Do you want to create a B2B website in WordPress? By combining the power of WordPress and the B2BKing WooCommerce plugin, you can create your own B2B marketplace. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a B2B wholesale site in WordPress site using B2BKing.
In the past, it was difficult to imagine building a website like Alibaba and Amazon. The first barrier would be the technical skills needed to create such a giant marketplace. The second challenge would be managing it. Thanks to WordPress and B2B plugins, creating and managing a B2B website is now so much easier.
B2BKing, as you have already guessed by the name, is a B2B plugin that you can use to setup your B2B, B2C, or hybrid marketplace. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do any coding to build your site. B2BKing gives you different eCommerce features that you can add to your site with just a few clicks. Now follow along, and let’s get your B2B site started!
What is a B2B site? (Wholesale site explained)
B2B stands for Business-to-Business. A B2B website is a platform that enables businesses to sell their products or services to other businesses. These websites are designed to facilitate transactions between companies, rather than between companies and individual consumers.
B2B websites typically offer features such as bulk ordering, customized pricing, and account management tools to help businesses streamline their purchasing processes. In basic WooCommerce, you’ll have many eCommerce features, but several B2B features will be missing.
B2BKing is a feature-packed WooCommerce B2B solution that helps you maximize your efficiency and revenues. It adds features like:
- Wholesale pricing
- Restrict guest access
- Product visibility control
- Bulk order form
- Set maximum or minimum order
- Request a quote
- Multiple price tiers
- Wallet management
- Dynamic discount rules
- Conversion and much more
In order for you to build a successful B2B website, you need to set up different pricing structures and also control product price visibility for different user roles. Having a feature where buyers can request a quote and also communicate with the seller will make your site more useful.
The B2BKing plugin also provides different layouts for single product pages. You can choose one of the different layouts and start your B2B venture.
Benefits of creating a B2B website in WordPress
B2B businesses are tough to manage, it’s true. But when you have the proper tools and can invest enough time and strategy into them, this could generate a huge profit. Wholesale websites offer a range of benefits to businesses. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Scalability and growth: B2B websites can help businesses grow by providing a platform for online sales, which can be scaled up or down as needed.
- Customer-centricity: Wholesale websites allow businesses to focus on their customers by providing them with a personalized experience that meets their needs.
- Customer reach: B2B websites enable businesses to reach a wider audience by providing them with access to customers who may not have been reachable through traditional sales channels.
- Digital agility: B2B sites lets you adapt quickly to changing market conditions by providing with the ability to update your product offerings and pricing in real-time.
- Increased productivity: Boost productivity by automating many of the tasks associated with sales and customer service.
- Omnichannel experience: B2B portals provide customers with a seamless experience across multiple channels, including mobile devices, social media, and email.
- Flexible payment options: B2B websites offer a range of payment options, including credit cards, PayPal, and other electronic payment methods, which can help businesses increase sales.
- Accurate analytics: Get detailed analytics that can help you understand your customers’ behavior and preferences.
- Convenience: B2B websites provide customers with the convenience of being able to shop online at any time, from anywhere.
- Higher profits: By reducing costs associated with traditional sales channels, such as sales representatives and physical stores, wholesale sites can help businesses increase their profits.
In addition to these benefits, B2B e-commerce websites can also help businesses open new sales channels, improve efficiency, and continuously reach new market segments.
How to create a WordPress B2B website?
Creating a B2B website isn’t an easy task, but with the help of WordPress and proper plugins, you can do it all by yourself. However, before jumping into it, make sure you have planned everything out. This includes your website design, graphics, products, etc. When you have everything ready, it’s going to take you only a few hours to setup your WordPress wholesale site.
A B2B site is basically an eCommerce site where you’ll have multiple products. After adding in the products, you have to set prices, discounts, etc. As you already know, we’ll use B2BKing from KingsPlugins. To make our tutorial as simple and effective as possible, we’re not going to go through each minor steps such as “how to get domain and hosting”, “how to install WordPress on your server”, “how to install a plugin”, etc.
We have video tutorials on all these topics that you can check out if you’re having difficulty with these tasks. In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to setup your wholesale or B2B eCommerce site.
With that being said, let’s start building our B2B website!
Get domain and hosting
In most of our web-building tutorials, we recommend everyone get a proper domain and hosting for their websites. Since this is an eCommerce site, many aspects of your business will depend on your hosting. If your site appears slow or if visitors cannot access it, it will be a serious drawback for your business.
For this reason, we recommend getting a decent hosting plan. There are various hosting providers that you can get premium hosting from. So you need to find the best domain and hosting provider that suits your need.
Many hosting providers have special hosting for WordPress. Generally, a WordPress hosting plan will already include a WordPress installation on your server. In that case, you won’t have to manually install WordPress on your server.
After you get a good domain and hosting for your site, get your WordPress credentials (username and password) from the hosting support and use those to access your WordPress admin dashboard. This is where you can install plugins and themes and start building your B2B site.
Installing the theme and plugins
First, we need to install a good eCommerce theme. We will be using the B2BKing plugin for our tutorial, and this plugin works great with most of the popular themes. The developers recommend using the Woodmart and Flatsome themes. The B2BKing documentation has more theme recommendations.
For our tutorial, we’re going to use the Kadence theme and import an eCommerce starter site. Kadence is a freemium theme (both free and paid versions available). You can use their free version to build your site. On your WordPress admin dashboard go to Appearance > Themes, click on the “Add New” button, and then search for “Kadence”. Then install and activate the theme.
As soon as you activate the theme, you’ll see a notification on top. Click on the “Install Kadence Starter Templates” button to install a plugin that’s going to help you import Kadence starter templates. Once that plugin is installed and activated, it’s going to directly take you to Appearance > Starter Templates.
Here, you can browse for an eCommerce template that you like and click on it for a preview. On the top right corner of the screen, you can choose the page builder you prefer. You can select Gutenberg or Elementor. You can use the filter on top to search for free eCommerce themes.
We’re going to choose the GreenThumb starter template for this tutorial. To import a theme, simply click on it for a preview, then click on the “Full Site” button to import the entire site. After some time, you’re starter site will be ready. You can click on the “Visit Site” button to see what your new site looks like.
Now that we have our theme ready, it’s time to install WooCommerce and the B2B plugin. Normally, if you import an eCommerce starter theme, it installs the WooCommerce plugin as well. But if you don’t see it, you can install it manually from your WordPress admin dashboard. WooCommerce is required to add and manage products on your site. You also need to add your desired payment method in WooCommerce settings.
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Next, we’re going to install the B2BKing plugin. Since B2BKing is a premium plugin, you have to purchase it and upload the compressed file to install it. After you activate the plugin, you’ll be prompted to install the B2BKing Core plugin.
Install the plugin by clicking on the “Install Now” button. Once the plugin is installed, you’re ready to start building your B2B site.
There are a lot of options and features to go through, but don’t worry, B2BKing is going to do all the heavy lifting. Just follow along and your site will be ready in no time.
Set up shop mode
The first thing that we’re going to do is select the type of shop you want. You can create an exclusive B2B site, or you can create a B2B & B2C hybrid shop. To select this setting, go to your WordPress Dashboard > B2BKing > Settings and click on Main Settings.
For our site, we’re going to select the B2B shop, and we’ll enable all the features listed for this option. The conversation, quote requests, purchase lists, etc. all these features are important for a B2B site.
Enabling the quote request button
If you want buyers to request a custom quote, then you can enable this feature. Enabling it will add a “Request a custom quote” button to the cart. From the same section (B2BKing > Settings), select the “Others & Advanced Settings” tab. Under the Quote Requests heading, you can see the option to add the custom quote request button for different user types.
You can enable it for B2B users, B2C users, and guests, or you can enable it for all. Select the user types you want to include this option for.
Guest access restrictions
If you’re going to create a B2B site, there will be certain features hidden from the guests. You can control what the guests will see using B2BKing’s access restriction features. From the B2BKing settings, click on the Access Restriction tab.
You can see various options that you can hide from the guests. You can hide the price, you can also hide shops and products. If you select “Hide shop & products” you’ll be given more options to specify which shops and products should be hidden from guests. You can also hide the website and force users to login. Finally, you can replace the prices with the “Request a Quote” button.
Organize users in groups
Organizing your users into groups is an important part of your WordPress B2B site. Go to B2BKing > Groups and select any user group you want to create. In order for our site to work properly, we need at least one B2B user-group. So we’re going to create one from here.
After creating a user-group, you’ll also have to assign it to a user. For example, we’re in the admin account, and we want to become a B2B user. To do this, simply go to Users > All users from your WordPress dashboard. Then edit the user to whom you want to assign the B2B group.
Now scroll down, and you’ll see B2B User Settings. Here you can assign a customer group, choose a shipping method, and check the user registration approval settings. After choosing the right options, click on the “Update Profile” button to save your changes.
Set group rules
This part is optional, but you can use it if you want to transfer a user group to another automatically. For example, if you want a regular B2B user to reach the VIP B2B user, by setting up some rules, you can do it from here. Go to B2BKing > Group Rules and click on the “Add new rule” button.
You can select five conditions here:
- Total spent (total order value): The condition becomes true when the user’s total orders value reaches the given mark (the amount you set).
- Yearly order value (previous year) higher than: The condition becomes true when a user’s total order value is higher than (the amount you set) the previous year.
- Yearly order value (previous year) lower than: The condition becomes true when a user’s total order value is lower than (the amount you set) the previous year.
- Monthly order value (previous month) higher than: The condition becomes true when the user’s total order value is higher than (the amount you set) the previous month.
- Monthly order value (previous month) lower than: The condition becomes true when a user’s total order value is lower than (the amount you set) the previous month.
We’ve selected the “Total spent (total order value)” option and set the amount to 75000. Then we’ve selected B2B users for whom we want this condition to be applied to. Then we’ve selected the VIP B2B. So when a regular B2B user’s total order value reaches $75000, they will be moved to the “VIP B2B” user group.
Using this same method, you can promote or demote one user group to another. The choice is up to you.
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Control product visibility
There’ll be multiple users on your site, and you need to control the visibility of your product based on the user types. B2BKing allows you to hide your products from certain users. To access this option, go to B2BKing > Settings and select the Access Restriction tab. If you want to control your product visibility manually, disable the “All Product Visible” option.
When you’re done with this section, click on the “Save Settings” button to save the chances you’ve made. If you want to manually control product visibility, then go to your WordPress Dashboard > Products and edit the products you’ve added to your site using WooCommerce. Scroll down on the product editing page and you’ll see the visibility option.
Setting up dynamic rules
You can also set up dynamic rules for products. For example, you want to give a 10% discount if the user orders a specified number of products. This can be done from B2BKing > Dynamic Rules.
Here, you can create any number of rules you want. Then assign a product and user to whom the rule will be applied. You can then add your conditions, which the users must fulfil to get that discount.
Set wholesale pricing
If you’ve imported an eCommerce starter template, then you already have some products on your website. If not, you’ll have to manually add products by going to Dashboard > Products and clicking on the “Add New” button.
To set the wholesale price for a product, go to WordPress Dashboard > Products > All Products and edit a product. For each B2BKing user group, there’s a dedicated price input field on the product editing page. So enter the pricing on the product editing page according to the groups you’ve created earlier. Save the changes. Then on the frontend, the visitors will see the product pricing according to their role/user-group.
Bellow is an example of how a product will look on the frontend. The pricing will vary by the user role. Also, the design will vary by the theme you’re using.
We’ve set the minimum order to 10 units. So a B2B user must at least purchase 10 units. That’s how you can set up wholesale pricing.
User registration and login
Since we’re creating a B2B site, it’s important to create a login and registration page for the B2B users. WooCommerce has already created a login and registration page for us by the name of “My Account”.
In case you don’t see this page, you can create it manually. To do that, go to Pages and click on the “Add New” button. Then name your page, click on the ‘+’ button, and add the shortcode block. Within the block, add this code: [woocommerce_my_account]
. Publish the page. Link it from your site navigation bar and wherever you want.
Also don’t forget to enable registration from WooCommerce Accounts page. Go to Dashboard > WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy. Enable the Allow customers to create an account on the “My account” page option there. Save changes. Go to B2BKing > Settings > Registration to define your B2B user registration experience.
With the registration dropdown field option enabled, users will see a dropdown where they can choose to register as a B2B user. You can also enable the “Manual Approval for All” option if you want to manually approve all the user registrations. You can also go to B2BKing > Registration Fields to add more fields to the registration form.
After you’re done here, click on the “Save Settings” button to save your changes. Now you are ready to get new users and make bulk sales.
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👉 Video: How to Make a B2B Website with B2BKing
Wrapping up
So, that’s how you create a B2B wholesale site in WordPress using B2BKing. You know there could be many more things to discuss, but discussing everything in one single post is difficult. To make things easier, you can explore the different options that B2BKing provides. These are more than enough to create the perfect wholesale B2B site that you desire.
So, explore, experiment, and have fun creating your own WordPress B2B site. If you have any questions, you can ask us down in the comments.
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