Trade buyers want different things from retail shoppers. They want their own prices, they reorder the same products, they know part numbers, and they want to charge the order to their account. Here is how we are building all of that on WooCommerce for RBS, an Auckland supplier of labels, ribbons and barcode equipment.
The starting point
RBS's website ran on nopCommerce 3.9, a platform that had not been looked after for years. We moved about 450 products, 82 categories and 14 brands to WooCommerce, carried over 538 old web addresses with redirects, and connected the new store to the company's on-premise ERP. The site is not live yet; this is what is built.
What trade customers get
- Their own price. Logged-in trade customers see the dealer price, excluding GST. Everyone else sees retail.
- Trade-only products, hidden from public visitors everywhere, including search.
- Quote on request for products without a public price, without a login wall.
- Quick order by SKU, for buyers who know their part numbers.
- Buy again from their full purchase history, including orders placed by phone, pulled from the ERP.
- Charge to my trade account, offered only to logins linked to an account.
Behind the scenes
A small middleware service sits between WooCommerce and the ERP. New products arrive on the website as drafts for review. Stock updates twice an hour. Every web order is pushed into the ERP and its order number written back, with trade orders routed separately from retail. It has 60 automated tests and was proven against the real ERP in September.
Why not a B2B platform?
B2B software subscriptions run from hundreds to thousands of US dollars a month. For a supplier with a few hundred products and a few hundred trade customers, WooCommerce with a handful of focused custom plugins does the job on a site they own, for the cost of hosting and care. The trade-off is that someone has to keep it updated, which is what our care plan is for.
More on WooCommerce and B2B stores.