WooCommerce is best known for powering online shops for retail customers. Few people know that it’s also hugely popular for wholesale stores selling to trade users. In this post, we’ll take a look at the best WooCommerce wholesale plugins to do just that.

If you want to use it as a WooCommerce wholesale plugin – either as a private store or a wholesale area to run alongside your public shop – then it’s a bit trickier to get your head around. Strangely, there are no wholesale plugins in the list of official WooCommerce Extensions. However, some excellent wholesale plugins from reputable companies are available.

I’ve tried and tested all of them to create this guide to the best WooCommerce wholesale plugins.

6 Best WooCommerce Wholesale Plugins

The market for wholesale plugins for WooCommerce is dominated by plugins that offer different pricing for retail and trade customers. There are lots of wholesale plugins that offer this and nothing else.

Differentiated pricing is an important element of most wholesale stores. However, this is only a small part of the functionality needed to convert WooCommerce into a wholesale store.

To create a complete wholesale store, you need to do more than change the pricing. You might also want to display your wholesale products in a less visual format that is suitable for the trade.

You’ll probably want to password-protect or hide the wholesale part of the store so that only approved distributors can access it.

With this in mind, we can divide WooCommerce wholesale plugins into 5 categories:

• WooCommerce pricing plugins that charge different prices to retail and wholesale customers.
• Plugins to create a private WooCommerce shop or protect or hide areas within WooCommerce.
• WooCommerce plugins that create a wholesale-friendly table-based view or grid of products instead of the standard category layouts.
• WordPress Plugins to create a separate user role for wholesale users.
• Plugins that let people register to become wholesale distributors.

To help you create a fully featured wholesale area for your WooCommerce store, I’m going to recommend the top plugin in each of these categories.

1. WooCommerce Wholesale Pro

As an online store owner, if you sell to both retail customers and wholesale customers then you’ll need a way to add a wholesale area to your existing WooCommerce store. This way, you can make wholesale ordering easier for your B2B customers and deliver a quick and seamless shopping experience that’s tailored specifically for them.

Create a Wholesale Store in WooCommerce

The WooCommerce Wholesale Pro plugin is the easiest way to create a wholesale store alongside your public-facing store in WooCommerce. 

It lets you create a hidden area that only wholesale users can see complete with wholesale registration (with or without admin moderation), B2B wholesale discounts, and product-specific pricing for different wholesale user roles.

In addition to this, the plugin integrates seamlessly with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin allowing you to create quick order forms in just a few clicks. This way, customers can quickly add all of the products they’d like to purchase to their shopping cart at once and proceed to the checkout page.

Using the WooCommerce Wholesale Pro plugin, you can create an unlimited number of wholesale user roles, each with its own pricing. This is useful when you want to incentivize different wholesale buyers with exclusive discounts.

For example, you can offer Silver Wholesale buyers a flat 10% off whereas your Gold Wholesale buyers might qualify for a flat 15% off their total purchase. You have the option to set either global or product category-specific percentage discounts. However, if you’d like more control over product pricing, you can also add wholesale pricing for individual products.

The WooCommerce Wholesale Pro plugin lets you create wholesale-only product categories in WooCommerce which mean only your wholesale customers can see certain products. However, you can also choose to use the same products in your public-facing retail store and wholesale store.

2. Dynamic Pricing

One of the key elements of a wholesale store is that it has different pricing from retail customers. There are 2 ways to achieve this:

1. Create duplicate versions of your products for each group of customers.
2. Use a dynamic pricing plugin to charge different rates for the same product to retail and wholesale customers.

Option 1 is simple to set up and uses core WooCommerce features, so you don’t need any extra plugins. However, if you have lots of products then it’s not ideal to have to maintain 2 versions of each product, in which case option 2 is worth considering.

There are several WooCommerce pricing plugins that let you charge different rates depending on user role. While there are wholesale-specific versions of these plugins, I recommend WooCommerce’s official Dynamic Pricing extension. This is far more flexible and sophisticated than anything else out there.

You can create a ‘wholesale’ user role and use the plugin to charge different prices depending on user level. It lets you add bulk discounts so that wholesalers pay different prices depending on quantity ordered, or total order value. You can give a discounted rate for specific product categories. This means that if you had a separate wholesale category, you could apply a global discount for this category.

The only downside of the Dynamic Pricing plugin is that it’s quite complex to set up. This is largely because of the sheer number of options. You need to read the documentation carefully and plan the logic for your wholesale pricing structure.

Used correctly, this is a powerful plugin that gives you fine-grained control over pricing in your WooCommerce wholesale store.

3. WooCommerce Private Store & Password Protected Categories

I know this post is about the top 6 WooCommerce wholesale plugins, but I’m going to include 2 in this category as they’re quite similar. WooCommerce Protected Categories and WooCommerce Private Store offer simple but effective ways of locking down a WooCommerce wholesale area.

It’s surprising that password product categories aren’t part of the WooCommerce core, but you need a plugin for this.

You can use a password or user role protected categories store to create a protected wholesale area within your overall online store. This lets you have public categories for retail customers as well as a private wholesale area.

The WooCommerce private shop plugin creates a completely hidden WooCommerce store, protecting your entire store.

Here’s an overview of how to use either WooCommerce wholesale plugin to create a private trade area.

Creating protected wholesale categories

By installing WooCommerce Protected Categories, you can easily password protect any product category or make it visible to specific user roles only.

You can add one or more passwords for each category and give the passwords to your wholesale users. They can then enter the password to unlock the category and view and order the products within it.

Alternatively, you can create a wholesale user role with the free User Role Editor plugin, and use WooCommerce Protected Categories to lock down your wholesale categories so that only logged-in wholesale users can see them.

Once you have protected a WooCommerce category, all its products, and any sub-categories automatically inherit the same protection. This lets you create multi-level navigation structures within your wholesale area, so you’re not limited to a single wholesale category.

The plugin comes with options for controlling the visibility of your protected categories. For a wholesale store, you’ll want to set it to hide protected categories from the public areas of the store such as the main shop page, menu, and widgets. That way, B2C customers will never see your wholesale products and you can add a ‘Trade Login’ link to your main protected category to help B2B wholesalers find the hidden area.

Private WooCommerce Categories

WooCommerce Protected Categories also lets you mark categories as ‘private’. This works in the same way as private pages or posts (which are built into WordPress itself). Private categories only appear to logged-in users of the correct level. By default, this is administrators and store managers, but you can modify your user roles to let other roles access your private categories.

For example, you could create a ‘Wholesale’ user role (see below) to give trade users access to private categories. This is a good option if you want your wholesalers to have individual logins for your website instead of password-protected categories.

Create a Private WooCommerce Wholesale Store

The private shop WooCommerce plugin lets you hide your whole store so that only wholesale customers can access it.

There are just a few settings. Just select a page to use as the wholesale store login and choose a password, or whether you’d like to automatically unlock the wholesale store for logged-in users. If you like, you can customize the text on the wholesale login page too.

Everything else happens automatically. The private shop plugin hides all elements of WooCommerce from public view. Only wholesale customers who have entered the correct password or logged into a user account can see the hidden B2B store. The plugin protects your main WooCommerce shop page, product categories, products, tags, menu items, and widgets. Your WooCommerce wholesale store is also hidden from search engines, sitemaps, and the WordPress search.

4. WooCommerce Product Table

The standard WooCommerce category layouts are quite limited for wholesale stores. They tend to provide a grid of products – perhaps 2 per row – with large images. If you have lots of products then customers have to scroll down a long way and navigate between multiple pages to view an entire category.

This is great for WooCommerce retail shops. The visual layouts and large images help to engage customers and draw attention to each product. However, it’s less appropriate for WooCommerce wholesale stores because trade customers usually already know what they want to order. They make repeat orders and want to quickly select products from a grid and add them to the cart from a single page or online order form.

Check out our dedicated tutorial on how to use and set up the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

Display Wholesale Products in a Grid

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin is ideal for wholesale stores. It creates a compact grid of products and can be used as a one-page order form. The table can include ‘Add to Cart’ buttons so that wholesalers can order without ever seeing a single product page.

You can use product tables to display your whole inventory in a catalog-style format. All products can be listed as a single table, or you can create separate tables for each category.

The plugin comes with in-depth documentation and video tutorials showing you how to configure the tables to suit your needs. It’s very flexible and you can control details such as which columns appear in the table, the number of products per page, the sort order, and much more. You can also choose which categories to display, which is useful if you have separate products for wholesale and retail customers.

5. User Role Editor

You might want your wholesale customers to log into the website before they place an order. To do this, you would need to create a unique user role for trade users.

This is made easy by the User Role Editor plugin. This is a free WordPress plugin that lets you modify the default user roles and create new ones.

Create a new user role called ‘Wholesale’, ‘Trade’ or similar, and select the privileges that they should have. You can have a single-user role for your wholesale users or multiple roles.

Once you have created a wholesale user role, you can add your trade customers as WordPress users with this role. How you use the new role is up to you. For example, you could use the Dynamic Pricing plugin to charge different rates for this role. You could also use the WooCommerce Password Protected Categories plugin to create private categories that are only visible to wholesale users.

6. Gravity Forms

You also need to consider how you will add wholesale users to your website. There are a few options:

• You could let wholesale customers place orders as guests, without having to log in. If you use the WooCommerce Password Protected Categories plugin then you can keep things simple and provide a hidden wholesale area of your store without having to maintain individual logins for each user. This reduces admin time for you.
• You could create a ‘Wholesale’ user role and manually add each trade customer to your website (via Users > Add New in the admin), selecting the correct role for them.
• You could add a ‘Wholesale Application’ form to the website. People can then apply to become wholesale customers for your store.

If you decide to let people sign up via your website then Gravity Forms is the best WordPress plugin for this.

Using Gravity Forms as a WooCommerce Wholesale Plugin

You can use Gravity Forms to create a professional-looking wholesale application form and choose what happens when someone submits it. It’s easy to use and you can add as many fields as you like to the form. This can include contact information, text fields, dropdown lists, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more. The built-in anti-spam measures let you avoid getting contact foom spam from the application form.

You can use Gravity Forms’ User-Registration add-on to automatically create a user on your website (with the required role, e.g. ‘Wholesale’) when someone submits an application. This saves you the hassle of manually creating each wholesale user and they can get started with ordering from your wholesale store straight away.

If you’d prefer to approve each application first, you can set the form to email you when someone submits the form so that you can do the rest manually.

With over 1 million users, Gravity Forms is the world’s bestselling WordPress forms plugin. While it has many uses, it’s perfect for creating wholesale application forms.

Do these WooCommerce Wholesale Plugins Work Together?

Combining different WooCommerce wholesale plugins requires a bit of planning. I will give you some tips which will help you choose the right combination of plugins for your wholesale store.

Most of the plugins featured in this article perform different tasks and work perfectly together. For example, there are no conflicts between WooCommerce Product Table, Dynamic Pricing, or creating specific user roles for your wholesale users.

WooCommerce Protected Categories needs a bit more thought because it provides a slightly different solution to the other plugins I have discussed. For example, you can’t have the same product in a public category and a protected category. Instead, you need separate products for your wholesale and retail customers.

This means that you won’t need dynamic pricing based on user role, as you will be setting the wholesale rate directly for each wholesale product. The same applies to WooCommerce Private Store. (However, you can still use these hidden store plugins with Dynamic Pricing to give other discounts such as quantity-based pricing.)

With WooCommerce Protected Categories and WooCommerce Private Store, there’s no need to create separate role-based logins. This is because your wholesale customers will log in using the password for the wholesale category or store, so they don’t need to log in as individual users.

You can make WooCommerce Product Table work with password-protected categories or private shop plugins. To do this, you need to add a product table shortcode to the WooCommerce category template in your theme.

Whichever combination of WooCommerce wholesale plugins you decide on, these tips will help you to build a successful trade store for your website.