Wholesale and B2B commerce are going side-by-side. Businesses buy a large number of goods from manufacturers or warehouses and sell them to the end-users. The other ones are manufacturers themselves and sell their products to the retailers.
In the B2B segment, BigCommerce wholesale offers comprehensive functionality for creating a fully-fledged wholesale e-commerce platform. With BigCommerce tools, the wholesalers can attract new customers, increase their conversions and revenue.
In this article, we will tell you how BigCommerce functionality can be used for creating a wholesale website and consider apps that make wholesale commerce easier. We will also give you a comprehensive guide on creating a BigCommerce wholesale app on your own.
Why Wholesalers Choose BigCommerce
The B2B commerce is experiencing a transformation. In 2020, the global B2B market was estimated at $6.6 trillion. From 2021 to 2028, it is expected to grow by 18.7% annually. With the pandemic, the customers shifted their preferences to online shopping that causing the growth of e-commerce shopping.
BigCommerce is a rich e-commerce solution offering everything you need to build an online shop. With the Enterprise version and several additional plugins, you can change the format of your shop into a wholesale website. It has a lot of benefits for B2B companies to create a wholesale e-commerce website:
Numerous storefronts
Set and customize several storefronts for different regions, languages, or currencies.
Numerous sales channels
Integrate your e-commerce website with other sales channels: eBay, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Data synchronization
The B2B wholesale companies usually have many distribution channels and a lot of data. To simplify their work, you may offer data synchronization to control and analyze the sales and activities from different sales channels.
Wishlist
With a wishlist function, the customers can save the items for the future and compare them to choose the best option. With a B2B commerce, you can allow your customers to have several wish lists.
Minimum \ maximum amount per order
You can set up the required amount of purchase per order and offer discounts for large orders.
Customer segmentation
It allows the business to classify customers into different groups according to their location, preferences, or other criteria. They also can quickly import, export, and analyze customer information from various sales channels.
Price lists
Creating the price lists is an advanced feature designed for wholesale customers. With BigCommerce wholesale pricing, you can create an unlimited number of price lists and organize them into a neat document. You can also provide different price lists for different customer groups, offer bulk pricing and discount percentages.
The Guide on Creating a BigCommerce Wholesale Website
Building and launching the online store requires thorough preparation and a detailed shop development strategy creation. Now we will tell you about the main point of your business strategy for a wholesale store.
1. Make a project specification
Before starting the development of your wholesale e-commerce software, you need to define the set of requirements and create the project specification. It will help you to create a roadmap for further website development and launching.
First, you need to define the target audience of your future e-shop. Is it your current customers, new ones, or both of them? Remember to do a good customer segmentation and to create personalized offers and messages for each segment.
Here are some ways to study the market and to create a specification for your business:
Analyze the competitors
What do they sell? Which sales channels do they use? How do they promote their products over the internet? Study the business models of your competitors, compare your products with their ones, and think, which solutions you can adapt for your product.
Choose the best-selling products
Once you are launching your store, you’d better not upload the entire catalog at once. It’s better to start with a small number of products and grow your offering gradually.
Creating catalog structure
Before uploading your goods to the website, design how to organize them to allow the customers to find and locate the necessary things effortlessly. Add filters by color, brand, price, intended use, etc.
2. Predict potential difficulties
In the earliest stages, there are some hurdles that you need to overcome. All the companies have different goals, target audiences, and products, and it’s impossible to find one working solution that will fit all of them. Yet, it’s recommended to do some things to simplify the processes:
Account creation
Make sure that the team is ready to deal with the situations where the internal processes don’t allow the customers to complete the orders automatically
Shipping costs
Sometimes they are determined upon completing the orders and the customers don’t know the full sum of purchase until they complete the checkout. It’s better to make the shipping costs visible in the early stage.
Regulations
The laws of your and your customer’s country may have specific requirements and influence the purchase and delivery.
While creating the specification, make a list of all issues that might occur during the launch of your shop and further work. Think, how you will prevent and solve them.
3. Set the goals for your website
What is the goal of your website? How can it improve the lives of your customers and the work of your business?
Think over, what you want to achieve and set the measurable goals that will help you track your progress. For example: achieving a sales goal, tracking the return of investment (ROI) goals.
Think, how much time will you need to complete a task. How can you exceed your customer’s expectations? What is the room for improvement?
4. Gather your team
To achieve the best results, you need to gather a strong team. To launch and maintain the work of an online shop, you need the following specialist:
- UI\UX designer
- Project manager
- Digital marketer
- Content creator
- Front-end developer
- Back-end developer
It is a basic team that is necessary for launching an e-commerce shop. If you run a complex business, you will also need an ERP expert to control the work and integration of all systems.
Apps for BigCommerce Wholesale eCommerce
Now that you are aware of how to design, develop and launch a wholesale shop, we can tell you about some useful applications for the technical implementation of the app.
1. Bulk Orders & Wholesales by MINIBC
This is a bulk order application offering real-time inventory display, custom sorting, the possibility to filter the search result by keywords or categories. You can also customize specific pages making them accessible to particular user groups or hiding them.
They simplified and shortened the bulk product pricing, made bulk CSV uploads for the convenience of wholesale buyers. In case you need to create a customer discount, they can easily be personalized. Here are some other features of the app:
- Easy search features
- Lazy load of the entire product library
- Establishing wholesale specific prices
- Filter customization
- Creating customer group discounts
For and configuration installing the app, you need to pay a one-time $500 fee. Its monthly price is $49.99.
2. Quick Shop
Quick Shop offers a user-friendly interface for bulk adding products to the shopping cart. It allows ordering a big number of different items to the cart within several seconds.
With Quick Shop, you can display all the products or product categories on the home page. It will show 50 products per page, but you can modify the limit according to your need. Here you also can manage the in-stock status by displaying or hiding the message.
The customers can add the products to the wishlist, configure according to their preferences, filter and sort the products according to the different parameters.
Quick Shop’s monthly fee is $29.99 after a 7-day free trial.
3. Quotilio
This is a quote manager app allowing you to generate new quotes from app dashboards and send invoice emails to your customers. The app is oriented on B2B and wholesale transactions helping to increase your sales and strengthen your relationship with the customers.
You can also enable your customers to request a quote directly from your online shop by adding the corresponding button. Once the customers submit a quote, the application generates the one immediately visible on the dashboard.
Your sales specialists will be able to change the requested quotes and give your customers the final checkout.
App features:
- Adding a quote button with a single click
- Customization of quote type and email template
- Once the quote is submitted, you can see its current status
- Notifications about the quote requests
Its monthly fee is $15 per month with a 7-day trial.
Conclusion
The B2B and wholesale commerce sectors are growing and are not showing any signs of slowing their development down. It is an opportunity for wholesale businesses to test new distribution channels, gain new customers and increase the loyalty of the existing ones.
If you want to launch a wholesale store, but don’t know how to start, book a free consultation from a SoftLoft specialist. We will explore the possible variants and offer you the one that suits you best.
