Wholesale
Shopify recently announced they're now including the B2B features from Shopify Plus on all Shopify plans. We’re still exploring the changes, but it looks like all the features we think of with wholesale (pricing, personalized content, minimums) will all be available.
We've been building customized wholesale solutions for years. In the past, that often required complicated workarounds. This is what we think about when we think about wholesale:
- product quantity minimums
- order value minimums
- pricing / discount rate
- tiered discounts
- payment terms
- excluding products from wholesale rate
- making product only visible to wholesale or retail customers
- excluding wholesaler customers from retail discounts
- excluding wholesale customers from retail shipping rates
- inventory control
- fraud (wholesale discounts “leaking”)
- program maintenance burden (how easy is it for staff to maintain this program)
- ux features (e.g. catalog-style form, application page, re-order button)
And these are the tools we’ve used to build wholesale programs:
- discount codes
- wholesale variants
- wholesale products
- wholesale store
- custom apps
- draft orders
- app store apps
- shopify functions (cart scripts)
We have current projects in which we'll be exploring these newly available features. Our hope is that this update makes it easier for store owners and their teams to manage wholesale programs (updating pricing, granting access) and makes it easier for wholesale customers to purchase directly from Shopify stores (vs. using services like Faire). We'll keep you posted.
Launched! Parable Coffee Roasting Co.
Brandon is the owner of Parable Coffee Roasting Company, a family-owned, small-batch specialty coffee roaster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, crafting balanced, fresh-roasted beans for coffee lovers across the Midwest and everywhere.
At Parable, they're pro baristas, guiding coffee connoisseurs towards delicious coffee.
Our Roaster's Choice-Single Origin subscription celebrates the rich variety of coffee-growing regions across the globe.
Every day in our roasterie, we meticulously taste and analyze each roast to bring you the most exciting coffee experience possible.
Accessibility helps everyone
I love this TikTok on accessbility: Disability drives innovation. Accessibility helps everyone. We like to compare accessibility to veggie pizza at a party – everyone can enjoy it, not just the vegetarians. But this video goes further to show how forward thinking accessibility actually is. Overcoming the technical challenges to serve your impaired customers ultimately better serves your entire audience.
Update: Shopify x ChatGPT
Shopify and OpenAI had been working on a system to sell directly within ai chats, so you would be able to search for and purchase products without leaving ChatGPT.
That's been walked back a little bit and now the focus is just on discovery. So you search for products in ai chat and are then directed to the store to actually make the purchase.
This follows the same pattern as social commerce from a few years ago, which found low trust and engagement with embedded social media checkouts. That too was walked back to rich content links within social media.
The big takeaway for store owners here is to continue making your storefront as discoverable as possible, following the best practices for SEO and now AIO.
