Grow wholesale business by segmenting your customers into groups

Published on September 13, 2012 Grow wholesale business by segmenting your customers into groups

If you’re a wholesaler selling B2B to retail outlets via your website, one price may not fit all. Some of your customers could be VIP purchasers and attract better prices on certain products in your range, you might want to offer quantity discounts for wholesale purchases, or you might want to run promotions just to particular wholesale customers.

By segmenting your wholesale customers into smaller sub-groups you can reflect the diversity of the customers you sell to and come up with more targeted promotions to grow their purchases from you – ultimately making more through your wholesale store.

The traditional problem faced by store owners when trying to segment customers into multiple groups is that many software products do not have this functionality at all, and the ones that do may not allow more than one or a few wholesale groups to be defined. This limits your options as a wholesaler.

One set wholesale price lets you differentiate between retail and wholesale customers, but it doesn’t let you differentiate well between different wholesale groups. As your business grows, segmenting your wholesale customers is as important as breaking off retail and wholesale customers.

For example, some of your wholesale customers might have larger volumes and you might use different shipping methods/prices for them. You might offer different payment methods for different wholesale customer groups. You might want some products to only be available to certain wholesale customer groups. You might want to run promotions for only particular wholesale customer groups.

To manage your business effectively, you need a B2B cart facility to create multiple wholesale pricing groups with the flexibility to set multiple pricing rules for these groups, define different payment methods for those groups or different shipping prices and methods. You might also want to offer quantity discounts on a per group basis or set an order minimum that applies store-wide.

How can you set up wholesale pricing groups?

Using Ozcart all of the above scenarios are possible.

Here’s how wholesale pricing works. You can define as many wholesale groups as you have wholesale customers. How you divide them depends on the way your business works and the choice is completely yours.

You can then define pricing options for those wholesale groups on a per product basis.

There is a lot of flexibility in the way it works. You can set up pricing rules for particular groups to apply on a percentage basis or absolute basis depending on how you work. You could have a generic group of wholesalers that only qualify for a 5% discount on a product and then specific prices for your larger wholesale customers. You can change the discount amounts and prices for each product in your store.

If you wish you can set up these rules for quantities of 1 or more (as in the above example) or add further rules (on a per group basis) for bulk buying quantity discounts.

In addition to B2B pricing and quantity discounts for your online shop, you can apply complete promotions for a set period of time to discount groups. For example, you could run a 20% off store wide promotion for your “Wholesale 2” group (you would use your own meaningful names of course) or set up a coupon code that only particular wholesalers could use. You can also set the types of payments and shipping that apply for these groups to reflect the way you work. There’s a lot of flexibility in what you can do.