Wholesale orders can be profitable for your store, even without a separate wholesale division or even much of a plan. When they buy on a regular schedule you can get a foundation of stable revenue.
When companies buy in bulk they are usually looking for two things:
- good price on a large quantity
- reliable ordering and shipping
Both are easy enough to handle with the variety of price discount options and setting up a process for priority handling (e.g. pick/pack these orders first). At a low-volume, wholesale orders are just large orders intended for resell/manufacturing.
The difficulty is letting people know that you accept wholesale orders. This can be done with a link in your footer and a page talking about them, which works for new customers who are reading through your site.
For repeat customers, you can take another tactic and go directly to them.
Look at your customer's past orders and find the ones that are:
- large (in total or in quantity),
- going to company, and
- have multiple orders
Each one of those has a high likelihood of being a silent wholesale customer (or a super fan).
Craft an email along the lines of "now offering wholesale orders" and you might spark a conversation.
In Repeat Customer Insights you'd want to use the Customer Grid and the Whale (FM) automatic customer segment. Those customers are placing orders much larger than average.
Eric Davis
Market to your customer's timing
Figure out how long customers wait in-between purchases and you have a key component for your marketing timing. This is the basis of the Average Latency metric and Order Sequence Report in Repeat Customer Insights.