How to Find Shopify Wholesale Customers for Your Store?
Setting up a store on Shopify is not the endpoint for your wholesale journey. To find Shopify wholesale customers isn’t easy. Take a look at our brief tutorial to find and create appropriate wholesale accounts for your customers on the Shopify platform.
Who is a Shopify Wholesale Customer?
Wholesaling means selling and buying in massive quantities. Any customers assigned with at least one or more pricing lists in Shopify can be considered Shopify wholesale customers.
With the access of Shopify admin, you can easily create wholesale orders for these customers or invite them to create wholesale store accounts on your online store.
Furthermore, B2B customers can log in to your store via a wholesale account to create B2B orders at ease. It’s worth noting that Shopify wholesale accounts are allowed to access certain B2B product pages with your permission.
How to Find Your Shopify Wholesale Customers?
There are multiple ways for you to find wholesale customers, which you can read more about below.
1. Attract B2B customers via website
Do you know that if your store is popular enough, eventually retailers will contact you? Many distributors are constantly looking for potential partners, and your brand might be caught in their eyes if your promotion is successful enough.
You should never forget that any visitors who surf through your website might be a potential B2B customer. Therefore, always remember to put contact queries for wholesale on your website footer if someone is interested in your wholesale products.
2. Participate in tradeshows to find B2B buyers
One of the most traditional methods to find B2B customers is to participate in trade shows. You might develop valuable relationships and discover retail and wholesale partners of different industries at these trade shows, from fashion to furniture or materials.
However, you should remember that trade displays might be very costly for businesses, especially new wholesalers. The charge for exhibiting booths can be pretty expensive, while it doesn’t guarantee that your leads are potential enough to cover the cost.
3. Joining B2B marketplaces
LOOKING for B2B eCommerce marketplaces with lots of potential customers? Take a look at our list!
It’s recommended that you should participate and get featured on wholesale supplier marketplaces. So that you know, there are a bunch of marketplaces and you should cover them all.
If you’re wholesale newcomers, try picking one that requires little to no subscription fee for displaying your shop first and then moving on to paid ones, even if it costs little fees.
4. Finding complementary partners
Unlike B2C, wholesale business doesn’t require a massive number of consumers to survive. Instead, wholesalers need loyal customers that trust the brand and successfully sell their products. These customers are expected to return and place larger purchases regularly frequently.
You can try to find a fitting partner via social media, email or phone to display each other’s products as complementary products.
How to Create a Wholesale Customer Account?
Shopify wholesale accounts for customers can be created easily via assigning customers to a B2B price list. To do that, there’re preparations that you need beforehand.
1. Preparation
You might need:
- Wholesale price list.
Products you want to sell at wholesale price should be listed in a price list. Remember that price lists are only available for use within your wholesale storefront, not the regular storefront. Usually, a wholesale price list must contain product names, corresponding prices and tags.
Customers assigned via the price list tags should be able to see your wholesale price and place orders with the custom prices you set. There are two types of discount price lists for your B2B customers.
Price list type | Description |
Percentage discounts | All product prices in your wholesale store will be discounted with the exact percentages you set up beforehand. Or you can set it only apply to a selection of your product collections.
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Volume pricing | With volume pricing, your wholesale product prices are only applied when customers select a maximum (or minimum) quantity of the products.
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- Customer email.
To create a wholesale account, you need the customer’s email address. It’s up to you how to get these addresses. You can either invite them to create a wholesale account, ask for their permissions, or simply wait till customers directly contact you. That said, the email address is also needed for invoices, notifications, or order updates.
Customers should have an email address associated with their account. An email address is needed if you want your customer to log into your wholesale store. It is also required if you’re going to send them invoices or notifications of updates to their order from the wholesale channel.
2. Assign customers to the price list
The first step to create a wholesale account for your B2B customers is to assign them to the corresponding price list prepared back then.
- Log in as Shopify admin, click Customers from the administration interface.
- Select the name of customers that you want to assign to the price list.
- Choose the corresponding tag of the price list that you wish to assign to your customers.
- Click Save when finished.
Now you’re ready to create wholesale orders for your customers if they don’t feel the need to have a wholesale account.
Otherwise, if your customers want to browse products available in your B2B store, then it’s required for them to have their wholesale account. Having a wholesale account also lets them access your already set-up price list.
3. Invite customers to B2B store
Besides logging into the wholesale store by creating a B2B account, there’s also an alternative method that allows your customers to access your wholesale store. By sending an invitation link that can’t be shared or reused via emails, your customers can access your wholesale store easily.
To create the invitation link, the email inviter within the wholesale section is required. If you wish to send multiple emails at once or customize the already existing ones, please export the links to CSV then import them into other third-party email systems.
Follow the steps below to invite your B2B customers to your wholesale store:
- From the admin page, navigate to the Wholesale section, select Customers.
- Check the corresponding checkbox of the customers you wished to invite.
- Select Bulk actions, then click the Send invite if you’d like to send an invitation email.
- Otherwise, select Bulk actions and click the Export invite link to export to CSV files.
Customers that are invited will have their status changed and appear at the Invited tab of the Customers page, which makes it easier for you to keep track of your process. If everything goes safe and sound, your customers’ status might change to Enabled, implying that they have successfully created their wholesale account.
HAVE you setting up your Shopify B2B website? If not, why don’t you pay our service a visit?
