Magento is hand-down the best platform to build and run a wholesale clothing line. Why?
First and foremost, Magento is the leading platform with amazing scalability – which means it grows and matches with your business development.
Second, and it may be the most important – it’s high-converting. Magento can present your clothes with options in the most engaging layout and connect the customer journey in silky transitions.
Last but not least, Magento and its provider offer an all-in-one B2B solution at an affordable price! You’ll never have to worry about extensions conflicting while running your store with a frictionless flow from A to Z.
Today, let’s learn how to set up and run a Magento wholesale website in the clothing field from scratch!
But first:
How Much Does It Take To Tun A Magento B2B Clothing Store?
Table of Contents
So Magento offers three options to build your site.
- Magento Open Source (former Magento Community)
- Magento Commerce (former Magento Enterprise)
- Magento Commerce Cloud
Let’s go through the price for each of them.
Magento Open Source
You can download this version and use it completely free of charge.
But, there is more to building a website than code-based software. Here is the list of additional costs:
As follow, running a clothing store using the Open-source edition of Magento can cost roughly $15.000/year.
Magento Commerce vs. Commerce Cloud
These advanced plans offer a bigger range of support and functions for the big player in the game.
Therefore, Magento charges users of these versions based on their turnover numbers. The higher the revenue, the higher price for licensing you must pay.
Among the three often, Magento Open-source is no doubt the best choice to start your clothing line! It requires a lot more effort in terms of searching for the right wholesale extension, but you will end up with a more reasonable price that fits your budget.
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5 Steps Left To Start Your Clothing Line With Magento
So far, we have done these most two important steps: choose your platform and pick up a license plan.
Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of B2B store building!
Choose Name Brand (SEO-friendly)
By SEO, I mean: Short, Effective, and Outstanding.
Why do you need to keep it short? Because regardless, your brand name will be turned into a domain.
You must think ahead and visualize your appearance on the search result page first hand.
As you can see, the 1st page of Google search returns is full of the brand with a shorter and more recognizable name. And this is a bridge to the Effective and Outstanding – you must make a name that has a ring to it. Something that is roll-of-the-tongue, unique yet represents your only self to urge people to remember and search for your brand.
And I’m going to leave this part up to you!
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Pick-and-Pimp Your Theme
So the goal for an online store is to evoke a feeling – and this is a very big word:
It’s mean to create a version of reality that your customers can buy into and place their trust to finalize their purchases. Just like a brick-and-mortar store, the blocking, coloring, and placement for each component of your online store must be superb.
However, before jumping into the pool of themes, you must have your customer persona in mind. Questions to help you define the demographic:
- How old are they?
- What are their jobs?
- How much do they spend on clothes?
- What attracts them (in style and trend)?
Now, let’s choose your theme. This list is by far the most comprehensive gathering of fashion themes for Magento, I highly suggest you check it out.
And if you can’t find your best on the list above, don’t worry, just keep on going! No one is gonna break your strike and find your dream theme.
Enable Access Restriction
A key point that separates B2C and B2B is the treatment-on-tier list.
You need a forced login to divide your customer base at the get-go, this way, you can offer them the best options due to their preference as well as their previous purchase(s). There are several tactics that involve in this step:
B2B is a higher form of the business relationship, that’s why registration is vital. It gives you the information you need to know your customers to serve them better.
In addition, configuration for pricing is also crucial. Here hide/request for the price is wonderful. Because it opens the conversation and engages both parties in the direction of benefits for everyone involved.
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Add Your Product
Now it’s time to put your products on the Net. I wrote an article on how to configure your product page to boost your sale, use this as your preference on how to make sure your technical side of the product on-par.
One thing for sure, the most crucial product to a wholesale clothing line is the configurable type and we will discuss this part in detail later down this post!
Set Up Your Payment
This step needs to be perfect for the sake of you and your customers as well. Lack of payment options is the leading cause in cart abandonment and this will directly hurt your wallet.
Luckily, Magento offers a wide range of payment preferences that you can easily install on your store.
One pro-tip here is to sprinkle around trust signals to boost your customer trust in your store! It can be a trust badge, a quick new tab to the payment detail, or even your customer testimonial!
I highly recommend you do your test run after the setup. Therefore, you can walk in the customers’ shoes and experience the payment process from their view then optimize as wishes.
Why Is The Default Configurable Suitable for Magento 2 Wholesale?
At first, configurable products have choosing or drop-down displays for customers to choose options of attributes.
This feature of configurable products allows showing all attributes of a product so that customers can easily choose custom options of the attribute to combine into a simple product and add to cart.
Also about Magento Configurable products, CHECK NOW: 7 Differences in the Configurable between Magento and Magento 2
Despite its usefulness, this product type still needs to be optimized for B2B businesses, especially for wholesale in clothing fashion due to several cons below:
+ Customers can just add each child’s product to the cart each time.
+ Customers cannot see the total Magento wholesale pricing when ordering a lot of items unless they click into the shopping cart.
+ Available combinations of attribute options are not easy to seen or check at a glance
When building Magento wholesale website for several clients, we receive requests to customize configurable product functionalities and display to allow setting all kinds of colors/materials/sizes of clothes on the same page without having to navigate to so many web pages as well as ability to sell in pack and ability to limit access of specific customer groups.
On this blog, we focus on one ability to sell in the pack and reveal 2 solutions for this.
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The first option
We create a module that allows displaying attributes of configurable products in a more simple table to help customers add multiple simple products to cart at once.
Look at this image:
This solution is greatly useful for Magento wholesale websites because it let customers choose many items at once without taking much time to buy one by one as before. Customers can add as many items they want to cart and do not have to repeat this process for times.
This brings a larger amount of revenue as well as enhances wholesale business to develop. As a result, one of the most critical features that Magento stores can provide to wholesale customers is faster ordering or, on the other hand, the ability to purchase in bulk by filling desired quantities for each child product.
The second option
Regarding this solution, we suggest customizing a new extension, which helps wholesale customers to purchase in packs or pieces as wished.
Look at this image below as an example for this customized module:
It will limit access to purchase for different customer groups by requiring customers to login; they can see SKU, price, details, and description of a configurable product. Especially, there will be 2 options to order, which are suitable for merchants and B2B businesses.
Order in pack:
+ Show details about a package: SKU, size scale, list ratio, … as you want
+ Show price per pack and price per piece
+ A table ordering for the customer to choose quantity
E.g., If the admin sets quantity size S-M-L as the following ratio 2-1-2 when a customer chooses 2 in the quantity box, it will be 4-2-4 respectively. Have a look at this image:
+ If one of the attributes of a simple product is out of stock, show a button for customers to get notifications when it’s back in stock: a popup will be shown up, customers can choose the quantity and leave comments and then send the request.
Order special piece:
+ Show Magento wholesale pricing for each child product, show special price
+ Customers enable to choose the quantity for each child product.
Here is an example:
This solution for configurable products obviously can configure to choose which customer group to be applied to this function. Besides, the total quantity and total amount will be shown below the table.
Moreover, customers can add all chosen packs or items to cart with one click; then they can edit these packs (quantity for each pack) or items on the Shopping Cart page. Color swatch function is also supported to have more visual images of children’s products.
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Why Should You Select The Second Way?
First of all, it is suitable for B2B businesses because of its useful display and features. It allows wholesalers to order both in the pack and unique pieces.
Moreover, due to the login requirement, retailers or not-logged-in customers cannot order in the pack that helps to save items for only wholesalers.
Secondly, this way will stimulate merchants to buy in a pack with a large number, especially when it comes to Magento wholesale pricing. All customers need to do is set quantity due to the list ratio being fixed. Hence, this solution will help customers to order conveniently and economically when they purchase items in packs.
Last but not least, this second solution not only optimizes the display of configurable products but also boosts the particular product’s sales as wished. If store owners want sales of a t-shirt with M size, they just set up S-M-L with ratio 1-2-1 respectively, for instance, in the backend, the M size one will be boosted.
Why Shortcuts Are Essential To Sell Clothes in B2B Fashion?
If you look at the general characteristics of wholesale customers, one particular stand out – the pattern-inducing of purchase.
Their job is to scout the Net to find the source with the best products to buy in bulk and continue to do so. That’s why if you make this step easier, they’ll more likely to prefer your store among others! But first, let’s ease the blow with the multiple wishlists.
Remember, comparing and choosing is a big part of your customers’ routine, so, help them create and manage their target products easier is a must.
You can combine this with the ability to add multiple products at once.
Then, with the profile they used on your site, allow them to repeat their purchasing at ease.
And shortcuts do not stop there, you can also allow quick-refund to better your purchasing flow and gain trust from your customers. Store credit is excellent at this with the bonus point to keep the client hanging around!
Wrap Up
Magento 2 Open Source is free to download and use. Thus, if you have an idea for a Magento wholesale website, you should start right on. Besides products, you must also consider Magento wholesale pricing as well.
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