Wholesale shipping is one of the most popular features in Wholesale Gorilla. Setting up custom shipping rules for wholesale orders allows you to bypass certain retail shipping rates, and charge different amounts for B2B orders. Often wholesale buyers expect different shipping policies, and as a merchant you may want to exclude certain free shipping rates from wholesale checkouts.
Retail Shipping Rates
Default Shopify shipping rates (also referred to as your retail shipping rates), are the shipping rules you set up for your entire store in your Shopify admin.
What you need to know about retail rates:
- Rates set up in Shopify will be available to all customers - both retail and wholesale. You can exclude these rates from wholesale shipping options (more info on that in the next article).
- You must have at least one shipping profile set up with retail shipping rates for wholesale shipping rules to work.
- In order to ship wholesale to a certain country, you must have a shipping zone with at least one rate set up for that country in your Shopify admin. In the following example, the user has set up retail rates for the United States, as well as every other country in the world. Any countries not in a shipping zone will not appear as an option when a customer enters their shipping at checkout.
How is the wholesale shipping rate selected?
Wholesale Gorilla will give the customer the lowest shipping rate available given the rules you set up in Wholesale Gorilla, and your retail shipping rates.
When a customer places a wholesale order:
- We pull all of the possible retail rates for the order.
- Next we pull in all of the possible wholesale rates for the order.
- Then the lowest of the applicable rates is applied to the order.
The subsequent sections in this guide will cover the various shipping settings available through our app, alongside information on integrating other applications and systems with Wholesale Gorilla.
Wholesale shipping rules
Free Shipping
This setting establishes a minimum cart subtotal amount for wholesale customers to qualify for free shipping on an order. The rate will only apply once the customer reaches the designated minimum amount. Once that minimum amount is reached, the free shipping rate will always be applied, since it is the lowest cost option available.
For example:
- Retail orders over $50 get free Shipping
- You set a free shipping Minimum Order Value of $1000 for wholesale customers
- Wholesale customers will not get free shipping until they spend over $1000.
- The retail free rate is always ignored when you have set a wholesale free shipping Minimum Order Value
Remove free shipping
If you don't want to give wholesale customers free shipping under any conditions, you can use our Free Minimum to override any free retail rates you have set in Shopify. If you enter a Minimum Order Value of $9999999 (or a number that would never be reached in a single wholesale order, this will ignore all of your retail rates, and effectively never give a wholesale customer free shipping.
Flat Rate Shipping
A flat shipping fee applied to all wholesale orders regardless of order amount. This will only be applied if it is the lowest applicable rate out of the assorted rates available for an order.
Percentage Rate
A percentage based rate based on the order's subtotal, rounded to the nearest dollar. For example, if you set a percentage rate of 0.05%, an order of $1000 will be charged $50.00 for shipping.
This is a useful alternative to regular shipping rates where you want to give your wholesale customers a break on shipping, but want it to more accurately reflect the size of the order. Think of it as a cap on how much a customer will be charged for shipping - like a flat fee that increases as the order gets bigger. This rate will only be applied if it is the lowest applicable rate out of the applicable rates for the order.
Shipping workarounds
Our wholesale shipping settings are currently set up as 'one size fits all', which means that these settings will be applied to all wholesale customers who shop on your site. While this is a useful tool for enforcing specific shipping rules across all customers, it may not be ideal if you need to exclude certain customers or apply different rules to different groups of customers. In these cases, workarounds with Net Terms and Manual Order settings can be helpful in adjusting the customer's order to align with your preferences.
Applying special shipping rates to select customers and orders
When using Net Terms orders, they will be submitted to you as unpaid, editable drafts, giving you the flexibility to make necessary adjustments. You will have the opportunity to review the order before approving it and allowing the customer to make payment. This feature is particularly useful if you need to apply special shipping rates that are not set up within the app, as it enables you to ensure that only specific orders are subject to these charges. However, please note that manually adjusting each order to align with your desired shipping charges may require additional effort. Ultimately, leveraging Net Terms orders can help you to enforce special shipping costs that would otherwise be applied to all wholesale customers.
Excluding select customers and orders from already established wholesale shipping
If there are specific customers or orders that you want to exempt from your predefined WG shipping costs, you can provide them with Net Terms Checkout access. This feature allows them to submit their order as an unpaid draft, which you can edit as necessary, including removing or modifying any automatically added shipping costs. In addition to using the Net Terms feature, you may find the Manual Order setting helpful, which enables you to manually create an order for your customer via the backend of your shop, bypassing any order limits, shipping settings, or VAT tax settings you've established within the app. This approach is ideal when you need to apply specific shipping settings to 99% of your customers, but offer an exception for select customers or orders. As long as an order remains in 'Draft' format, you can adjust the shipping costs. However, be sure not to update the order status until you have finished modifying the shipping charges.
Compatibility with other apps
Because we use a custom cart & checkout system, we're unfortunately not compatible with most shipping settings offered by other apps. This is due to the fact that these apps need to use widgets on the cart and/or checkout page, which is unable to hook into our custom code. Your retail customers should still be able to use these settings while they checkout, so only your wholesale customers will be affected.
You can review the rest of our guides to shipping settings to learn more about what we do offer/support, and our apologies for any incompatibilities that arise for the time being.