order applicable to the standard rates of the products. Whereas if your store also has a retail section, you may set the prices keeping the fact in mind that there will be buyers who will place an order for as less as one unit, thus you may fix your margin accordingly.

Do You Need a WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing?

It is important to figure out if you need WooCommerce wholesale pricing; not every seller needs to have wholesale prices. The following situations will help you get sorted. If either of them applies to you or your business, WooCommerce wholesale pricing is a must for you.

  • Being the owner of a business that deals with manufacturing or supplying of certain goods.
  • Selling products in bulk to different retailers or resellers.
  • Taking orders manually and managing each order form without the help of an automated system leading to a lot of paperwork and calculation.
  • Selling products in bulk, but without using any method of dynamic pricing.
  • Negotiating with different buyers but via emails or submission of forms and not through any proper channel.
  • If you own a dropshipping business where you directly supply the goods from the manufacturer to the retailer and have no apt way of displaying the rates, availability, and discounts if applicable.

In situations where you are a manufacturer as well as a seller i.e., when you are open to accepting bulk as well as retail orders, deciding when to apply wholesale rates and retail prices can be a tedious yet confusing task.

The easiest and the most efficient way to solve this problem is to separate the wholesale products from retail products. You can also prefer selling on two different platforms or at least, change the visibility settings to limit access before fixing the prices. Thus, enabling only the accounts intending a bulk purchase to view the wholesale prices.

This is one of the special benefits of the WooCommerce platform and is popularly called as Single user role and Multiple user roles. This will make the entire process a lot easier and hassle-free for you.

WooCommerce Wholesale plugin

Now in order to have the wholesale pricing for WooCommerce, you can use the plugin called WooCommerce Wholesale Suite.

It consist of total 3 plugins but the most important one is Wholesale Prices plugin.

Now, there are two main versions of WooCommerce Wholesale plugin:

  1. WooCommerce Wholesale prices, which is a free version
  2. WooCommerce Wholesale Prices premium, which is a paid one with enhanced functionality.

The free version allows the user to fix WooCommerce wholesale pricing for every product individually. In contrast, the premium version allows two additional types of discounts, namely- percentage-based discount and quantity based discount. Let us understand this terminology in detail and yet a lucid way.

woocommerce wholesale pricing

  • Fixed Wholesale Price

This is used if the seller wants to quote wholesale prices for the products. This can be done by logging into the admin panel, products, and then edit. If there are multiple products, and you wish to set up the wholesale prices for all of them, simply generate the CSV file using the WooCommerce product import/ export tool.

  • Percentage Based Discounts

This is an even more sorted approach and can help you save a lot of time. The seller may simply specify a discount percentage and offer wholesale prices of the products. Now, three different settings can be done in this regard. General/ Global settings, as the name implies, will apply the discount percentage to all the products.

woocommerce for wholesale

To do this, simply navigate to the settings of your WooCommerce store, click wholesale prices and then discount. The seller may also prefer to exempt the discount for some users; this can be done through the user settings. The option to set a discount percentage as per the product category is available too.

  • Discount based on quantity

This can be termed as an additional discount offered to the buyers who buy in a large quantity or the quantity range as specified by you. You can edit this as per the various wholesale customer roles; all you need to do is specify the starting and the ending quantity range and specify the discount offered against each one of them.

Steps To Add WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing To Your Site (Free Plugin)

Step 1: Install WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Plugin

wholesale for woocommerce

When you download and install the WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Plugin, both free and premium versions will be available for the user to select as per the requirements. The free version though basic, works well to add user roles and wholesale pricing to the available products.

In contrast, the premium WooCommerce wholesale plugin offers additional features, and this upgrade can be done anytime by simply navigating to the dashboard, plugins section and add new. Search for the desired plugin, install and activate it.

Step 2: Add a new wholesale user role

You want your wholesale prices to be visible only to specific customers. For this, you need to add a new user level to which retail customers will not have access.

Click on the option “Users -> Add new” from your dashboard to add the new role. You can also edit the user role or information that you created previously anytime simply by clicking on the particular user and saving the changes done.

Step 3: Adding the wholesale prices for the products

The wholesale pricing for WooCommerce is different from the pricing done on retail goods. Now you can prefer adding the wholesale prices for either all the products or just a few of them.

To do this, visit the section for “All Products” on your dashboard and select the product to which the changes are desired.

You will find a “wholesale prices” header on the “Product Data” section in the General Tab. Simply type in your price, and it will be applied.

woocommerce wholesale pricing

Since we have now defined the user role and the associated wholesale prices, the intended customer will now be able to check out smoothly. The retail buyers will see the normal pricing where the bulk buyers will see the wholesale prices and the discounts applicable, if any.

Step 4: Disable if any coupon codes are applicable for wholesale customers

The coupon codes are for retail customers. The wholesale price is already less than the retail price, and therefore, no additional discount is necessary. So, you can disable the coupon codes for wholesale customers.

To do this, go to the “Wholesale Prices” tab from the “General settings“. You will find an option for disabling the coupon codes.

Step 5: Customize the display for the wholesale prices, as per your preference

Although the free version doesn’t offer much flexibility in terms of display customization a few things can still be implemented. For instance, Visit the “Wholesale Prices” tab from the WooCommerce settings on your dashboard. Click on the option for “Price“. A field will be provided, and you can change the font for the pricing.

There are also other features available for customizing the display. You can cross out the original price and show the wholesale rate beside it. You can also hide the original price completely and just show the wholesale price. Customization allows you to decide what exactly you want your customers to view when they are browsing through the products.

Step 6: Test the whole setup to check if the display is working properly

It is important to test whether the customization and the general settings of the page work. The final step, therefore, is the preview the product pages on your WooCommerce wholesale store. You can either ask someone to create a wholesale user account and test the page, or you can do that yourself.

Flexible Pricing and Visibility Control Feature in WooCommerce for wholesale

WooCommerce for wholesale is particularly beneficial for B2B businesses, and the benefits associated with the same are multitudinous. For instance, prices can be easily fixed for multiple products.

Different prices can be set for wholesale buyers and retail buyers, avoiding any confusion in the whole process. This is fully aided by the visibility control feature offered by WooCommerce for wholesale; the owner can simply label the product as wholesale or retail only depending on his stock and margin. Thus, wholesale prices will only be visible to the intended buyers.

How to Set Up Wholesale Pricing with WooCommerce (Premium version)?

When you decide to sell your products on WooCommerce, your product pages with proper pricing will have to be created. You will have to fix the wholesale prices and organize the display and user roles so that your customers have no trouble accessing the store. Given below are six steps that will help you to do so without any problems.

Install and activate the WooCommerce Wholesale Prices Premium Plugin

The first thing that you need will be a WooCommerce wholesale suite that contains three main plugins. All these plugins need to be installed and activated. Once done, check for your license key in the account section on the plugin website and input the same in the WWS License page in the Settings section.

Now on the product edit screen, you can simply create a new product or edit the existing one. To set prices, scroll down to the product data section, where you can simply quote a retail price for a product or a minimum order quantity needed to view the bulk of the wholesale price.

Setting the prices following the quantity

WooCommerce allows you to set the prices as per the quantity and offer discounts depending on the same. Simply navigate to the product pricing section present on the product edit page and enable the dialogue box that seeks permission to help you offer discounts based on the quantity demanded by the buyer.

A dialogue box will then appear in which you can simply define multiple wholesale user roles, specify the quantity range and the associated price, and click on the add quantity discount rule. The same process can be repeated for various quantity range. The rule is simple more the quantity, better the prices, and discounts.

Viewing the wholesale prices of the products

All the buyers with wholesale customer role will have access to the wholesale prices by default. You can further test this by creating a new user account.

To do so, simply open the Users Page, add new and select the user role as Wholesale Customer.

Now, simply login to your account, navigate to the product you wish to check, the retail, as well as wholesale price, will be mentioned there.

Global discounts for wholesale customers

Generally, the wholesale price for the individual products are entered manually, this may depend on the quantity range too. To avoid so much of hassle, WooCommerce plugins enable the option to enter Global discounts for wholesale buyers, wherein they can take advantage of the offered discount irrespective of the product quantity they order.

This can be accomplished with just a few simple steps. To begin with, go to the WooCommerce setting page and then to the Wholesale Prices Tab. Click on the Discount option, choose a wholesale customer role, input a discount percentage, and then click on the Add Mapping option.

This way, the discount will be also be applied to the products that do not have a specified wholesale price.

Global discount setting based on quantity

Go to the Discount page in the plugin settings. Choose the wholesale customer role, specify the quantity range, and the discount percentage, and you will be sorted.

This way, the buyers can take advantage of the discount offered by you based on the quantity range irrespective of the product they buy.

woocommerce for wholesale

Finally, click on the Add Mapping button to publish the changes.

Creating multiple wholesale customer roles

Every wholesaler understands that there are various types of buyers in their chain. Some order a lesser quantity while some order a huge one, some rarely buy while others too often.

WooCommerce gives you the advantage to segregate them using the wholesale customer roles. You may specify separate discounts and pricing based on the same. You can always add or subtract these roles from the Wholesale Roles page in the WooCommerce settings.

Final Words

WooCommerce will provide the best services if you are a manufacturer or a wholesaler. The WooCommerce wholesale plugin is not only easy to use but a very reliable one. The plugin offers various features that can be used for proper management of user roles and product prices. This will help you to stay organized and run your business without unnecessary complications. Once you use it to set up your wholesale pricing, customers will start visiting the site rendering more business to you.