Wholesale e-commerce is an online sale of bulk and discounted products to other businesses. It enables you to expand your business into the wholesale market as an extension of your online store.
Your wholesale store does not have access to your online store, as they have a separate storefront and they require different login credentials. By putting the items on a pricing list and customizing the costs of the products, you can offer the same things in your wholesale store as in your online store.
Retail shoppers and wholesale customers both shop differently. Due to big order volumes and approval procedures, wholesale customers require certain payment choices and website experiences.
The wholesale e-commerce market is huge with a value of around $13.09 trillion in 2021. With a 15.2% year-over-year increase, the wholesale e-commerce segment expanded 1.17 times faster than the rise in the total U.S. manufacturing and distribution sales.
How to Choose a Wholesale E-commerce Platform?
Here are a few recommendations if you’re looking for e-commerce development solutions to build a wholesale e-commerce platform:
- Adding your products into existing inventory sheets, creating customer accounts and developing wholesale price lists should be a simple process
- Although the platform caters to a wholesale audience, some of the typical e-commerce website elements still make the user experience a great deal better. This includes building a user-friendly search bar and a product catalog that enables quick searching and transparent pricing
- Releasing developer APIs regularly and upgrading user experience
- Enabling modifications and evaluations before making the platform live
Best Platforms for Wholesale E-commerce Development
Wholesale e-commerce is considered the backbone of the retail industry. This kind of business model involves direct trading between two companies, often a retailer and a wholesaler. Here are the top 10 wholesale e-commerce platforms that you may choose from for your business needs.
1. Shopify Plus
Shopify is a widely used e-commerce platform because of its straightforward and efficient approach. It is an ideal e-commerce solution that can go live immediately, irrespective of whether you’re a small or a mid-sized business.
The benefits of wholesale e-commerce include increased order volume and less time spent on administrative and manual entry work. You can expand into this enormous industry and discover new sources of income for your company by becoming a wholesaler. Leese, Pepsi and Bombas are some businesses that use Shopify Plus for their e-commerce business.
2. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is the most trusted e-commerce solution provider. Its landing page helps you find new wholesale customers and modify your website to suit their product preferences and prices. Managing your front and backend is very simple with BigCommerce and it also has a combined wholesale functionality.
By placing your wholesale consumers into specific customer groups, BigCommerce makes it simple to customize the website experience. They can benefit from special pricing and reordering procedures as a result. Some big firms that are using BigCommerce are Toyota and The Real Yellow Pages.
3. Magento Commerce
Magento Commerce stands out from the crowd of e-commerce platforms and is the ideal
option for many online businesses because of its extreme flexibility and robust features. It is a feature-rich platform that can meet all the needs of businesses, enabling them to easily handle hundreds of goods and run their websites without any problems.
Magento Commerce is SEO friendly too, making the process of optimization and product descriptions easy for businesses. Some organizations that use Magento commerce are Adidas, Paul Smith, Cox & Cox and Liverpool Football Club. You can take your wholesale business to the next level using Magento mobile app development features as well.
4. 3DCart
For B2B wholesale businesses with a variety of products, 3DCart is the best e-commerce platform to use. It can rapidly draw visitors and effectively convert them into customers due to its straightforward yet effective website. You can use 3DCart to build features that are crucial to your business with no technical hassle. Some features of 3DCart are:
- One-click subscription and order
- Customizing prices
- Numerous payment gateways
- Mobile-friendly and flexible platform
- Manage website content
- Quick loading on all devices
- No transaction fees
5. PrestaShop
PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce platform offering efficient and innovative e-commerce solutions with features that help in creating an online store from the beginning. It can quickly create products, categories and values, track product inventory, customize store features, promote the store with unique deals and product spotlights, manage orders and run multiple stores in the same back office.
PrestaShop is easy to install and budget-friendly too. It is free of charge and supports multiple secure payment options.
6. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform that allows for broad customization. You can quickly complete setting up your wholesale e-commerce store by installing the plugin on your WordPress website.
To make the most of the features of this plugin, you will need a basic knowledge of WordPress. By adding these necessary plugins, you can change the features and functionality of your online store.
With the drag-and-drop technique, WooCommerce is quite simple to use (even for non-technical people). Purchasing a WooCommerce service is completely free, but you might have to pay for some more extensions, a domain, hosting and maintenance.
About 26% of all online stores use this extension as their power source. AeroPress and Weber are some companies that use WooCommerce.
7. TradeGecko (QuickBooks Commerce)
TradeGecko is a good option for small wholesale enterprises searching for affordable omnichannel management and optimization solutions, as it is a cloud-based e-commerce platform. It provides a sleek and user-friendly interface.
It was first created exclusively to streamline the process of storing and managing customer and inventory data (for both offline and online businesses). The platform’s store performance enables the admin to track and evaluate metrics necessary to increase sales status. Some companies that use the TradeGecko platform are The 5th and Anothersole.
8. SuiteCommerce
SuiteCommerce, an Oracle offering, is ideally suited for B2B sellers. One of the hallmarks of SuiteCommerce is its easy integration with NetSuite, Oracle’s ERP offering, which eases one of the most cumbersome processes for wholesale businesses by unifying the backend commerce with a robust ERP solution.
A primary advantage of an integrated ERP and commerce platform is the ability to get a holistic view of your entire operational data on a single platform without having to configure and merge multiple logins. This helps you keep track of major operational aspects such as sales, inventory, and customer experience.
9. OroCommerce
If you’re looking to operate with a competent B2B e-commerce platform, OroCommerce will certainly meet your needs. It has a built-in CRM feature that enables businesses to navigate the sales process successfully by having a thorough grasp of the customer’s reactions. Multiple pricing lists can be created and managed using OroCommerce.
It personalizes and organizes the catalogs and manages the inventory efficiently. OroCommerce is designed to support large and midsize organizations in achieving their objectives. Dunlop and Igual are some firms that use the OroCommerce platform.
