Being successful in the wholesale game is a totally different challenge than being successful in your direct-to-consumer business. Wholesale relies on your skill in building fruitful client relationships that allow you to sell in bulk. To make sure the cash flow is always there and keep making the things people want, you have to pitch buyers, make them best-in-market offers, and then follow up with them in order to keep them coming back. But you can’t spend all your time on just one area of business management, so you need the best software for wholesale distribution that you can get; you need an innovative platform that frees up your bandwidth to make smart decisions and focus on selling instead of a bulky ERP system that has too many unnecessary functions.

Once you settle on a platform you like and can use seamlessly, here are 5 best practices to getting the most out of it:

Butter Up Your Buyer

We’ve already said that wholesale is about relationships; what better way to make a client feel special than to give them special pricing? Look for a function that can set a global discount for a particular account. If someone knows they have an exclusive, blanket 10% off everything in your store, why wouldn’t they become a repeat buyer right then and there?

Make Sure Your Inventory is Accurate

There’s nothing more disappointing than being on the cusp of a purchase decision and realizing you’re out of stock. To avoid stockouts and keep resellers happy, couple your wholesale platform with a solid inventory management software that gets inventory sync right every single time. If you sell an item on Shopify, your inventory on Amazon should be automatically adjusted accordingly. And you don’t have time to do that yourself – because you’re busy concentrating on what matters!

Encourage Bulk Purchases

Volume buying keeps sales consistent, cash in the account, reduces manufacturing costs per unit, and keeps everyone in the know and on a level playing field. Your wholesale software should be able to offer tiered discounts to your clients depending on the quantity per product they hit. If they can save an extra 3% by stocking up on another 10 units they’re forecasting being able to sell anyway, why not take the plunge? Tiered and global discounts also lighten your workload; you’ll never be flipping through pages of a document containing a million promo codes figuring out which ones you have to delete or which ones you have to create. This makes it easy to stay tuned in to the important parts of your enterprise.

Exports Should Be Quick and Clean

Remember, the more steps you go through when exporting data to your accounting software, like Quickbooks and Xero, the more chances exist to lose data integrity. Your bookkeeper will be a huge fan of yours if the data coming from your wholesale software is regular and organized. Since most e-commerce platforms have limited APIs, you’ll need to export data to a .CSV file before you upload into your accounting platform of choice, but there are plenty of processes that you can put in place to make sure what goes out matches what comes in.

Make Your Storefront Welcoming

When choosing a website on which to host your wholesale store, go with a platform that offers easy templates as well as customization options in case you or someone you know can custom code the store of your dreams. Shopify, for example, makes it really easy to place and track orders without additional plugins, so you can spend your time on making store augmentations that make sense for your business. As an added bonus, our wholesale plugin app is easily accessible through the Shopify store, so you don’t have to spend hours doing custom connections!