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Running a wholesale business is challenging. There are many more balls to juggle than a traditional B2C shop, especially if you’re hosting everything online. WooCommerce is great for B2C product sales, but you need something extra to operate a WooCommerce B2B wholesale business.
With wholesale businesses, you need to consider things like business account registrations, VAT handling, and hiding prices from the public. And you might wonder if WooCommerce is the best platform for building a B2B wholesale website. The short answer is yes; it absolutely can be. However, with so many aspects to manage, it can be a daunting prospect.
There are plenty of plugins in the WordPress market to help you create forms, make your store private, or sell both wholesale and retail items. That’s good news, but the better news is that you can do it all with just one plugin.
In this article, I’ll show you how.
Create a Fully-Featured WooCommerce B2B Wholesale Site with B2BKing
If you only had to use one plugin to build and manage your WooCommerce B2B site, wouldn’t you? Thankfully, it exists, and you can forget about hunting down and testing multiple plugins to see how they work. The plugin I’m sharing with you in this post is B2BKing.
B2BKing integrates with WooCommerce, enhancing your site to tailor it specifically for wholesale customers.
B2BKing allows you to set up business registration forms, create wholesale discounts, bulk order forms, and much more. Some of the features offered in the plugin include:
- Hide price to guests or hide website entirely
- Separate B2B and B2C business registration
- Request a Quote
- Messaging
- Group Pricing
- Category & Product Visibility Control
- Multiple Users on Account
- Wholesale Bulk Order Form
- Complex Tax Exemptions
- CSV Import & Export Tool
- Advance Email Notifications
I’m going to show you how to get started with B2BKing in this post. If you want to see it in action quickly, they have a live demo you can play with on their website.
How to Get Started with B2BKing
If you toured the demo, you’ve seen how much you can accomplish with a WooCommerce B2B wholesale store. It’s easy to get up and running relatively fast, so let’s get into it!
Install the Plugin
Start by downloading the B2BKing plugin directly from its WordPress.org page. You can also search for the plugin right from your WordPress site. In the Admin Dashboard, select Plugins>Add New. In the search bar, look for “B2BKing,” and you’ll see it appear as an option.
You can also purchase the premium version on their site, which provides more features and support.
After you’ve downloaded the plugin zip file, navigate to the Admin Dashboard of your WordPress site. Select Plugins>Add New. Click Upload Plugin and browse for the .zip file you saved. Click Install Now, then activate it.
In your dashboard left-side menu, you’ll now see a new item called B2BKing. Click it, and you’ll be in the plugin’s dashboard area. This screen will show you a chart of sales stats, messages, and any pending registrations you need to handle. Obviously, it will all be empty since you just got started. Let’s skip down to settings and get things configured.
Configure the B2BKing settings
Every shop will be a little different, with varying needs, types of products, and customer base. You’ll first need to make some decisions about your shop and set up B2BKing accordingly.
Shop Mode
Is your shop solely B2B or a hybrid? In other words, will you sell only wholesale to businesses, or will you also sell retail to individual customers? Under the Main Settings, you’ll need to choose and set the Plugin Status.
Activating the B2B & B2C Hybrid setting means that the plugin will not show B2B-specific items to your B2C customers, only to your wholesale business customers.
Setting the plugin to B2B Shop means you’ll not be selling products to individual customers (retail).
Enable/Disable Features
Directly below the Plugin Status, you have options to enable and disable certain features. These settings determine whether or not a feature will appear to a B2B customer. Enabled features will have other settings to configure later on.
Access Restriction
In this area, you control which things guest users can see or access. You can choose to hide prices, hide your shop and products, or hide the entire website. In the latter setting, this replaces the site with a page that forces login to view your WooCommerce wholesale shop.
Similarly, under the Hide Shop & Products setting, you can enable an additional selection, which will restrict access to pages. Disabled, it will only hide your shop and products but allow access to other pages. This can be helpful when you want to let potential customers know about your company and encourage them to register to become a buyer.
And, of course, you can choose None, which allows free access to any guest user.
In the same menu under Product & Category Visibility Settings, you can choose to hide or show products to non-logged-in users. You’ll first need to create groups to make this feature function correctly. Let’s cover that now!
Create B2B Groups
A crucial step is to create specific groups for both B2B and B2C customers. These will help you control payment and shipping methods and visibility, as mentioned in the previous section.
From the main Groups menu, let’s choose Business Groups. Then click Create new group in the new menu that appears.
On the next screen, give your group a name. Then you can enable and disable shipping and payment methods specific to your group. Click Publish, and you’re done. You can create as many groups as you need.
Product Visibility
Let’s go back to the Product Visibility setting. Previously, we enabled or disabled the visibility switch. Let’s take it a step further. Navigate to B2BKing > Tools > Bulk Editor.
In the Visibility Editor, if you set “All categories as visible to ALL,” you can then hide specific categories in the WooCommerce Products/Categories menu.
As you create a category, scroll down to find the B2BKing Group Visibility menu. Here you have options to control who sees your new category.
Registration
The simplest way to set up business registration is to enable the option for the dropdown. This allows users to choose to which category they belong.
If you’d like to separate the two registration types, you’ll need to create separate pages for B2B and B2C customers. You’ll use different shortcodes on each page to designate the type of customer who can register.
Once that’s completed, you need to enable “Allow customers to create an account on the “My Account” page. You’ll find that setting in WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy.
Wholesale Pricing
To best way to set wholesale pricing is to do it by product. Under the WooCommerce menu, navigate to your Products. You can either create a new product or edit an existing one. Scroll down to the Product Data section. Under the General tab, you’ll see fields where you can set the pricing by the group.
Other & Advanced Settings
In this section, you can change the Front end color and design and the Purchase Lists Header.
Another helpful setting is in the Quote Requests feature. In this area, you can enable custom quote requests for B2B, B2C, Guests, All — or completely disable it. You also have the option to create custom quote fields specific to your needs. Just click on the blue “Manage Quote Form Fields.” Three default fields are already prepared for you: Name, Email, and Message.
Offers is a feature that allows you to create something special for specific customers or groups. For example, you could make a bundle offer where a customer purchases 500 items and gets a discounted price. First, you enable the feature under Other & Advanced Settings. Then you navigate to B2BKing > Offers to create it. You can set things like Group Visibility, User Visibility, Offer Details, and Offer Custom Text.
These are the basics of getting your B2BKing plugin configured for your store. There are many more settings to dig into, but this quick guide will get you on your way.
Additional Features
B2BKing comes chock full of useful features to help you build your shop, including:
- Messaging
- Multiple Users on Account
- Wholesale Bulk Order Form
- Complex Tax Exemptions
- CSV Import & Export Tool
- Advance Email Notifications
Your B2BKing site can also be translated into any language. For example, if you want to only use one, local language it’s as easy as selecting it in settings.
Pricing
You can download the B2BKing plugin for free on their WordPress.org page. The Pro version is available for purchase in the Envato Marketplace.
As I write this, the Regular License is $179 and includes six months of support and future updates. You can extend the support to a year for an additional $65.25.
B2BKing is an All-in-one WooCommerce B2B Solution
There’s a lot to manage when you run an online wholesale business. Managing business registration forms and setting bulk pricing is plenty to handle. When you add in multiple user accounts and the potential for B2C business, things can escalate quickly.
The good news is that you already have a solid start with WooCommerce; you just need a boost from a plugin that covers all the bases.
B2BKing is that plugin.
While some settings can be overwhelming initially, B2BKing has extensive, well-written documentation. Their step-by-step guides will help ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
It won’t take you long to build your fully functional wholesale online store.
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