How to Set up a Wholesale Shop on Squarespace
Updated: Sept 2023
There’s a lot to love about Squarespace Commerce (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C, etc.) but if you’re interested in adding wholesale to the mix, you may have found you need something… more. This is because, in addition to normal eCommerce functionalities, B2B sellers might need to offer things like tiered pricing structures, alternate invoicing or net payment options, or ways to keep wholesale prices hidden from the public, among other features.
Ultimately, I think the fact that these things aren’t necessarily built-in to Squarespace isn’t a shortcoming at all; you wouldn’t be upset if your shipping software didn’t also manage your social media posts – these are just very different tools! In the same way, traditional eCommerce and wholesale are two very different things.
So let’s dig into a bit about wholesale, who should do it (and who shouldn’t), my recommendations for how to get started, and tips from some of my friends in the biz that know wholesale better than anyone. Stick around for some wholesale FAQs at the bottom of this post. Here we go!
First, is your business too small for wholesale?
Adding a wholesale arm to your eCommerce business can be a beneficial thing for many small to medium businesses (even startups!) and I would say the biggest mistake is waiting too long to get started! Establishing even a few solid wholesale connections early on can help you get your name out there and help you build a following.
This isn’t something just for the big guys or those who’ve already made a name for themselves. I would even say that forging some strong wholesale relationships early on can be a great indicator of long-term success. So if this is something you’ve been considering or sitting on - don’t wait!
Options for Setting up a Wholesale Shop on Squarespace
Once you’ve decided to start selling wholesale, you probably started tinkering around with the specifics of how to actually make that happen and quickly became stuck. I don’t blame you! If there are a million moving parts to traditional eCommerce, there are a billion more for a business looking to sell wholesale. But it doesn’t have to be scary or overwhelming! Below are some ideas on how to start selling wholesale on your Squarespace website.
Create a second shop and password protect it.
This solution is pretty low-tech (Squarespace does all the heavy lifting for you) but it’s not without several drawbacks. Running two mirror images of the same store (one for retail and the other for wholesale) may technically work but you’ll need to think about how you’ll manage inventory levels, what to do about duplicate SKUs and how you’ll take care of the administrative side of things.
Also, since commerce settings are set at the website level on Squarespace things like what shipping methods you offer and what payments you accept need to be able to apply to all shop pages on your site; there’s no way to offer different options that would be tailored to a wholesale customer’s needs and keep those out of sight to your retail customers.
And don’t even get me started on what happens if and when you need to change the password on the wholesale shop! What do you do then? Email all your wholesale customers with the new password?! Awkward.
Use a Wishlist Plugin
If you’re only selling wholesale and want to be able to have potential customers essentially “request a quote” from your online shop, you could look at using SF Digital’s Product Wishlist Extension. This plugin replaces your traditional cart functionality with a custom form that allows customers to send you their “wishlists” without needing to enter any payment or shipping information. I’ve used this plugin for just this purpose before and it works great with a few (kinda) major caveats.
The first big thing is that you cannot use this plugin on any site that you also want to have a traditional eCommerce shop on. So this may work well if you don’t have a retail shop and are only selling wholesale but not if you’d ever like to be able to do any B2C selling on your site.
The other things to consider are similar to the duplicate shop scenario, above. With the Wishlist Plugin, you’ll need to have systems in place to manually calculate shipping, process payments, and communicate with your customers. You’ll have all your inventory set up on Squarespace but all the commerce functionality as far as getting paid and sending notifications, etc. will need to occur off the platform. Where and how is up to you.
Use Custom Coupon Codes
Ok, ok. So we’ve encountered two not-so-perfect scenarios. What about just creating coupon or discount codes for each wholesale buyer? Not a bad idea at first. The good: you can control who has access to discounts on an individual account basis and can provide different wholesale buyers with various discount levels.
I’ve had some clients set up systems like this for things like influencer marketing, creating individual codes to distribute to each person they’re working with. Depending on how many accounts you have this system can quickly be hard to manage though and it’s very difficult to gain access to helpful metrics and analytics on usage. (Tip: in the case of influencer marketing, I would check out my tips for setting up an affiliate or referral program instead.)
For wholesale, I would say this is also a passable but imperfect solution. Just like in the duplicate shop scenario, it also assumes that your wholesale customers are interested in the same shipping and payment options as your retail customers and I can see the mess of tracking spreadsheets and semi-canned emails quickly making you swear off what could otherwise be a profitable venture.
Try Candid Wholesale (My Recommend Method!)
I’m always keeping my eye out for solutions that I feel I can wholeheartedly recommend to you and you know I’m keen on keeping a lean tech stack, meaning I never recommend adding third-party solutions haphazardly. They’ve got to do what they say they will, and they’ve got to do it well.
Meet: Candid Wholesale
Candid Wholesale is an official Squarespace Extension that makes managing the wholesale side of your business a breeze. Remember what we said about choosing the right tool for the job? This is it.
At its simplest, Candid is a wholesale order management tool but it's really a robust CRM system geared towards helping you grow your entire wholesale business. With Candid you can take orders, send quotes, set up custom invoices, create a custom wholesale storefront, manage your customer relationships, and more.
Candid is going to take care of the problems some of our other imperfect solutions couldn't, such as: syncing up SKUs and shipping information, providing meaningful data to help you make informed decisions, and creating a wholesale experience for your customers that’s as great as your products are.
You can keep your current retail side of things exactly as they are and Candid will automatically keep the wholesale side of things in sync. You can choose which products you want to show in your wholesale catalog, how you want them organized, and quickly set prices for your wholesale customers.
Other Notable Candid Wholesale Features:
Create collaborative order forms that you can send directly to your wholesale clients.
An integrated message system keeps conversations in one place.
Accept payments online - or not. (Perfect if you accept check payments from accounts with net terms.)
Send reminders for past-due invoices.
Track shipments and invoices in real-time.
Control access to your wholesale catalog.
All plans include unlimited orders and no commissions, you just pay one flat monthly fee. There are three pricing tiers and while the Pro Plan is going to be great for most, I really love the embedding feature of the Complete plan!
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Wholesale Tips from The Pros at Candid Wholesale
I recently had a great conversation with the co-founders of Candid Wholesale, Avery Bloom & Dave Lowensohn. In addition to talking about Candid's features and some of the “why” behind the business, I asked if they had any sage wholesale advice to share. Here were their top tips:
Consider the benefits to your brand that come with being featured in someone else’s shop. Selling wholesale is about more than just the individual sale; a retailer that’s willing to stake their own business on your products is the ultimate endorsement! This can be a great way to get your name and brand out there and build relationships with more established sellers with their devoted followers.
Don’t think of wholesale as a feature that you can just turn on or off. Selling wholesale is more than just offering discounted prices in your regular eCommerce shop, as you can tell from the pros and cons of some of the solutions outlined above. You want to be able to offer payment terms, a clear and easy ordering process, and an experience that’s tailored to the wholesale experience.
Think about economies of scale. Selling wholesale can help you take advantage of price breaks on your raw materials or other components that go into your products. Instead of buying 10 of something, you’re able to buy 100 at a better unit price. Hint: this can also help you improve profit margins on all those retail orders as well!
Focus on building relationships. While we talk a lot about ways to personalize and customize the traditional eCommerce shopping experience, wholesale is in many ways still pretty old-fashioned. Great wholesale partnerships can last decades meaning it’s worth it to invest in the tools and systems to make those relationships successful and ensure you can consistently deliver on your promises.
Wholesale FAQs
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Yes! Wholesale is not for everyone. Wholesale probably isn’t a good fit for your business if:
You’re selling products with already very thin profit margins. In this case, you probably don’t have any room to discount to a point that would be attractive to wholesale buyers. You never want to be swapping high-profit margin retail sales for lower-profit margin wholesale ones if you can’t do both.
You don’t have a way to keep up with accounts or manage the additional sales volume. It’s easy to let things fall through the cracks without good systems in place and failing to deliver for your wholesale clients can send things south fast.
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Oh, I’m glad you asked! First, if you’re unfamiliar with Faire – it’s an online wholesale marketplace where sellers can post their goods and buyers can browse from a bunch of sellers all in one place. Think of it kind of like Etsy meets Match but for wholesale.
Faire’s pitch to sellers is seemingly attractive at first glance. They promise no setup fees, no long-term commitments, and access to thousands of eager buyers. It would be easy to assume that you’re just going to sign up and then sit back and watch the wholesale orders come rolling in. The reality is pretty bleak, though.
The truth is that if you sell on any sort of online marketplace, including Faire, you’re not doing anything to build your own brand. You don’t own the relationships you’ve built there and you don’t have any control of how your company is represented. There’s no promise that the marketplace will continue to exist - or that you won’t get kicked off the platform at any point for selling to customers 1:1, which is a violation of their terms of service. And where would you be then? (Hint: I take the same stance when it comes to selling exclusively on social media.)
It’s simple when you think about the economics of a marketplace that only makes money when they connect buyers to new sellers. Simply put: it means that it’s in Faire’s best interest to introduce your customers to your competitors. Faire may not charge a commission if those customers bought from you, but they make 25-30% if they connect them to your competition.
Bottom line: in an industry built on long-term personal relationships, be wary of anything that promises anything sounding too much like a “get rich quick” scheme. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
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One of my favorite myths to bust! Just like Squarespace, Shopify is a traditional B2C eCommerce platform. This means that all the same issues I talked about above for Squarespace apply to Shopify as well. They are simply not a wholesale platform out of the box. However, there are technically three ways to sell wholesale on Shopify which I’ll quickly cover here.
The first is via Shopify’s wholesale marketplace called Handshake. Let’s just say that all my warnings about Faire apply 100% to Handshake as well. I’m not even going to link to it. Caveat emptor.
The second is by adding the wholesale sales channel to your existing Shopify store to (wait for it) create a separate, password-protected storefront. Sound familiar? And don’t assume that just because it’s on Shopify that it’s somehow better than on Squarespace (it’s not). First of all, the fine print on the wholesale sales channel is that it is only available if you’re on Shopify Plus which starts at $2k per month and goes up from there based on sales volume.
Assuming you’ve passed on both of the options above, you could always head over to the Shopify app store and search for a suite of plugins to add to try to emulate wholesale functionality in a meaningful way. You’re going to need something for price lists, another for user/login management, something to create and manage client portals, another thing to host your catalogs, and something else to manage your bulk shipping options. Never mind that each of these apps comes with its own monthly cost, the likelihood of everything working together as it should and details not slipping through the cracks is crazy small. Another inelegant solution.
A Final Note on Wholesale
First and foremost, you’re never too small to give wholesale a try! Successful wholesale relationships can become a source of stable income and help you get your business and products out there. Using the right tools for the job, such as Candid Wholesale, can make the process smooth and easy for both you and your wholesale partners. Just remember to always keep your eyes on your margins and focus on building your own site where you can own and control the experience.
Ready to give wholesale a try? Get Started With a 7 Day Free Trial of Candid Wholesale PRO!
