Create a store for consumers and one for wholesale customers

Question

I am pretty new to magento so bear with me.

What I want is to be able to make a wbshop that can service both consumer customers and wholesale customers.

Consumers customers

1. Every product has a retail price (the consumers cannot se the wholesale price)
2. Consumers do not have to login to buy
3. Anybody can order any quantity of products they want.

Wholesale customers

1. Every product has a wholesale price only approved, logged in wholesale customers can see.
2. Wholesale customer have to be logged in to see and order products at wholesale prices.
3. Wholesale customers can only order products in increments like e.g.5, 10, 15, 20 or 3, 6, 9, 12. That is because wholesale customers only can order products in larger quantities.
4. A shipping possibility only available to wholesale customers

Can you give me some pointers how to set that up?

Answer 1

You will need to set up 2 websites with each their own storeview. The consumer website should be pretty straight forward like you would set up any store.

The wholesale store needs some extra settings and extensions however. First of all, users on that website should not be able to register themselves and when added through the backend should be added to a different customer group. This customer group can be used to assign tierprices to each product offering the reduced price only to that customer group.

On the requiring a log in part you can use this extension. It's stable, I've used it in 2 projects Magento version 1.7.0.2 and 1.8.0.0. Please read the README for requirements and configuration (it's pretty simple tho)

For thq quantity increment, there are some extensions out there (google for Magento quantity dropdown) that will do this but they are pretty pricy. If you decide to build it yourself keep in mind that the dropdown should not only be displayed on the catalog product view page but also the cart, wishlist add to cart and so on.

If you configured the setup as 2 websites adding a shipping option just for the wholesale stores shouldn't be a problem. Most shipping methods can be disabled or enabled on website level

Answer 2

I thought that this could be done by just creating a new WHOLESALE user group and assigning that user group a new price list. I do see a lot of people creating second stores to manage this, but to be honest, I haven't tried it myself.

Answer 3

Since you asked to be able to sell products in increments to wholesale customers I can recommend using this extension to get the incremental functionality with a drop down pre-filled with the allowed values, i.e 3,6,9 etc, on category, product and cart page.

The Magento built in function for qty increments is working fine but leaving it up to the customer to fill the right value in a text field is with too much of a fault margin. I used it myself on a wholesale store and it's working great for category view, product view and cart.

With the extension you can set the incremental value and the max value. If you handle stock in magento the extension will also check against the stock qty and only fill the drop down with saleable values.

Btw I am by no means connected to the developer of this paid extension, just a happy customer and user thereof.

Good luck!

Answer 4

i am interested in this also... wouldn't this be much easier to have dealers to send in their inquiry and after approval you will create their account which will be assigned to this wholesale group (with the different prices etc.)

after that the dealer can login through normal login panel that is also used by regular customers but they will see different prices.

Answer 5

I didn't make a new store for our dealers (and distributors) and instead made different customer groups for them then added their pricing on each product we wholesale.

Then our wholesalers wanted one page with "just our products". Looking through the various options for this (including just a link of all products sorted by manufacturer), I ended up making a simple module that makes the a product list showing retail and dealer pricing. My B2b module is shared on github.

As far as minimum quantity requirements, that can be set up within the items themselves via tier pricing: Choose the group and then set the minimum. We started out with a minimum with tiered discounts but then it was too much effort explaining it, so we got rid of all that.