While WooCommerce is one of the most powerful and flexible ecommerce platforms on the market today, it was built for retail, and therefore it’s missing many important features for business buyers.
If you are setting up a wholesale store with WooCommerce, you will find many of these features fulfilled by small individual plugins. However, that approach comes with large disadvantages: reduced site performance caused by running a large number of plugins, and plugin conflicts that can lead to technical issues and errors.
One solution can be replacing several wholesale plugins with a single all-in-one WooCommerce wholesale suite solution. By doing that, you avoid cluttering the site with a large number of plugins, as well as avoid conflicts and errors, since all features are running under the same extension.
In this article let’s explore some of the best plugin suites on the market for wholesale sites, by looking at features, use cases, pricing and support.
1. B2BKing – Ultimate Wholesale Plugin for WooCommerce
B2BKing is a complete wholesale plugin that will transform and extend WooCommerce functionality, and get the platform fully ready for B2B or wholesale projects. The plugin adds over a hundred functionalities, covering everything from wholesale prices, bulk discounts and tax exemptions, to business registration, payment methods and VIES VAT number validation.
Here are a few of the plugin’s most important features:
- Prices by User Role and Wholesale Pricing
- Business Registration with Custom Fields and Forms
- Tax Exemptions and Displaying Prices Incl. or Excl. Tax
- Request a Quote
- Product and Catalog Visibility Control
- Payment and Shipping Methods Control
- Messaging System for Communication with Customers
- Offers Functionality – Ideal for Promotions and Negotiated Pricing
- Tiered Prices and Generated Tiered Price Table
- Dynamic Rules, Pricing and Complex Discounts
- Minimum Order, Free Shipping and Custom Taxes
- Different Content for Different Users
- Bulk Order Form with AJAX and SKU Search
- Invoice Payment Gateway
- Purchase Lists – Ideal for Frequent Purchases (e.g. Stock Resupply)
B2BKing is sold with a lifetime license (for a single one-time payment), that comes with unlimited plugin updates and 6 months of included technical support.
2. B2B & Wholesale Suite
B2B & Wholesale Suite is a wholesale plugin suite with similarly powerful functionality, yet a different scope. This suite will also allow you to set up wholesale pricing, tiered pricing, business registration, discounts, tax exemptions and so forth.
Additionally, it has a central control panel, modular design, easy setup, and is ideal for businesses that want to focus on sales, and get everything up and ready as fast as possible.
B2B & Wholesale Suite is available for sale on the official WooCommerce extension store, vetted by, and sold in partnership with WooCommerce. By purchasing this plugin suite you also benefit from the customer-centric Automattic refund policy, including a no-questions-asked 30 day money back guarantee.
There are several feature differences compared to B2BKing, including differences in customers panels, dashboard, quote request and bulk order form functionality.
Group-Based User Management
This plugin suite operates through a powerful group management system, where customers are organized into business groups. Subsequently, each group can have its own wholesale prices for products, specific payment or shipping methods, bulk discounts, minimum order amounts, etc.
The above image shows the group management panel, where business groups are controlled alongside options for B2C users and logged out users.
Modular Control Center and Design
One of the functionalities that sets B2B & Wholesale Suite apart is its modular control center, where each plugin module can be disabled, and each functionality can be controlled in detail from a central location.
The suite has 20 configurable modules, 8 of which can be disabled, reducing unnecessary code and improving performance. These are: discussions, quote requests, bundles, shopping lists, bulk order form, multi-user accounts, product visibility, and payment & shipping control.
Advanced Quote Requests
Another area where this plugin suite will shine is when it comes to quote requests. Quote requests can be enabled for all users, guest users, or specific user groups. Furthermore, the quote request form is customizable, and there are 4 default quote fields: name, email phone and message.
Quote requests are sent either as email notifications, or integrated with the plugin’s discussions functionality, where users can communicate and negotiate with the shop directly.
Wrapping Up
Both plugins presented above are excellent all-in-one solutions for wholesale stores. While B2BKing is more customizable, feature-rich and great for technically-inclined customers, B2B & Wholesale Suite was designed to be as simple to use and setup as possible, making it a fantastic choice for businesses.
