How to Add Wholesale Pricing in WooCommerce (Step by Step)

Do you want to add wholesale pricing in WooCommerce?

Wholesale pricing can make your online store more attractive to retailers that need to place large orders. This can greatly increase the average order value, but by default WooCommerce only allows you to set normal pricing for a product.

In this article, we will show you how to easily set up WooCommerce wholesale pricing for customers who want to place bulk orders.

Why Add Wholesale Pricing in WooCommerce?

If you have enough resources and staff to manage really big orders, then you may want to set up wholesale pricing for your online store. This can make your site more attractive to companies or organizations who need to buy in bulk.

Customers who place large orders can have a big impact on your profits and help you grow a successful WooCommerce store. You can even use wholesale pricing to offer discounts to dropshipping businesses, and set up an additional revenue stream.

However, by default WooCommerce doesn’t allow you to offer different pricing based on quantity or the customer’s user role.

This means your wholesale customers will need to manually negotiate prices and discounts in order to place their orders. If you don’t offer automated discounts for wholesale customers, then those customers will eventually look elsewhere.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add wholesale pricing in WooCommerce so customers can place big orders, fast.

How to Setup the WooCommerce Wholesale Suite Plugin

The easiest way to add wholesale pricing in WooCommerce is by using WooCommerce Wholesale Suite. This is a suite of three plugins that allow you to sell wholesale products on your WooCommerce store and manage your wholesale customers.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the free Wholesale Prices plugin and the premium Wholesale Suite extension. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Wholesale » License.

You can now enter your email address and license key.

You’ll find the license key by logging into your Wholesale Suite account. This information is also included in your purchase confirmation email.

After adding this information, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Wholesale Suite automatically creates a new role called ‘Wholesale Customer.’ This role allows you to offer a discount to all your wholesale clients at once.

Note: Do you want to offer different perks, to different wholesale customers? Towards the end of this guide, we’ll show you how to add more wholesale roles to your WordPress website.

By default, anyone who has a ‘Wholesale Customer’ role will see the discounted pricing when they log into their account.

To create a ‘Wholesale Customer’ account, go to Users » Add New.

Here, enter all the information you want to use such as the wholesaler’s business email address and username.

Then, just open the ‘Role’ dropdown and choose ‘Wholesale Customer.’

After that, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the ‘Add New User’ button.

You can now create more wholesale customer accounts simply by repeating the process described above.

How to Add Wholesale Pricing in WooCommerce

Once you’ve created some wholesale accounts, the next step is offering them an exclusive discount. One option is to add wholesale pricing to individual WooCommerce products. To do this, simply create a new product or open an existing product for editing.

Then, scroll to the ‘Product Data’ section. If you haven’t already, then you can set the ‘Regular Price’ which will be offered to everyone who visits your WordPress website. You can also set a sale price.

After that, scroll to the ‘Wholesale Prices’ section and open the ‘Discount Type’ dropdown. You can now choose to offer wholesale customers a fixed discount or a percentage discount.

If you select ‘Percentage,’ then type an amount into the ‘Discount (%)’ field. Wholesale Suite will then work out the price and show the value in US dollars.

If you choose ‘Fixed’ from the dropdown menu instead, then you can simply type a value into the ‘Wholesale Price’ field.

You may also want to set a time limit for the wholesale discount. For example, you might offer a bigger wholesale discount leading up to popular holidays, to try and get some extra sales.

To do this, click on the ‘Schedule’ link.

This adds two new fields where you can enter the start date and end date.

In this way, you can create automated workflows for your wholesale discounts.

After that, scroll to the ‘Wholesale Minimum Order Quantity’ section.

Here, type in the minimum number of items a customer must purchase in order to unlock wholesale pricing.

This is all you need to offer simple pricing, so you may want to go ahead and update or publish the product.

Now, any wholesaler who is logged into their account will see the discounted price next to the product’s regular price.

To get more bulk orders and wholesale customers, there are some extra settings you may want to look at.

Setting up Quantity Based Wholesale Pricing

You can encourage wholesale customers to buy more units by offering tiered discounts. For example, you might offer a 25% discount if the customer buys at least 50 units and a 50% discount if they buy more than 100 units.

To create tiered discounts, simply open the product where you want to offer tiered pricing and then scroll to the ‘Product Quantity Based Wholesale Pricing’ section. Here, check the following box: ‘Enable further wholesale pricing discounts based on quantity purchased?’

This adds some new settings where you set the starting and ending quantity, plus the discount you want to offer.

After entering this information, click on ‘Add Quantity Discount Rule.’

You can add more tiers to your pricing simply by following the process described above.

Enforce a Minimum Order for Wholesale Customers

By default, wholesalers don’t need to meet the minimum order quantity. They can buy as few products as they want, although they may not qualify for their wholesale discount.

To improve the customer experience, you may want to make sure wholesalers always get their discount. One option is to stop wholesalers from placing an order that’s below the minimum order quantity needed to qualify for discounted pricing.

This can improve the customer experience and is also a good choice if you’ve made exceptions for a customer because they buy in bulk. For example, your online marketplace may not normally offer free shipping. However, you might offer free shipping to wholesale customers since you expect them to buy in bulk.

In this case, you’ll want to stop wholesalers from abusing their free shipping perk by placing smaller orders. Simply scroll to the ‘Wholesale Order Quantity Step’ section and then type a ‘1’ into the field.

After that, click on the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button to save your changes to the product.

Next, go to Wholesale » Roles in the WordPress dashboard. You can now hover over the ‘Wholesale Customer’ role and click on the ‘Edit’ link when it appears.

On this screen, check the following box: ‘Prevent purchase if wholesale condition is not met.’

Once you’ve done that, just click on the ‘Edit Wholesale Role’ button to save your changes.

Now, wholesalers won’t be able to checkout until they meet the minimum quantity.

Creating New Wholesale Customer Roles

By default, Wholesale Suite creates a new rolled called ‘Wholesale Customer.’ If you want to offer the same discount to all your wholesale clients, then you can simply use this default role.

However, sometimes you may want to create different wholesale roles with different discounts, or even entirely different perks.

For example, you might give a bigger discount to the wholesaler who places the biggest order. In this way, you can keep your valuable customers coming back to your online store or digital product marketplace.

For more on this topic, please see our beginners guide to WordPress roles and permissions.

To create more roles, go to the Wholesale » Roles page.

You can now give the role a name and a key, and then type in an optional description.

When you’re happy with the information you’ve entered, click on ‘Add New Wholesale Role.’

You can now assign this role to any customer by opening that person’s user profile in the WordPress dashboard.

Here, simply open the ‘Role’ dropdown and select the wholesale role you just created.

You can also create different wholesale pricing tiers for specific products.

Simply open the product and scroll to the ‘Wholesale Prices’ section. You’ll now see different settings for each of the user roles.

To create a discount or other perk for the new user role, simply follow the same process described above.

Pro Tip: You can customize your wholesale user roles in exactly the same way as any other WordPress role. To learn more, please see our guide on how to add or remove capabilities to users in WordPress.

Setting up Global Discounts for Wholesale Customers

A lot of the time, you’ll want to add a different wholesale price to each product. However, you can also set a global percentage discount for all products using the Wholesale Prices WooCommerce plugin.

Wholesale Suite will apply the global discount to all products where you didn’t add a unique wholesale price. This allows you to offer store-wide benefits to wholesalers, so it’s a great choice if you have a big WooCommerce store with lots of products.

Just be aware that there’s no minimum order value. This may be a good way to encourage wholesalers to try new products by allowing small orders, but you should also think about the impact this will have on your profits.

To create a global discount for wholesale customers, go to WooCommerce » Settings. Then, click on the ‘Wholesale Prices’ tab.

In this tab, you can configure the default settings for your wholesale customers. For example, you might offer a shipping discount or give wholesale customers a choice of more WooCommerce payment gateways.

To improve the customer experience, it’s a good idea to spend some time looking through the different tabs.

To create a global discount, go ahead and click on the ‘Discount’ link.

With that done, open the ‘Wholesale Role’ dropdown menu and select the role that will get the global discount.

After that, just type a number into the ‘Percent Discount’ field.

Once you’ve finished, click on the ‘Add Mapping’ button to save your changes.

We hope this article helped you add WooCommerce wholesale pricing in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of best email marketing services for small businesses and how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

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