What’s the point in having a wholesale eCommerce store, exactly? We’re glad you asked.
We’ve worked with one business that has been in operation since the ’70s. And before they met us, they still did business like they were in the ’70s… the fashion since then sure has changed, and so has the sales approach.
Wholesale ECommerce works if you recognize any one of these time consuming tasks. Keep reading.
- Your wholesale orders sell through PDFs and line sheets. Emails, marked-up PDFs, spreadsheets, each one retyped before anything ships.
- Every account has its own prices, and keeping the right list in front of the right buyer means you could have multiple copies of the same PDF with different pricing.
- Your graphic designer has to spend hours preparing PDFs and editing pictures.
- Your team’s evenings go to order entry during the weeks they should be selling.
- You sell on rush order / same-season purchasing.
- You manually calculate shipping and logistics: You currently count boxes, pack shirts, make sure they’re weighed properly, and have to do all that by hand.
- Buyers ask for repeats between appointments, and the answer depends on someone being free to reply.
- The catalogue changes mid-season, and orders keep coming in off last month’s PDF.
- Adding accounts means adding hours. Ten more buyers means ten more inboxes to watch, and eventually another person to process them.
If that’s your week, the store pays for itself in retyping alone, before it sells a single extra unit. Here’s what a wholesale eCommerce store includes.
People buy online these days. If your customers can’t, that’s a lost opportunity to make an easy sale.
Every hour that passes between a buyer deciding they want to buy, and you confirming by email, is an hour they can spend ordering from someone else.
It also means your team is spending hours and weeks to complete tasks that could be done 99% faster.
So the question isn’t whether wholesale eCommerce works.
It’s whether the cost of using wholesale eCommerce is cheaper than the cost of not using it.
Granted, there are cases where a wholesaler / distributor / supplier think this might not work for them:
- “Our buyers won’t use it.”
- “We’re not technical.”
- “We’d be locked in.”
- “We’re too small for this.”
- “We already use a wholesale platform.”
We’ve answered a lot of questions on why wholesale eCommerce wouldn’t work for you via the Book a call page. These are often pre-conceived notions about wholesale eCommerce, and we have to say, most of the time there is never a sound reason why you shouldn’t be making it easier for your customers to buy from you. Remember, it’s not about whether or not wholesale eCommerce works; it’s about whether the cost of using it is cheaper than the cost of not using it. People buy online these days. If your customers can’t, that’s costing you thousands of dollars in lost opportunity and revenue.
There are in fact very good reasons why wholesale eCommerce would legitimately not work for your fashion / garment business. These are some of the reasons.
When wholesale eCommerce wouldn’t work for you:
- You want to keep your catalog a secret: If you don’t want people to be able to see your products online, then having a website is probably a bad idea.
- You sell to one or two large accounts and speak to the buyer anyway. The order is a formality at the end of a conversation, and software doesn’t improve a conversation.
- You outsource your wholesale opportunities to someone else: maybe you prefer to have your buyers / retail partners handle the process themselves.
Any brand that recognizes itself in this list should keep its money. We’d rather tell you now than three weeks into a build.
Do you sell on rush?
A buyer who needs stock this week can’t wait for a reply, and by the time someone answers Monday’s email, they’ve often ordered from whoever answered first. How many opportunities were missed out on because of that?
How does Syndicate compete amongst the other options? Shopify, Faire, JOOR, etc….
When it comes to wholesale eCommerce, Syndicate competes on two major angles: ownership and cost.
Ownership: compared to platforms like JOOR, Faire, FashionGo, etc…. Syndicate actually lets you own your store. It’s company property. With these platforms, yearly costs could exceed $10,000 USD. If any of those platforms decided they don’t like you, your page is shutdown, the customer list disappears, and the revenue stream is lost.
Price: Syndicate is not the only option for your wholesale eCommerce needs. In fact, you may already be using some of the platforms mentioned above, or even using something like Shopify. A lot of businesses with the potential to work with Syndicate already have retail operations set up with platforms like Shopify — which let’s face it, is quite synonymous with the word “eCommerce” today. Here’s the thing: Shopify Plus charges $2,300USD (over $3,500 CAD) a month for a true wholesale sales setup and even worse — the store still doesn’t belong to you. Over 5 years, working with Syndicate is about 90% less expensive for most of our customers. And, you walk away with an asset for the business, owning the customer relationships, revenue stream and the store itself.Â
We build wholesale stores for fashion brands: product pages, a cart, a checkout, and the prices set for each wholesale account. It runs alongside your existing email and PDF ordering, so you invite buyers over at your pace rather than switching everyone at once. The store belongs to you, including the domain, the files and every login, with no subscription to us forced to keep it alive, and ongoing care is optional with no contract on monthly plans.
The fastest way to judge it is to watch someone use one for fifteen minutes and ask questions above while they do. We are a Canadian team, based in Montreal, working with businesses since 2015.
Book fifteen minutes or call us today: 1-844-404-4796.
