In B2B, it is important to build your site on a platform that can maximize your sales and revenue. You’ll find many e-commerce platforms and plugins out there, but not all of them have the same capability of enhancing your results and helping you reach a wider market.
Enter WooCommerce, a free, open-source e-commerce platform that allows you to intuitively sell products online, no matter the order size. It is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, with 29% of websites using it to power their online stores, and it is used by both small online stores and large B2B businesses. Its flexibility also makes it a great choice for building and managing wholesale transactions.
In this article, our WooCommerce development experts will walk you through the basics of setting up your WooCommerce B2B wholesale store and introduce you to the best WooCommerce b2b plugins.
What Is Business-To-Business (B2B) E-commerce?
Business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce is a form of business that allows companies to sell products and services to other companies, without dealing with the customer directly. Your B2B clients can then use your products to create a final product or resell your items to their own customers.
Wholesale businesses are a subset of the B2B market, selling products in bulk to other companies, and occupying a large space of the market. In fact, according to TradeGecko U.S. wholesale alone is currently an $8.3 trillion industry.
When we talk about B2B eCommerce specifically, we refer to an online store where you can purchase products or services from a company that will deliver them directly to another company, with all transactions taking place online. The B2B eCommerce model is also referred to as “enterprise” or “channel” e-commerce because it allows businesses to sell directly to other companies rather than consumers.
How Are the Needs of a Wholesale Business Different?
As we’ve previously established, business-to-business eCommerce is a subset of eCommerce that focuses on selling products and services to other businesses. As such, their websites tend to be more complex than their B2C counterparts because they need to handle more complex transactions, including:
- Transactions that involve multiple parties.
- Accepting a variety of payment methods.
- Providing a wide range of shipping options according to their client’s needs.
- Offering different pricing for both regular and non-regular users with special pricing or discounts for specific users.
- Using various types of registration forms for different types of businesses.
- Offering validation of VAT or other types of taxes and support and exemption.
Is WooCommerce a good platform for a wholesale business?
WooCommerce is an excellent platform for e-commerce businesses of all kinds, but it is mighty for B2B and wholesale. It is a full-fledged platform with the necessary tools to run an online store.
Creating a B2B store on WooCommerce is very simple and easy to use. You can set up your store within minutes without coding knowledge or technical expertise.
WooCommerce lets you connect your store with other marketplaces and platforms using their API keys. The backend admin panel comes with many pre-built pages that you can use to display information about your products or company. You can also create custom pages using custom templates. In addition, accept payment from all major credit cards and add other different payment gateways to fulfill your business needs using WooCommerce without any restrictions.
Moreover, you can use WooCommerce’s powerful B2B and wholesale extensions to access different shipping options, tiered pricing, private client stores, dynamic pricing, and other essential features for wholesale vendors.
Ultimately, WooCommerce provides you with flexibility and a wide range of tools for managing orders and shipping costs
WooCommerce B2B Themes and Plugins for Wholesale
If you want to sell bulk items to customers, you will need to make sure that you can handle the volume of orders. You will also want to consider whether or not you need extra features like order tracking or inventory management. Thus, suitable themes and plugins are critical to thriving your store.
Here is our list of recommended themes and plugins for setting up Wholesale business on WooCommerce:
Best Wholesale Themes for WooCommerce B2B
When it comes to finding the best wholesale themes for WooCommerce, there are many different options.
When setting up your wholesale business with WooCommerce, we recommend using a theme that seamlessly integrates with the plugin and its features, is regularly updated, compatible with any plugins you’ll be using to run your B2B online store, and offers a variety of professional page layouts or templates.
We have compiled a list of some of the most popular and well-known wholesale themes for WooCommerce.
Astra
From learning to e-commerce, Astra is always a good choice. It is also one of the best options for your wholesale WooCommerce site as it seamlessly integrates with this e-commerce platform and is fast and lightweight. Astra also makes it easy for anyone to design a professional-looking site thanks to its many prebuilt website options. However, it also provides you with the flexibility of using custom code or enlisting the help of a WooCommerce development agency to customize the theme for your wholesale site.
Astra is also fully compatible with Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Gutenberg blocks and optimized to bring your site maximum speed.
Storefront
Storefront is WooCommerce’s official WordPress theme and is available for free. It is specially designed with WooCommerce in mind, meaning it will always work seamlessly with WooCommerce’s latest updates and its official extensions.
Additionally, the theme is fully responsive and comes with multiple display options and an e-commerce-focused home page. If you want to take it a step further you can enhance Storefront with multiple extensions which will provide you with additional e-commerce and design options, improving your customer’s experience and checkout process.
Flatsome
