Shopify is a versatile platform for retailers, but wholesalers can find it limiting at certain scales. For example, can you use bulk discounts on Shopify?
The only viable native option for business-to-business operations is to spend $2,000 or more per month on the international enterprise service level, which comes with tools that many younger B2B companies don’t need.
For startups and small businesses, apps are the best way to use bulk discounts on Shopify.
Can You Bulk Discount Items on Shopify?
You can offer bulk prices on Shopify. In fact, the issue isn’t lowering prices. It’s offering discounts when customers make orders of predetermined quantities — and applying those price strategies efficiently.
How To Set Up a Bulk Discount on Shopify
Smaller wholesale companies usually use a bulk discount app. These apps reduce costs in various ways:
- Eliminating the need for time-intensive workarounds
- Making the purchasing experience clearer and less prone to errors
- Encouraging large single orders rather than multiple, smaller orders
Apps allow companies to apply quantity-based pricing tiers to multiple items in a Shopify inventory. They also allow customers to see discounts and make large purchases automatically.
Unfortunately, Shopify does not come with bulk discounts outside of the enterprise service tier — most companies use apps. The good news is that, should a business ever choose to migrate to that level, the company provides plenty of support during the process.
Can You Use Shopify Discount Codes for Bulk Discounts?
Businesses could theoretically use discount codes for bulk discounts. However, this approach is not ideal, as it:
- Creates an extra step (and possible user error point) for checkout
- Requires communication between the wholesaler and all potential clients
- Is more labor-intensive than bulk discount apps
The only advantage the discount-code strategy has is that it uses a built-in function. This eliminates an (often minor) cost associated with an app purchase or subscription.
However, as we mentioned above, there’s really no long-term advantage in being a Shopify purist — the company helps growing enterprises integrate or transition from third-party apps during migrations. Good bulk checkout apps also typically pay for themselves by reducing costs and increasing sales.
Why Would You Want To Use a Shopify Bulk Discount?
The most obvious reason to use bulk discounts — and also a major reason that businesses want to get into wholesaling in general — is that larger orders increase the number of items a business sells at one time. This increases average order sizes, reduces handling fees, clears warehouse space, and has various other advantages.
A traditional way to do this is to sell cases of merchandise. This has the downside of limiting the customer’s ability to choose the exact quantity of product. In other words, the customer must order in multiples of the case quantity.
Businesses that use Shopify bulk discount apps get multiple advantages over those that simply offer large cases. These more versatile companies can:
- Sell individual items at retail prices, if they want
- Offer partial-case options to wholesale clients
- Encourage larger orders by clearly communicating discounts
These offer a competitive edge in several situations. Examples include retail-wholesale hybrid settings, wholesalers that sell to a large range of retail businesses of different sizes, and companies with less of a focus on manual wholesaler-client relationship management.
How To Use Bulk Discount on Shopify With Your Existing Inventory
Inventory moves faster when wholesale ordering is easy when customers can see prices upfront and businesses can list items without excessive administrative work. In other words, merchandise sells better with easy-to-apply bulk discount functions at checkout.
Ultimately, apps are the best way to use bulk discounts on Shopify, so install ours today.
