Owning an online store, wholesale or retail, you need to set up prices. Setting up prices is a vital part of any business. Now how do you set up prices for a wholesale store, when you have to deal with multiple kinds of vendors or retailers who are coming to you for products or groups of products. Deciding upon the prices for your wholesale store is indeed a tough job.
Now as a wholesaler, you might want to sell to both retailers and wholesalers at the same time. In such cases how you might go about the prices for the products, which may be the same or different prices for different retailers. Ideally, now to set up wholesale prices, which is different from the retail prices of the products, there should be a proper mechanism. You can make use of the role-based pricing system in WordPress WooCommerce to easily setup wholesale prices for your WooCommerce wholesale store. With this, you need not even create two different sites for retail selling or for wholesale selling. You can make use of the same site and do it hassle-free.
Let’s find more about it !!
What is Role-based pricing?
Every customer requires special attention. It is an undeniable factor. Now how do you go about in a wholesale industry where you are mostly selling either a product in bulk quantity or a group of products in bulk. So all you have is the same set of products for a different set of customers. Now selling the same items at different prices to different customers – How is it possible?
Consider for example :
- You have regular purchasers from your wholesale store, and you want to offer them a discount. They may or may not purchase products in bulk quantities.
- You might also have some customers who are not going to be there for the long term. And still, want to purchase in bulk quantities that are sure to be profitable for you.
- There might be some customers who are just wanting to buy fewer products from you, like a retailer.
Now how do you manage these kinds of situations?
This is when role-based pricing comes to the rescue. In role-based pricing, you can assign users certain roles that determine their purchasing behavior. Like for example, you can assign a role Customer1 for customers who purchase from you in bulk quantities. You can even assign a role like Customer2 for those customers who come once in a while to purchase certain products in bulk or maybe lesser quantity. You do not want to give the same prices to both these customers. Hence you want to differentiate such customers and plan accordingly to assign prices.
Using role-based pricing, you can easily perform the same in a feasible way. WooCommerce plugin like ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing plugin and ELEX Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin for WooCommerce plugins you can setup wholesale prices for your WooCommerce store.
WordPress WooCommerce Role-based pricing plugin
When you consider WordPress WooCommerce, it facilitates you in assigning roles and their capabilities or responsibilities accordingly. With these roles in WordPress WooCommerce, you can segregate your users in a better way. Also, you can offer them prices to build better long-lasting relations with your customers.
The basic idea is to restore your potential clients by giving them specific rates that are not offered to others for the same products. In this way, you offer unique and distinct prices to your special customers. In this way, you can keep them coming back to you again and again.
There are certain plugins that will help you achieve the same in WooCommerce, which can simplify the task and help you achieve wholesale pricing.
Let us take a look at the same using the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing plugin.
The plugin has certain features which let you manage:
- Catalog mode
- Role-based Pricing.
Catalog mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing Plugin
The prime functionality of this plugin is to assign prices on a role basis. So here are some major functionalities of the plugin.
Catalog mode
You can easily customize your store as a catalog on display to the customers who are visiting your website. In this way, you can customize your store as per the customers visiting your website. Creating a customized Catalog mode for your website is easier using the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Mode, Wholesale & Role Based Pricing plugin.
When you customize your user roles and the way the store should behave towards those certain classes of users, it is easy to set the store as you want. Suppose you have a Customer cust1 and you do not want to show the prices to the customer who is logging in with cust1 credentials or maybe even unregistered users, then you can set in the plugin settings to do the same.
Once the settings are saved, you can see that the store does not show the cart button to the required users as mentioned by you in your plugins settings.
There are many more customizations available in the catalog mode of the plugin to exclusively host your store as a simple Catalog with your product listing. When you own a wholesale store, you can also hide the prices for the products to certain users, whereas display prices for users who are coming to purchase less quantity like a retail shop. Using these settings you can as well keep your wholesale store open for retail shopping too.
Do You Want to Switch Your Store into ‘Request a Quote’ Mode?
You can switch your products into ‘Request a Quote’ mode or catalog mode easily using ELEX WooCommerce Request a Quote Plugin. The plugin lets you place the quote request upon products easily to the store admin. The wholesalers get the opportunity to add items to a list and submit to the store admin easily. You can provide offers, discounts, price adjustments, and much more to attract potential customers with this requesting and approval of quotes.
It allows the customers to request a quote of products with or without the ‘Add to Cart’ option and helps to set up a custom form into which the customers should be redirected for requesting a quote and makes the ‘Add to Quote’ option available only for specific user roles. To know more about this plugin, and how to configure it, refer to an article: How to set up ELEX WooCommerce Request a Quote plugin?
Role-Based Pricing
In order to create roles for your WordPress WooCommerce store, you need to first segregate the users. Then customize the roles and responsibilities of the customers before the pricing is set. Being a wholesale store, you might interact with different types of customers visiting your store. It is easy to create roles as well as delete roles as per your store needs .
You can assign different roles as per the WordPress roles and then use it to understand what kind of price adjustments are to be given to users. In order to obtain user-roles and credentials to the roles, you need to set the roles in the Plugin settings. You have to add the custom user roles to the Manage User Role to enforce the rule on your store.
Once you decide upon the roles and specifications, you can go ahead and provide price adjustments on the same from the plugin settings itself.
Once you decide upon, what each user role is capable of, you can apply the price adjustments that will be displayed to the customer. Suppose you want to set a $10 discount on every product on your store, then you can set it up using the price adjustments.
All you can see is that the particular role gets the price adjustment of $10 on every product.
You can easily set an overall price adjustment as well, price adjustments for individual products too at the product level.
Now after the changes, you can see :
Assigning prices to User Roles using Dynamic Pricing plugin
Consider scenarios where you are selling a product or multiple products to different customers. Every customer is different when you are dealing with bulk products.
Case 1: A customer might require a bulk amount of products from you for a shorter term.
Case 2: A customer requires a bulk amount of products for almost longer terms, assuring good business ties to progress.
In these scenarios wherein you are selling a bulk quantity of product, you can make use of yet another plugin which helps to set the prices dynamically. The prices are then decided upon the basis of the purchases. The ELEX Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin for WooCommerce is yet another plugin to be used when implementing pricing for a wholesale WooCommerce eStore.
When using dynamic pricing you can easily set the prices on various aspects like :
- On the basis of the number of products in the cart using Cart rules.
- Rules on the basis of certain categories of products.
- Certain product combination rules etc.
Like for example, when a customer purchases a product in bulk quantity. You can choose to provide discounts on the basis of the minimum and maximum quantity of a product in the cart. You can even assign certain rules to certain products in the cart while discarding the others. It is up to you, how you want to implement the dynamic pricing on your products.
Case study
Consider a scenario where you are selling a Tshirt in bulk quantity of around 200 to 300 pieces to a retailer. You might want to give them a discount, as they are purchasing in a much higher quantity. You can do it using the plugin.
So finally when any customer purchases a minimum quantity of 100 and within a maximum of 400, then they are entitled to get a flat discount of 300.
In a similar manner, you can also apply various discounts or dynamically allocate prices for various combinations of products and quantity.
Conclusion
In order to allocate wholesale prices for your WooCommerce wholesale store, you need to keep certain conditions intact before deciding the prices. With these WooCommerce plugins, the hurdles are kind of reduced. It also helps to baseline certain rules to efficiently manage a wholesale store.
Further Reading
