The 8 Best WooCommerce B2B Plugins (+ Tutorial)

WooCommerce is an excellent solution for Business to Customer (B2C) e-commerce, but falls short for Business to Business (B2B) stores. Functionality such as wholesale user registrations, multiple wholesale user roles, exclusive B2B pricing, and more don’t feature within WooCommerce. However, you can add these B2B features and more with the help of WooCommerce B2B plugins.

In this post, we’re going to look at the top WooCommerce B2B plugins to help you make wholesale transactions, whether you want to add B2B sales to your retail store or sell only to retailers. As a bonus, we’ll also show you how to set up our top choice, WooCommerce Wholesale Pro, and use it to build a B2B store.

The Best WooCommerce B2B Wholesale Plugin

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro is a plugin from WordPress developer Barn2 and our top choice for adding the functionality you’ll need to manage and run a wholesale WooCommerce store.

It offers the flexibility to handle wholesale-only business, or help you create a separate wholesale system within your existing WooCommerce setup. As such, you can cater to both retail and wholesale customers with ease.

The feature set of the plugin will (of course) give you the tools you need to support a business focusing on wholesale products. For instance, you can create a tailored registration form to gather important details such as business license numbers or tax IDs during the signup process.

You’re also able to moderate wholesale account requests through an approval and review process, which you can automate.

This emphasis on wholesale functionality stretches all across the plugin, as you’d expect:

• User roles. You’re able to create specific roles for wholesale customers to give them access to exclusive pricing and product visibility. This is an efficient and straightforward way to manage different types of wholesale customers.
• Products. You can assign certain product categories for wholesale customers. Because of this, typical retail customers won’t be able to view or purchase items within that category.
• Pricing and discounts. There are three ways to set wholesale prices: apply storewide discounts, category-level percentage discounts, or set product-level prices for each wholesale role.

Alongside other Barn2 plugins, you can also extend the functionality of WooCommerce Wholesale Pro further. For instance, with WooCommerce Product Table, you’re able to leverage a functional and gorgeous bulk order form layout that lets customers add multiple products to their cart fast. This can replace the default WooCommerce Shop layout for something more relevant to the needs of a wholesale business.

Pricing

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro starts at $99 per year for a single-site license. There’s also a lifetime license available for $399, and more licenses if you need them.

If you purchase WooCommerce Wholesale Pro alongside WooCommerce Product Table, you can save around 25 percent on the total purchase ($149 per year). Every purchase of any Barn2 plugin comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee too—no questions asked.

7 Other Excellent WooCommerce B2B Plugins

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro can deliver most of the functionality B2B stores need. However, other plugins can also give you similar tools, and may fit your specific needs better in some cases.

Let’s take a look at seven other WooCommerce B2B plugins, in no particular order.

WooCommerce Protected Categories

B2B businesses often need to restrict access to certain products based on the customer. Barn2 also offers WooCommerce Protected Categories, with which you can create secure, protected categories that only specific users or user roles can access via passwords.

Once a user logs into your site, the plugin redirects them to the correct category. You’re able to set the visibility of password-protected categories from menus, sidebars, and all public-facing sections of your store.

For example, an apparel manufacturer might need to create custom product catalogs with exclusive designs for their distributors. These products are accessible to logged-in users and hidden from everyone else.

Pricing: The plugin starts at $89 per year for a single-site license, with more licensing options available, and bundles to save money on multiple purchases.

WooCommerce Variation Prices

Unclear pricing details can confuse customers and result in lost sales for your business. WooCommerce Variation Prices can fix this by letting you choose how to display prices for variable and grouped products.

You can customize this display in a number of ways. For instance:

• Show the lowest or highest variation price (“$70+” or “Up to $200”).
• Swap the default dash between the minimum-maximum variation prices (“$30 to $120” or “$30 / $120”).

There are additional options available too. You’re able to show the prices of all variable products up front, without the need to select a specific variation first. In contrast, you can conceal variation prices until the user selects a specific variation, and update the primary product price to that of the chosen variation.

Pricing: WooCommerce Variation Prices starts from $59 per year, and offers discounts based on the number of licenses you purchase.

YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode

As the name implies, YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode enables you to set your store as a catalog. This lets you showcase products without enabling purchases. It conceals Add-to-Cart buttons and product prices, then lets you add custom messages and even a Call To Action (CTA) to invite customers to indicate their interest in the product.

You’re also able to customize who can see the catalog version of your store—for instance, only unregistered users or customers accessing your store from certain geographical locations. You can also schedule opening and closing times to control when you accept orders. Another way this plugin helps customers make a purchase is through the ability to add contact forms to product pages.

Pricing: YITH WooCommerce Catalog Mode costs $79.99 per year, which gives you a year of support and updates.

Wholesale Suite

Wholesale Suite offers a slew of features including pricing, payment, order forms, and other important features you need to conduct B2B business online. There’s a free version available that lets you create wholesale-specific user roles, set pricing, disable coupons for wholesale customers, set your site’s privacy and catalog mode, and much more.

In addition, Wholesale Suite’s premium add-ons let you create a customer approval system, add bulk order forms, enable minimum order thresholds, add shipping and payment restrictions, and set tax controls, among other features. It’s a solid solution that stacks the functionality high.

Pricing: You can get the full functionality of Wholesale Suite with a single-site license for $297 per year. This can be expensive, but there are regular sales to make a saving. You can also get as many licenses as you need for $597 per year.

ELEX WooCommerce Role-Based Pricing

The freemium ELEX WooCommerce Role Based Pricing plugin is another that lets you put your store in catalog mode and set up separate wholesale pricing. This lets you remove the Add-to-cart button for unregistered users and specific user roles, and replace it with a custom button. Of course, there’s more the plugin can do.

You’re able to hide product prices from the users and roles you specify, redirect customers from product detail pages to external websites (useful for linking affiliate products), and much more.

Pricing: For $79 per year, you can have a single-site license of ELEX WooCommerce Role Based Pricing. There are other tiers too that provide more licenses, but the full functionality is available regardless of the plan you purchase.

Whols

Whols is an affordable plugin that lets you convert your store to a complete wholesale platform or alternatively, a hybrid wholesale and retail store.

There’s a free version that lets you customize registration form fields, set up a customer approval system, adjust prices storewide, set minimum product quantities, and other core features. An upgrade to the premium version gives you additional features such as the option to tailor prices for different users or roles, send email notifications about approvals, customize shipping and payment methods per user roles, and plenty more.

Pricing: A Whols single-site license is $79 per year, with other tiers available if you require further licenses. However, for the first month you can purchase any plan for $1, which is a unique way to take Whols for a spin.

Role-Based Payment / Shipping Methods for WooCommerce

Role-Based Payment / Shipping Methods focuses on one specific use case: it lets you restrict shipping options and payment gateways based on each user role in your store. This could be wholesale customers (including multiple tiers), retail customers, or guest users.

Given the limited use case, it’s only going to suit you if you already use one of the other WooCommerce B2B plugins available. Most plugins both on and off of this list, do include the feature. Even so, it can be useful if you need the functionality as-is, which is solid and could even be your only option if you need a simple implementation.

Pricing: The plugin is one of the cheapest on this list at $59 per year. It’s straightforward pricing for a straightforward plugin.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro – How to Set It Up

For the rest of this article, we’ll walk you through how to set up our favorite from our list of WooCommerce B2B plugins—WooCommerce Wholesale Pro.

Even better, the entire process takes 15 minutes or less.

1. Configure The Plugin Setup Wizard

Once you purchase WooCommerce Wholesale Pro, go through the typical installation process for premium plugins. This will bring you to a setup wizard, where you’ll first need to enter your license key. Clicking to continue, you’ll next need to tweak the plugin’s core settings.

First, tick the checkbox to add a registration form to the dedicated login page, so you can take new wholesale customers on. If you want to review each new registration before you approve it, check the Moderate new registrations box. You can disable tax calculations too, which will display prices without tax if your wholesale users don’t pay this in your jurisdiction.

Clicking to the next screen, enter a storewide discount value if necessary. Note that you can still set custom discounts and product-level pricing for specific categories and products later too.

From here, choose a preferred layout for the Shop, Category, and Tag archive pages. The default WooCommerce layouts will be available in every instance. If you opt for the WooCommerce Wholesale Pro two-plugin bundle though, there’s a one-page order form layout to select.

2. Set Up Wholesale User Roles

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro will create a default Wholesale role upon installation and assign all B2B customers to it. However, you can create additional roles or even edit the default one. This will be ideal for setting custom wholesale prices and discounts for each user role.

To work with wholesale user roles, head to the WooCommerce > Settings page, then to the Wholesale > Roles screen within WordPress:

Adding a new user role is straightforward, and you can create custom user roles for your specific purpose. For example, clothing or footwear stores could have roles such as Retailer or Distributor. You can also assign default roles for new registrations and set pricing, discount, and tax rules for each role.

3. Customize Wholesale Registration Emails

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro lets you send custom emails to update customers throughout every stage of the signup process. By default, the plugin comes with pre-built email templates and you can customize them as you need.

To do this, head to the WooCommerce > Settings screen in WordPress, then head to the Wholesale > Emails page.

You’ll see a list of notification templates, which you can customize through the Manage button. Editing these is beyond the scope of this article, but you can use HTML to work on these templates as you need.

4. Set Wholesale Prices and Discounts

There are multiple ways to set wholesale pricing, and this plugin does so based on user roles. Once a user logs in, they’ll see the appropriate prices across your site, per category, and per product for their user role.

Let’s take a look at these in turn, beginning with site-wide discounts.

Global Discounts

This option will reduce all product prices by a set percentage, apart from the category- or product-level. You will often set this up upon installation, within the plugin’s setup wizard:

If you didn’t choose to set this up with the wizard, you can head to the WooCommerce > Settings screen, then move to the Wholesale > Roles page. Here, you can edit the global discount value for each user role.

Category Level Discounts

You can apply a percentage discount to every item in a product’s category and sub-categories. From the Products > Categories screen within WordPress, hit the Edit button for your chosen user role. Here, you can add a new product category or edit any relevant ones from the list.

Next, enter the discount amount for each wholesale role as a whole number—you won’t be able to use decimals here. Once you save your settings, the changes will apply.

However, if you set up product-level wholesale pricing, those products won’t be able to accept category-level pricing. To set individual wholesale prices for each product, check out the next section.

Product-Level Pricing

You’re able to assign specific wholesale pricing for each user role for both simple and variable products. This gives you enormous pricing flexibility for your store.

Make sure that you enable product-level pricing on the Wholesale > Roles screen within WooCommerce’s settings. Next, navigate to Products > All Products and open up the Edit screen for a specific product.

You’ll need to scroll down to the Product Data metabox here. For Simple products, navigate to the General tab and add the full wholesale product price for each user role—not the discount price.

For variable products, look to the Variations tab. Again, add the variation’s wholesale product price for each user role before saving your changes.

5. Set Up One-Page Wholesale Order Forms

Wholesale customers will often need to order large quantities fast. WooCommerce’s default Shop layout isn’t ideal for many of these situations, but WooCommerce Wholesale Pro is.

Bulk order forms can replace WooCommerce’s typical lengthy ordering process with a spreadsheet-like interface. This way, customers can add multiple products to their cart, select the desired quantities, and click a button to place an order, all in a few clicks.

This not only saves time, but boosts efficiency. To set this up, head to the Wholesale > Layout screen within WooCommerce’s settings:

You can simply choose from the drop-down lists, then save your changes. From here, check out the front-end of your store, and you should see the new and active layout.

Find the Best WooCommerce B2B Plugin For You

There are a sea of options to wade through when it comes to choosing WooCommerce B2B plugins. If you have a niche application in mind, your pool will dry up. However, our recommendation regardless of your requirements remains WooCommerce Wholesale Pro.

You’re able to create as many wholesale user roles as you need, accept B2B customers, set up an approval system, offer specific products and categories to wholesale customers, set wholesale prices and discounts, and much more. We find the plugin straightforward to use too. At $99 per year for a single-site license, you could earn that money back in a flash given the new business you could earn.

Do you have any questions about using WooCommerce B2B plugins on your site? Let us know in the comments section below!