How to Create a WooCommerce Wholesale System

WooCommerce works out of the box for direct-to-consumer sales, but business-to-business sales require extensions or additional plugins. Creating a WooCommerce wholesale system also requires additional setup, as wholesale customers, pricing, and payment or shipping methods need to be created.

Fortunately, there are several plugins that can help you create your WooCommerce wholesale shop, and can create a store that sells wholesale products exclusively, or sells to both regular and wholesale customers.

Create WooCommerce Wholesale Customers

When anyone purchases an item in your shop and creates an account, they’re identified with the “Customer” role in WordPress. This ensures that they have only the capabilities on your site that customers should have (such as the ability to update account information in the “My Account” area on your site’s frontend), but don’t have further capabilities on your site (like adding blog posts).

To create a wholesale role, you can use the free User Role Editor plugin. Go to Users > User Role Editor and click “Add Role”. This will let you select an existing role to clone, so I’ll give wholesale customers all of the same abilities as regular customers by cloning the “Customer” role.

Create WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing

Wholesale pricing systems can be created in WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts ($29).

WooCommerce Wholesale Product Catalogs

Many shops have products that are wholesale-only, and should be hidden from everyone but wholesale customers.

If this is the case, you’ll need another plugin to change your product visibility: WooCommerce Products Visibility ($22).

Create Shipping Methods to Wholesale Customers

Since you have wholesale customers, you will probably want to set different shipping options for them. To do so, you’ll need another plugin, WooCommerce Advanced Shipping ($17).

Summary: Creating a WooCommerce Wholesale System

Creating a basic WooCommerce wholesale system is fairly simple and requires the help of a couple of plugins. Once you’ve created your wholesale customers, here are the plugins we’ve mentioned that may prove helpful in creating your WooCommerce wholesale system: