Wholesale with Magento

If you have a B2B business and you would like to make it easier to contact with your clients you can take many advantages from Magento. As it is a multistore you can have both a BTC store and a version for your wholesale partners along with other profits you can check in this article.

Your B2B client can log before you will show him the prices of products you present. You can use here many registration fields like tax number, name of company and more.

Furthermore, when the registration is done, you can verify with a phone call or e-mail the client before he can log in. This way you can check, if he is a wholesaler like he claims to be.

• Check order status, stock, available promotions and recently ordered items, history
• Make an order
• Set default billing and shipping addresses
• Make wish list and add comments and email or send RSS feed of this wish list

WHEN YOU SHOW YOUR PRODUCTS YOU CAN ADD INFORMATION THAT YOUR B2B CLIENT WILL APPRECIATE.

PROMOTIONS YOU CAN EASILY MANAGE

• Free-shipping – you can set it through product information page
• Newsletter – as a default option you have it on Magento, so you can easily send e-mails to all your B2B partners at once.
• Up-sell, Cross-sale, Relative products – This is a way to offer an extra standard product when your client is already at the cart. You can use relative products to offer up-sell or cross-sell, if you would like to offer complementary products instead.
• Tier price – Different pricing reliant on the products they buy. With Multi-tier pricing you can manage quantity discounts.
• You can set a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
• Group Price – Customer Group Prices allows store owners to set up different prices for every customer group that means more targeted promotion for different kind of clients. You can set a wholesalers group and offer easily special prices for them. From the admin you can make special prices for your wholesalers group. The price will be seen only for logged users. As you can see group price is a tool to encourage people to log into your store. Below you can also see how tier prices are an asset, if you would like to sell more quantities. Also on product information page you can set promotions for you wholesale clients. With this option they know, for instance, that if they buy 12 shirts, they will save 10%.

SHIPPING

• Flat rate shipping per order or item – the easiest way, you set up a fix price for each parcel
• Table rates – this tool makes it easy to set different prices reliant from the weight, sub-total, destination and number of parcels
  
• API integration is always a choice, if you would like to set a more complex agreement with the courier, each delivery service have its own API.
• Magento is by default integrated for real-time shipping rates from: UPS, UPS XML (account rates), FedEx(account rates), USPS and DHL
• The platform has ability to specify allowed destination countries per method

With table rates or API you can take advantage from some on-site order tracking from user accounts, use your couriers available tracking parcel option and you can make it easy for your clients to check shipping costs in the cart. With Magento you can have also here tax estimates. That is one of the best ways to avoid cart abandonments. estimate shipping

Shipping integrations are available with label printing tool. You can view, edit, print labels for all major carriers.

PAYMENT, ORDERS AND INVOICES

• With Magento you can set/edit order and invoice from admin panel
• Tax rates per location is something you can set through Magento admin panel.
• SSL security support for orders
• Saved credit card method for offline payments
• Magento is configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices.
• Integration is available with Amazon Payments, multiple PayPal gateways, Autorize.net and lots off available extensions on Magento Connect.
• You can also add extensions from Magento Connect to manage orders and invoices more efficient to automatically arrange process. For example you can:
  

  “Invoice and ship orders right from the order grid. Change order status, capture payment right on the grid. Apply the actions to multiple orders in a couple clicks. This extension is a one-time 69$ cost, but there are many more you could use.”

• With Magento reports you can check all orders and returns. You can check them here: System > Configuration > General > Reports

WAREHOUSE, ERP AND MORE INTEGRATION

• With some more serious integration if you use some ERP systems like SAP One for instance you can automate the process of placement Magento sales orders with your delivery service.
• Actually all orders, clients, product descriptions can be transferred between the systems.
• If you use Subiekt GT or software like this, it is also possible to integrate it with Magento so your order in Magento is automatically placed at your Subiekt.
• If you plan to set a drop-shipping model, you can use Magento. It is possible to automate the communication between your online store and offline orders to product fulfilment partners you use.
• If you buy from different suppliers and you would like to make it easier you can also do it with Magento. Integration can be made even with a dozen of warehouses suppliers you do business with. And this solution can vividly short-circuit the process. How? With an automatic update of stock and product prices, even if wholesalers are uploading their files in a different way. The final profit is, that you get information about the stock, name and price in each warehouse and product on your Magento panel and also, a „cost” field can be automatically completed with the lowest price available.

LET’S SUM UP

What are your client’s benefits? They can set an order; check their payments, supply, special price you offer them individually. You can set for them special payment conditions like different periods to fulfill the payment. With some advanced delivery options you can make it easy for them to track they order and delivery parcel and of course set a range of promotions from price groups, tier price to free shipping and more.

What are your benefits? You shorten all repetitive activities which take your precious time and develop your business instead. You make it easier to order from you and the profit here is obvious.