No BS with BS: Wholesale Pricing Tiers

This company burst onto the web scene almost ten years ago with a custom eCommerce site built by BlueSwitch. Over the years, they’ve made a name for themselves as an industry leader selling bulk backpacks, tote bags – even school supplies – at steep discounts. With their growth, BlueSwitch encouraged and then migrated their custom site to Shopify Plus so they could take advantage of the Shopify infrastructure, app catalog, and all the other goodies that come with Shopify Plus.

One of the early challenges was creating a shopping experience on Shopify Plus that closely mirrored their original custom experience.

Crucial to their business model is selling products wholesale to the public, or in bulk. One of the key requirements is being able to sell products by the case, where each case contains an assortment of products. As an example, their signature backpack comes with 24 pieces per case. Each product costs between $2-$3 depending on volume purchased and can only be purchased by the case (of 24 pieces in this scenario.) The more cases you purchase, the lower the price drops.

The solution ended up being simpler than we initially thought. By creating a new Variant Group – in our example for “Case Quantity” – we created variants for the case sizes, and then where applicable, for color or size. So, for example, we have variants that look like this:

What the table is showing is for quantities 1-10, the price is $120. For 11 – 20, it drops to $116, and so on. With that, on the front-end, we customized the product page. To the end-user, it looks simply like pricing tiers, but in reality, it’s actually variants powering it all.

With that done, we encountered our final challenge: to their users’ benefit, the wholesale site will automatically discount all of their products with quantity purchases – even if they are purchasing different products. So, for example, if a user buys 10 of the product above, their price per case is $120. If they then go buy 10 cases of a *different product* the price for the new product will automatically be the cheaper price for the 11-20 tier. Also, the price for the first product drops from $120 to $116. The pricing is fluid and dynamic and changes as they progress through the shopping experience.

For this solve, BlueSwitch implemented custom code on the Cart page that, whenever a user enters the page which programmatically reviews the products in their cart, it checks and adjusts all pricing accordingly. Also, a user is unable to checkout before entering the View Cart page, to ensure that pricing is always calculated properly, and the user gets the absolute best pricing.

With this model, the excellent product offering on the eCommerce site is trailblazing online. They are a destination for churches, schools, and even regular shoppers.