Setting up Wholesale & Trade Offerings

Setting up Wholesale & Trade Offerings

kaorimtodd
Visitor
2 0 0

Hi everyone,

I’m in the process of setting up wholesale and trade offerings for my business, where I sell high-quality Japanese ceramics.  I’d like to structure things:

  • Wholesale customers get 40% off retail prices with a minimum order quantity (MOQ) and access to limited collections.
  • Trade customers (e.g., photographers, Airbnb hosts, hospitality) get 25% off without an MOQ and can access the entire collection.

The main issue I’m running into is finding an app that can handle all of the following:

  • Dedicated logins for wholesale and trade customers.
  • Wholesale customers only see the collections available to them.
  • Sync inventory between retail and wholesale 
  • Trade customers can access the full range of products and check out with a discount code (I understand I can do this in Shopify admin).
  • Both wholesale and trade customers can place orders without paying at checkout, so I can invoice them later with the correct shipping costs (since they don’t qualify for the retail flat-rate shipping).

I’m considering setting up a separate website for wholesale while using discount codes for trade customers on my retail site, but thought of building another website from scratch is a bit daunting...  and more cost, so I’d love any advice or recommendations on apps that could handle all of this in one platform.

Thanks!

Replies 2 (2)

PaulNewton
Shopify Partner
7450 657 1562

Hi @kaorimtodd when there's that many moving parts you have a lot of research ahead of you as this turns into a very vague broad topic too fast.

 

With so many compounding requirements you are hunting for a unicorn, which implies you should either use  Shopify Plus, multiple apps, or build your own apps for the use cases.

 

For actual B2B wholesale features do the math to evaluate getting a shopify Plus plan; if viable let me know and I can refer you to Plus sales.

 

For multiple storefronts, shopify has more than the online-sales channel for storefronts, see the buy-buttons channel or buy-buttons sdk or cart-permalinks, etc , which could be used to embed products/carts on pages instead of having normal /product/ endpoints and having to try to lock those down.

https://www.shopify.com/custom-storefront-tools  , https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/headless/getting-started 

Or external sites, but that can mean multiple logins for customers.

 

For logins keep in mind the new-accounts system is a singular shopify login that's currently hard to customize. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/customers/customer-accounts/new-customer-accounts 

 

See apps like locksmith for content gating, limit some customers from seeing some products etc, 

For creating custom draft orders from carts there usemechanic app which is made by lightward the developers of locksmith as well

https://tasks.mechanic.dev/create-a-draft-order-from-the-cart 

Contact paull.newton+shopifyforum@gmail.com for the solutions you need


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kaorimtodd
Visitor
2 0 0

Hi @PaulNewton 

Thanks so much for your detailed reply! I really appreciate the insight.

Shopify Plus isn’t viable for my business at this stage—perhaps down the track, but the fees are a bit out of reach for now.

I think combining a few apps will be the best option, as finding a single app to handle everything might be unrealistic.
I'll definitely explore the options you mentioned.

Thanks again for your help!

Kaori