Wholesale orders

After your customers have added products to their carts, they can submit their orders for you to review, or they can pay for their products at the checkout within your wholesale store.

Submit purchase orders or pay in the store

By default, wholesale customers don't pay for their orders at checkout. Instead they submit draft orders for you to review. This process works well when your customers make large orders and they need to contact you to pay. But, it can be faster to allow customers to pay at checkout for small purchases, such as sample products.

You can activate the wholesale checkout option to let individual customers pay for their orders within the wholesale store at checkout. When you activate this option, you can also set a limit for the order amount. If an order amount exceeds this limit, then your wholesale customer needs to submit the order for you to review. This option can be activated for an individual customer from their account page. You can also activate it for multiple customers by using Bulk actions in the Customers page in the wholesale channel. Learn more about wholesale checkout.

Draft orders

The orders that your customers submit for review are draft orders. These orders appear in the Drafts page in your Shopify admin. After you review an order, you email your wholesale customers an invoice that includes information about how to pay for the order.

By default, the invoice includes a link to a checkout page that uses the payment provider that you set up in your Shopify admin (that is, the same payment provider that is used in your online store). But, you can customize the contents of the invoice email that gets sent to your wholesale customers. For example, you can remove the checkout link and include your contact information. Learn more about editing the invoice template.

You can also create wholesale orders on behalf of your wholesale customers in your Shopify admin. Create a draft order as you would normally, but be sure to add your wholesale customer to the order. When you add products to the draft order, you will see their online store prices only. To replace the prices with those from the customer's price list, click More actions > Apply wholesale pricing. Quantity rules are also checked by Apply wholesale pricing, and you will be notified if you need to make any changes. Learn more about applying wholesale pricing to a draft order.

When a wholesale order is created, it is tagged with a tag named wholesale.

Shipping rates

By default, the wholesale checkout offers the same shipping rates that are set in your Shopify admin. These are the shipping rates that are offered in your online store. You can override this default by setting a shipping rate for your wholesale customers in the Preferences page in the wholesale channel. The shipping rate that you enter in the Preferences page will be:

  • The only rate offered to customers when they checkout using the wholesale store.
  • The default rate applied to the draft orders that your wholesale customers submit for review. You can change this rate when you review the order.

The wholesale shipping rate isn't added to the draft orders that you create on behalf of your customers in the Shopify admin. When you create draft orders for your wholesale customers, you need to enter the shipping amount manually or choose one of your online store shipping rates from the drop-down list.

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