Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel Management

If you want to sell wholesale on Shopify, you need to create a separate wholesale channel. This option is only for those who have a Shopify Plus subscription. (Though there are other methods of selling wholesale.) This storefront acts as an expansion of your store and is password-secured, thus needing different login requirements. You don’t have to worry about carrying over your customer or order data, though. You can track it through the same Shopify admin you’ve been using for your online store.

Your products sold on your wholesale channel can be the exact same ones you sell to your customers on your regular online store. Additionally, you can even sell products exclusive to your wholesale storefront. Naturally, the wholesale pricing differs from the product pricing in your main store.

As mentioned earlier, the wholesale channel has a completely different, passworded storefront. Because logins are also different, customers can’t get to your main store from the wholesale channel.

Your wholesale store has what is known as price lists. You are able to pick which products to include in which price lists. YOu can also assign customers to these lists who can only browse and purchase the listed products. This is how you can sell the same products across these channels.

You should note here that your wholesale channel pages do not appear in SERPs. This is because Google and other search engines do not index these pages.

Pages

Here is where you can create personalised pages that you can add to your menu. You can build pages that have your contact details, shipping options, and policy information, etc. Customers can access these pages as soon as they are added to the menu.

Navigation

Here you can access and change filter options and browsing settings for customers. You can also set featured products, and determine product arrangement on the page. This is also the place where you can include additional pages you’ve created and expand your navigation menu.

Appearance

Here you are able to customise your storefront through personalised logos, choosing what accent colour to use, and selecting what background image to display on pages like where customers sign in and where you direct them to reset their passwords.

Notifications

Here, you can customise settings regarding the notifications that your customers receive. For instance, you can make it so customers putting in a draft order will get a confirmation ping and additional notifications for any changes to the order or order cancellation.

Customers

This page allows you to access customer settings and accounts that you’ve added to the wholesale channel as well as the assigned pricing for each.

Some of these adjustable settings include:

• Minimum order spend requirements for specified groups customers or selected individual buyers
• Payment options directly from wholesale stores versus sending in orders and waiting for approval.
• Limiting the amount of product that a wholesale customer can pay for directly on the wholesale website.

Preferences

As the name suggests, the settings enabled here are personalised depending on the store owner. Such choices include:

• Selecting what language is displayed on your storefront for customers to see or to use for sending customer emails like notifications and invoices. (Note: The currently supported languages are English, French, Brazilian, Portuguese,German, Japanese, Spanish, Polish, and Italian.)
• Enabling reCaptcha for logins to provide extra security
• Allowing customer wholesale accounts
• Allowing customers to put in draft orders for out-of-stock products.
• Showing retail prices against your wholesale prices
• Setting a minimum wholesale order amount that buyers must spend

Tax exemption settings

Through customer and product tax exemption settings, customers are safe from paying any tax amount attached to any order made in either store.

Wholesale price lists

These lists are exclusive to your wholesale channel. As mentioned, price lists are composed of wholesale products that you’ve added and customers whom you have specifically assigned to be able to purchase these products. A customer tag is also present as this is what groups customers into the price lists. Any customer with a certain tag can purchase from the price list associated with it.

The wholesale pricing you set in these lists overrides the pricing on your regular storefront. This means customers in price lists get exclusive price offers on the same products through your wholesale channel.

Pricing 

Earlier, we talked about price lists and how you are able to set prices differently for customers in different price lists or even determine a specialised price for individual customers. There are also other ways you can customise pricing for wholesale buyers such as: determining storewide percentage discounts or discounts based on collections of products, setting fixed prices, or implementing volume-based pricing.

Order Processing

When you add customers to a price list, they do not have the ability to create their own orders. You have to do it for them. However, if you invite customers to create and log in to a wholesale store account or allow them to sign up for one, they can begin making purchase orders themselves. You can see these orders displayed in your Shopify admin as draft orders.

You can process draft orders by:

1. Sending customers an invoice that they can pay through the payment provider that you have enabled in your Shopify admin
2. Sending an invoice email to customers that offer customised payment methods other than the preset one above
3. Accepting credit card payments or payments on other channels, then marking the invoice as paid on your admin dashboard when you receive the money.

• Third-party apps or other forms of integrations are not possible on the wholesale channel.
• Wholesale prices always include taxes. An expansion store allows you to display prices with or without tax inclusion. This may be especially helpful if you plan to go international with your store.
• The Shopify organisation admin from where you can manage all your wholesale stores is only available to the Shopify Plus plan.