Shopify is an amazing platform for listing and selling products online to the public, with simple pricing options, allowing customers to add to a basket and purchase an item. But what about trade customers? an area dedicated to Trade only, providing information hidden away from public view, customer discounts, and ex vat or tax options to make price calculations easier.
Shopify is a perfect platform for Retail, Trade, and Wholesale Jewellery companies for listing and selling products online.
The answer is, that Shopify provides some simple and more complex options to facilitate all customer types, from password-protected areas and hidden collections to customer login areas that provide different pricing levels or price bands. We have highlighted some options below starting at the simplest option, leading onto more involved Wholesale Shopify Websites.
1: Customer Discounts
By far the most overlooked and simplest option for trade pricing is to create discounts with Shopify and give them to your customers. These could be individual discounts for each customer or you could create bands of discounts e.g Band A 5% Discount, Band B 10% discount, etc. You could also create an Automatic Discount in Shopify’s discount panel that will automatically deduct 5% or 10% for instance off a particular collection only. This option requires no updates or modifications to your current website and can be implemented right away.
2: Bulk Order Collections / Multipacks
Another simple and effective option is to have a trade collection that has bulk order options for a particular product. These are great for minimum orders and can already be discounted. E.g x5 or x10 of a particular product with an applied discount. This will prevent the public from ordering as they won’t want to buy in bulk. This could also work for packs or parcels of jewellery products such as 10 products for our range of 20 products from our range at a particular bulk price. This is great for product ranges that have similar prices but not so great for varying product prices such as diamonds and precious metals. This option requires no updates to your theme.
3: Password Protected Collection or Area
A really effective option is to have a hidden collection or set of collections that are protected by a password. This allows you to have a Trade or Customer Link to that collection and when they login to their created account, they will unlock the collection to view and buy from. This collection can then be set up in Shopify as a set of Trade Products with their own pricing structure with applied discounts and trade pricing. The simplest method to add this functionality is to install an app such as Locksmith or Wholesale Lock Manager for instance. These offer some nice features but they do come at a cost from $6.99 pcm to $99 pcm depending on your Shopify plan. Alternatively, we can build some simple code into your website pages or collections that offer the same functionality without the need to install any third-party apps, there are no ongoing monthly fees.
4: Simple Trade & Wholesale Features
If the options above don’t quite hit the mark with the features you need for your business then the next stage is to set up dedicated Trade/Wholesale functionality on your website. We can do this by ensuring Customer accounts are turned on. A trade registration form can be set up to capture enquiries. New customers are set up and tagged as ‘Trade’ or ‘Wholesale’ for easy sorting and as a failsafe for customers logging in, only those tagged will see the wholesale features.
Once a trade customer is logged in they will be able to:
See all prices on the store ex VAT or Tax if applicable, making better buying decisions at a glance.
Be able to see a list of current and past orders
Be able to re-order a past order with a click of a button
Use normal discount codes to apply a discount to their order at checkout and/or
apply a standard discount to all products visible on the product pages. This will affect all products in the system. If multiple customer discounts are required the more advanced trade features are required below.
Cash on Delivery Option at checkout to allow customers to pay at a later date via invoice.
5: Advanced Trade and Wholesale Features
Trade accounts that require multiple level discounts per product, per customer, or collection require some advanced customization and app installations. A Shopify App such as Wholesale - All in One can provide some great features with an additional monthly cost of $24 pcm plus an installation charge. These features include:
Wholesale, Volume, and Individual Pricing
Wholesale/ Trade Signup forms
Minimum order limit and Quantity breaks
Tiered customer discounts
Wholesale Shipping
Dashboard Image courtesy of Wholesale ‑ All in one
Dashboard Image courtesy of Wholesale ‑ All in one
Dashboard Image courtesy of Wholesale ‑ All in one
Shopify Trade / Retail Websites
If you are a jewellery company that sells products to both the public B2C bases and the Trade as a B2B, then building your website in Shopify is a great choice to offer these features. You can effectively manage one set of products and company information on a single website but offer slightly different features if your customer logs in using your account username and password. This then gives your trade customers access to repeat orders, simple discounts, and ex VAT pricing. Our team at Lionsorbet are experts at building or migrating Jewellery Retail and Trade customers into Shopify to create a beautifully designed eCommerce website to grow your business in-store and online whilst reaching more customers. Contact us to find out more about converting your existing retail business or creating a new e-commerce trade website.
Shopify Wholesale / Manufacturing websites
Do you run a dedicated Wholesale business that buys in or manufacturers your own jewellery? Do you want to offer your customers a private portal for browsing your product range, and view tiered pricing, whilst providing multiple discount levels to individual customers or customer groups? Shopify has some amazing tools to manage and grow your business online.
We can create or migrate an existing website, giving your staff the tools to manage an enterprise-level business in a simple-to-use environment. Contact us to find out more about creating a new Wholesale eccomerce websirte.
READY TO UPGRADE YOUR TRADE WEBSITE?
If you are ready to start your new wholesale or trade business or want to update your current website to a more modern and feature-rich platform get in touch on the details below and we'll discuss your options.
