Your wholesale customers will use the same website as your retail customers, following the same checkout process. Their ordering experience will be very similar to previous orders, with the only differences being the wholesale settings (like discounts, quantity limits, or shipping rules) replacing the retail settings. Wholesale customers can pay using any payment options you've set up in Shopify.
After payment, their order joins your regular queue, following the sequence of retail and wholesale orders. The order ID will follow the usual order numbering. Customers receive an invoice through Shopify notifications and can review their order in their 'my account' area.
Regular Wholesale Orders
AKA: Pay-up-front Orders
Wholesale customers shop on the same site as retail customers, using the same checkout process. Their ordering experience closely mirrors previous purchases, with only wholesale-specific settings like discounts, quantity limits, and shipping changes replacing retail settings. Payment options available in your Shopify gateway are accessible to wholesale customers. Once they pay, their order joins the regular queue, following the sequence of retail and wholesale orders, and the order ID continues sequentially. Customers receive an invoice via your Shopify notifications and can review their order in the 'my account' section.
Wholesale Orders Vs. Retail Orders
While these orders will be nearly identical to retail ones since they're being sent through the same process, there will be a few identifiers that you can use to differentiate a wholesale order from a retail one.
- Tags: All wholesale orders will automatically be tagged with the customer’s wholesale price rule tags as well as the default tag 'wholesale'; this allows for easy sorting in Shopify’s Orders manager, meaning you can quickly pull these orders out from the retail ones by simply searching for those tags.
- Order Note: In addition to the order tags, the notes section of all wholesale orders will also contain the phrase "Wholesale Order: (SHOPNAME)", meaning you can search for the shop name in order to pull these orders forth as needed.
- Timeline/Order History: The beginning line on all wholesale orders will read "Wholesale Gorilla created this order at XX:XX", thus signifying that our app was responsible for this order and that it is indeed a wholesale one.
Draft Wholesale Orders
Net Terms, International Draft, Abandoned Checkouts & Processing Orders
International orders
We offer a setting in which all orders placed with a shipping address outside of your home country will be submitted as unpaid, editable drafts. This can be very useful in situations that you may need to apply special shipping costs to an order due to it's international shipment needs. You'll be notified of this draft order via email, and can then edit it however needed, hold it for as long as needed, etc. You'll gain all of Shopify's draft order functions with said order, so can do whatever you may need with it before emailing it to your customer for payment (or collecting payment outside of Shopify, if you so wish).
You can find this setting within the 'Settings' section of our app, and it looks like this:
If you choose to untick the box that says 'Submit as draft order', any orders with a shipping address outside of your home country will be sent through the normal checkout, thus prompting them to go ahead and pay for the order and locking it's costs in place.
If you choose to tick the box that says 'Submit as draft order', this setting will be turned on, and any orders from outside your shop’s country will be processed as draft orders. As for what your customer will see, after clicking ‘Checkout’ in their cart, their orders will be automatically redirected to a separate order confirmation page, which you can adjust the message for via that 'Confirmation Message' setting.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
- Your customer will not receive a copy of their order until you manually email one their way.
- Because this is a draft order, no inventory will be subtracted from the products until you manually update the order's status either by paying it out, or marking it as paid/payment pending.
- You can do anything with this draft order that you're able to do with a retail-based Shopify draft.
Our app utilizes draft orders for several functions within your shop:
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Manually Created Draft Orders
We offer manual order functionality through the app, which will allow you to create draft orders for your wholesale customers within the backend of your shop. These orders will remain as drafts until either you manually update their status as paid, or until your customer actually pays for the order themselves via an emailed link you can send them, at which point it will become a regular order. When using this order type, you will have two options to collect payment:
- You can email a copy of the invoice to your customers, which will supply them with a link that takes them back to your secure Shopify payment gateway; at that point they will be able to pay for the order with any payment options you provide, and the order will be turned into a regular order and moved to your main order queue.
- You can manually enter payment information from the backend of your shop, which will allow you to email them a receipt of the order and move their order to your main order queue.
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Customer Submitted Draft Orders
When customers use our Net Terms or International Draft shipping options, they submit their orders on your shop's front end without making a payment. When they're ready to complete the order, they click 'Checkout' on their cart page, where they provide their shipping address and click 'Submit Order.' This action takes them to a custom "Order Received" page.
You'll receive an email alert as soon as these orders are submitted. They appear as unpaid, editable drafts, giving you the flexibility to make any necessary adjustments before finalizing them into regular orders in your shop. You can manually convert these drafts into regular orders by either entering payment details in the back end or sending your customers an invoice for payment through your secure Shopify payment gateway.
To streamline this process, there are also settings available to automate the conversion of net terms draft orders into full orders, which you can learn more about here.
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Non-Order Draft Orders
Abandoned Checkouts
We utilize your draft order area to capture wholesale customer’s abandoned checkouts in order to store them for later use by said customer. These orders are shopping carts that your wholesale customers entered the checkout with and then backed out of before completing the order process, thus they are not actual orders. You will not receive email notifications when these are added to your draft order queue, as they are not actual orders; you can use our abandoned checkouts tool to remove them whenever needed.
Temporary Drafts For Order Processing
As for the regular pay-up-front wholesale orders, you may also notice that an order temporarily appears in the Drafts section of your Shopify admin; this is how Wholesale Gorilla processes the wholesale discounts on an order, and is thus a crucial (though temporary) step to properly price said orders out. Once the payment for these pay-up-front orders has been processed by our system, it will be removed from the Drafts tab and moved into the regular orders section automatically. This process typically takes only a few moments, so you’re not likely to catch most of these drafts while using the app, and no further action is needed on your end for this process to complete itself.
Analytics
Wholesale Gorilla does not offer any features related directly to analytics, though most analytics apps and programs will work just fine alongside Wholesale Gorilla, since all wholesale orders are still processed via Shopify's order system. This means that wholesale orders will be nearly identical to normal, "retail" orders - however, there are a couple of identifiers that you can use to sort out wholesale orders from the rest.
All wholesale orders will contain the following, regardless of what settings you've used within the app:
- The tag 'wholesale'
- Any discount rule tags that are associated with that customer's account tags
- A note within the notes section which reads "Wholesale Order: SHOPNAME"
- A beginning order history timeline that reads 'Wholesale Gorilla created this order at XX:XX'
You should also see any applicable discounts, VAT tax lines, shipping and net terms tags applied to the order, should those have been set up for said customer.
When wishing to sort out wholesale orders, we suggest viewing all orders in your Shopify admin, and then filtering by either specific discount rule tags or the tag 'wholesale' in order to view all wholesale orders and thus generate reports. You can follow this Shopify guide for further steps on running Shopify analytics, and will otherwise want to check in with your app or program's support team for their best advice on running wholesale order analytics per the info above.