How to offer wholesale pricing in your online store without everyone seeing it

Maribel makes salsa macha in Tulancingo, Hidalgo. She sells it in 250-gram jars, in three flavors —peanut, sesame, and chile morita—, at $95 each. But half of it doesn’t go straight from her kitchen to the person eating it: it goes out in boxes, to the eleven resellers who take it to their office, to the corner store in their neighborhood, or to their stall at the Sunday street market. For them, she offers wholesale pricing: $70 a jar.

That wholesale list is a photo Maribel sends over WhatsApp. And photos get forwarded. In August, a woman she didn’t know wrote to her: “someone sent me your list, can I get two jars at 70?” She wasn’t a reseller; someone had passed the image along. Maribel told her no, the woman got offended, and neither of them was happy about it.

That’s why Maribel hadn’t dared to open her online store. She figured a page could only show one price. That’s not the case.

What is a wholesale price?

A wholesale price is the lower price you give to someone buying in bulk or to resell, different from the retail price the general public pays. In an online store it’s built two ways: by quantity, which applies to anyone who takes a certain number of pieces, or by customer group, which applies only to the people you add.

In your page’s console, both live under Settings → Price lists, inside a list of the Wholesale price type. The console explains it in one line: “The price a customer group pays. It shows as a normal price, with nothing crossed out.” That detail matters. Your reseller doesn’t see a deal with the old price struck through; she sees her price.

Price by quantity or price by customer?

It depends on who you want to charge less. If anyone who buys a box deserves the discount, go by quantity; if the price is for your resellers and no one else, go by group.

By quantity. When you add a price, you fill in Starting at N pieces. Leave it blank and it applies to any quantity; fill it in and the minimum is 2. Maribel set $82 starting at 12 jars for all customers: the woman buying year-end gifts for her office reaches that too.
By group. Under For whom you pick a group instead of “All customers.” Maribel created one called Resellers, at $70 from the very first jar.

Both rules can live in the same list. When more than one applies to an order, the more specific one wins — the one that requires group and quantity — and if there’s a tie, the cheaper one wins. A reseller who buys 12 jars pays $70, not $82. The console sums it up this way: “The store always charges the best applicable price.”

How do you keep your wholesale price from being seen by everyone?

With a group. A group price is only calculated for someone who’s logged into your page and whom you’ve added to that group; anyone who browses without an account or checks out as a guest is shown and charged the public price. And there’s no way to request it from the outside: the group comes from the account the person logged in with, not from anything they type into the order.

That brings a step Maribel wasn’t expecting. Each reseller has to log in once on the page, with her email; before that, she doesn’t exist for the store. After that, Maribel goes to Customers → Groups, opens Resellers, taps Members, and adds her from the list. If she has a lot of them, she can search by email, but she has to type the whole thing: the search is exact.

One warning before you tidy up: if you delete a group, its members and all their special prices go with it.

How does the store count pieces?

By product and by variant. If Maribel sets “starting at 12 jars” on the peanut one, the customer needs 12 peanut jars in the cart; six peanut and six morita don’t make a dozen. Each flavor is its own variant, with its own line in the price list.

That’s the limit worth knowing up front: if your usual wholesale deal is “the mixed dozen,” the store doesn’t count it that way. For Maribel it wasn’t a problem, because her resellers’ price doesn’t require a minimum: any combination comes out to $70 for them, one jar or thirty. She kept the quantity price for the general public, flavor by flavor. In total she entered six lines: three flavors for Resellers and the same three for all customers, starting at 12.

What does your reseller see when she logs in to buy?

Her price, as if it were the usual one. When she logs in, the store shows her $70 on each jar and charges her that same $70 at checkout, because what’s displayed and what’s charged come from the same calculation. The general public, meanwhile, still sees $95.

So you can see it before they do, every price you save comes with a preview written in plain language, something like “Resellers customer buying 12: $70 each.” And if another rule in the same list beats it, that price shows up tagged Doesn’t apply. You find out right there, not when a customer complains.

How to set it up in an afternoon

In Customers → Groups, create the group: Resellers, Wholesalers, Corner stores.
Ask each reseller to visit your page and log in once. Then add her from Members.
In Settings → Price lists, create a list of the Wholesale price type. The type can’t be changed later. Dates are optional: leave them blank and it always applies.
With Add price, choose the product, the price, who it’s for, and, if you want, a minimum number of pieces. One line per variant.
Write “wholesale from 12 jars” in the product description, so the public knows it exists.

If you don’t have a store yet, start there. Here’s how Maribel described hers to Proyecta:

“Handmade salsa macha from Tulancingo, Hidalgo. Three flavors in 250 g jars: peanut, sesame, and chile morita, at $95 each. I want an online store with a cart, card or bank transfer payment, shipping within Hidalgo, and a WhatsApp button.”

Her store came out, published, with its own link. She set up wholesale afterward, from the console.

Before you open the console

Write your rule in a single line: who, starting at how many pieces, and at what price. “Resellers, from the first jar, at $70.” “Anyone, from 12 of the same flavor, at $82.” If it doesn’t fit in one line, it’s not a rule yet: it’s a negotiation, and those still happen over WhatsApp.

Once you have it, describe your business to Proyecta and publish your store. That line is exactly what you’ll be entering, and the photo of the list no longer has to leave your phone.