Must-Have Website Features for Small Wholesale Producers

If you were a retail buyer and you were interested in learning more about a particular brand, where is the first place you would look? Probably their website, right? How strange, then, that most brands pay little or no attention to the wholesale pages of their websites!

Let’s look at the different reasons that a retail buyer might visit your website in the first place.

If they’re an existing customer of yours, they’re probably looking for your current offerings, for information about your brand & products, or for your contact information.

If they’re a prospective new customer, they’re probably looking for that stuff too, along with info about how go about setting up an account and placing a first order.

Why not make it as easy as humanly possible for them to find that info? And while you have their attention, why not impress them with your super professionalism?

My Ideal Wholesale Website

If I was representing a brand, I would want the wholesale page of my website to act in full support of my sales efforts. These are the features I would want it to include, and this is roughly how I would like it to be organized:

Let’s take each feature in turn.

First, notice that WHOLESALE is listed in the top navigation menu. Not as a sub-menu item, not in the footer, but right there at the top, for the whole world to see. Shouldn’t it be immediately apparent the moment a potential buyer lands on your website that you do indeed wholesale your products? By clicking that menu item, the buyer is taken to the page we see above, from whatever page they happen to be on on your website.

A form is an eye-catching call to action, and putting it front and center like this makes it easy for an interested buyer to take action. They don’t need to sift through anything to find the information they need to begin setting up an account. They can simply fill out the form, hit submit, and be on their merry way. The alternative is to list an email address where they can inquire about wholesale, but then you’re creating unnecessary steps for them: they need to copy that email address, exit your website, log into their email, and compose an email that hopefully includes all of the info that they imagine you’ll need to get the setup process going.

With a form, you capture the info you need right off the bat, eliminating any of the needless back-and-forthing that often causes buyers to disappear. As an added bonus, responses entered through a form will filter through to a spreadsheet, which you can easily load into your sales pipeline for follow-up and tracking purposes.

Once the buyer hits that submit button, display a notice saying that a wholesale account manager will get back to them within 24 hours.

If they seem like a good fit and you approve them, send them a welcome email with a link to a secure web form application, where they can complete the setup process (payment info, delivery details, etc.) and agree to your terms & conditions.

This section allows you to share links to additional information that a potential buyer may be seeking, without distracting them too much from the main action that you’re guiding them towards (sending you their contact info). Buyer Testimonials could be a page of quotes from happy wholesale customers, in case the buyer needs a little more convincing. New Customer FAQs provides answers to questions such as:

• What is the shelf life of your product?
• What is your order lead time?
• What is your minimum order?
• What carrier do you use?
• Do you work with any distributors?
• Do you ship internationally?

And so on, along with any product-related questions that you commonly get.

We address Terms & Conditions in this post.

The Resources for Retailers section serves a dual purpose. First, it gives you a place to house all those handy resources you’ve created, and an easy way to share them with your existing retailers. Second, it assures prospective new customers that they’ll be in good hands as soon as they complete that form!

These links can take you to a PDF in the case of the sales tools we’ve previously discussed: Catalog, Product Knowledge Sheet, Special Handling Instructions, and Current Line Sheet. (Note: you don’t want to publish your wholesale pricing on your website for your competitors to see, so just leave the pricing off of the published version.)

Make a PDF with photos & dimensions of the Displays that you offer too, and include a link to that. As for Shelf Talkers, create some downloadable files of various sizes and formats for retailers to print and hang with your display.

Digital Files and Photos might include any press-ready photos (both white box and lifestyle), logos, brand copy, product descriptions, and marketing materials that your retailers can include in their blogs, social media, and newsletters, etc. Retailers will be happy to know that a lot of this time-consuming work has been done for them, and will be more inclined to feature you on their website and in their social media.

More info about the importance of quality product photography can be found at the end of this post.

With all of your retailer resources set up as links on your website, you can easily send buyers any specific info that they request. If they’d like a hi-res file of your logo, just email or text them the link. Product knowledge for their staff? Shoot ’em the link!

Give retailers a way to connect with an actual human if that’s what they so desire!

Your RETAIL LOCATIONS is as much a gesture of partnership-building for your wholesale customers as it is a resource for your end customers, the people who are wondering where on earth they can find your product. Upload (and maintain) a current list of your retailers, including links to their websites.

Maybe you’re worried that by revealing your retailers on your website, your competitors will poach your accounts. But as long as you have a solid product and have built solid relationships with your retail partners, you can rest assured that this gesture will further cement those relationships, making them less inclined to drop you when your competitor comes a-knocking (which is inevitable, whether or not you publicly share your retailers).

Connect with your retailers on your social media. Follow them, engage with them, and like their stuff!

Your ABOUT page is a marvelous opportunity to showcase the humans behind the brand. Include a current photo of the team. Keep the text short and sweet, and touch upon your company origins and your raison d’etre. Prospective and current retailers will turn to your ABOUT page for an understanding of who they’re doing business with. Include your location (city & state) and your contact information.

A Word About Blogs

A blog can be an effective way to connect with your industry and your customer base while keeping your website looking current. Blogging is a science and an art that can serve multiple purposes — driving traffic to your website, increasing your website’s SEO/SERP, etc. The same goes for your social media. We’ll delve more deeply into these topics in a future post about marketing. For now, just know that if you decide to include a blog, you’ll want to have a plan for continuously publishing new content. Nothing shows dust collecting on a brand like a blog with no recent posts.

A Word About Order Portals

In the very first post of this publication, I mentioned that one of the missions of Shelf Life is to clarify the sales-related needs of small wholesale producers, so as to dispel some of the confusion that solution-sellers like to prey upon. In particular, I pointed a finger at software solution-sellers.

One prime example of a software solution that doesn’t quite fit our needs is Sales Order Management (SOM) software, such as Handshake, NuOrder, or BlueCart. These are effectively eCommerce platforms for wholesale, which let you create an order portal on your website for your wholesale customers to enter their orders into. The idea behind it is based on the explosive success of B2C eCommerce (eg Amazon), and the theory is that if individual consumers like purchasing through a web-based order portal, then surely wholesale buyers should like it too.

In Handshake’s words, SOM helps you “leverage mobile order writing, web order management, and B2B eCommerce in order to grow sales, increase efficiency, and improve the customer experience.”

Sounds great, right? But wait. Does an order portal really improve your retail buyers’ experience, or are you just trying to make your life easier? Sure, receiving orders in a standardized format would be nice, but portals require that the buyer a) remembers their login credentials for each different wholesaler that they work with, and b) re-key their purchase orders into your unique portal. The goal in wholesale is to remove obstacles to buyers placing orders, and in this case you would be creating more.

I don’t advocate for order portals, as nice as they seem in theory. I have spoken with retail buyers who find them to be inconvenient and even “annoying,” compared with simply emailing or calling their orders in. Portals can also cause an account manager to take a passive approach to sales — in this business, you can’t wait for orders to come to you.

And the Award for the Worst Website Goes to …

In researching this post, I came across many mediocre websites, either with uninspiring wholesale pages, or entirely nonexistent ones. Why so many wholesale businesses choose not to mention “wholesale” anywhere on their website is a mystery to me. But worse than saying nothing is saying something like the following. This is the first thing a buyer sees when they click this business’s wholesale link (which is buried in the footer of the website):

Could this page be any less welcoming? So much negativity and not-so-fine print! The tone is downright antagonistic. If you were a buyer who discovered their products somewhere and wanted to bring them into your store, wouldn’t you think twice about working with them after seeing this? “Reorders are approved based on availability…”? “We may decline a reorder…”? “No products or goods shall be resold…”? They sound like quite a joy to deal with.

Save this kind of stuff for the Terms and Conditions section. They’ve found you! They want your products on their shelves! Careful not to kill the moment with your demands.

Do you know of a small wholesale producer with a well done wholesale section of their website? Please share it in the comments section below!