How do you accept orders from your wholesale clients?
If you’re like most growing coffee roasters, your clients are emailing, texting, and calling you nonstop. Sure, this ordering process worked when you were first starting. But now that you have several customers to manage, dealing with endless phone calls and emails throughout the day and week is becoming quite the headache.
This is why we firmly believe that in order to scale, every wholesale coffee roaster needs a dedicated B2B wholesale website. A wholesale site is one of the easiest ways to streamline your ordering process. And best of all, getting started is not as complicated as you might think!
The key to roastery growth is efficient operations that allow you to remain profitable while expanding your business. A functional and integrated B2B wholesale website is a critical component of efficient roastery operations.
Let’s first define what we mean by a B2B wholesale website.
A B2B wholesale site is a website where customers can directly order the products you sell wholesale from your coffee roasting business, such as:
These websites make it simple for your wholesale customers to log in and place their orders with a few clicks. In comparison, an ecommerce website is focused on selling products to retail customers.
But a wholesale ordering website is more than just the coffee products available for purchase. It also factors in the nuances of wholesale ordering, including:
“But only the large coffee companies have technology like this, right?” Wrong.
This type of wholesale ordering platform is available to all coffee businesses, regardless of size.
And there are many reasons why you need to have one for your coffee roastery:
You already juggle enough by owning and operating a coffee roastery. Adding multiple avenues for wholesale customers to order only complicates things.
Do you want your roasting schedule interrupted by endless emails, calls, and texts? And how many times have you misheard a customer over the phone or missed an email thread, inevitably causing order errors?
A dedicated wholesale ordering website streamlines the ordering process for everyone involved. You can receive and manage all of your wholesale orders in one place, and customers don’t have to use different communication channels to place an order. They simply log in to their account and place their order—it’s that easy.
As a business owner, your goal is growth and profitability. Plain and simple.
The more wholesale orders you can sell, the greater your capacity for growth will be. The more streamlined your wholesale processes—both ordering and production—the easier it is to add new customers and increase profitability as a whole.
Every new customer added to your wholesale roster requires more communication and responsibility from you and your team. If you’re still dealing with never-ending texts, calls, and emails to place orders, you cannot grow your business effectively.
Don’t get us wrong. It’s possible to manage a wholesale coffee roasting business this way. We’ve seen it! But the difference is that these systems are often chaotic, riddled with errors, and worst of all, not profitable.
With a B2B wholesale website in place, your entire ordering process is streamlined. You and your team won’t be bogged down with manually capturing and organizing wholesale orders, allowing you to put your focus on production tasks, brand awareness, and relationship building with new and existing clients. Thanks to this streamlined process, you won’t hesitate to add new clients to your roster as the leads come in!
The most successful wholesale accounts are those that you’ve built a solid relationship with. These clients trust your expertise and believe in the coffee products you’re roasting and selling.
But it’s difficult to build a lasting relationship when so much of your time is spent being inundated with calls and texts from other clients. With a B2B wholesale ordering website in place, you can spend your time getting to know each client and helping them grow their business (and in turn, growing your business.)
Plus, communicating with clients solely about the details of their order doesn’t count as building a relationship. It’s executing a transaction.
Wholesale websites allow customers to order exactly what they want and need to run their business down to the intricate details like:
Now, you can focus on fostering a long-term relationship with these clients that helps both parties succeed and grow.
Wholesale coffee roasting programs are complex. Even with the most well-structured processes, the nature of B2B sales makes it difficult for wholesale transactions to be super straightforward. Having a wholesale ordering website, however, can help alleviate some of the burdens and automate the process—without relying on an employee who knows the ins and outs of your system.
With this in mind, we believe that every wholesale website needs to have the following functionality:
Ironically, for a craft as hands-on as coffee roasting, we rely on a lot of software to run our businesses and roast great coffee. Your wholesale website needs to connect to and communicate with each of these platforms for comprehensive functionality and effectiveness.
Without an integrated approach to ordering, production, fulfillment, and accounting, you’ll continue to spend hours each day manually entering orders into different platforms. (Trust us, we’ve seen it happen!) Think of how much 4-5 hours of paid labor is costing your business… when it can all be accomplished with a few clicks.
Your wholesale website needs to connect to software, including:
💡Pro Tip: If you’re still relying on manually updated spreadsheets as well as disconnected ordering processes, finding a production planning and wholesale ordering software that meets your needs can drastically improve your roastery’s efficiency and profitability. Discover how!
Wholesale coffee roasters change the pricing of products based on factors such as order volumes, client relationships, green coffee inventory levels, promotional discounts, and more.
Client relationships and pricing negotiations are a major component of a wholesale coffee operation. This means that two accounts ordering the exact same product may receive different pricing. For example, a grocery store client ordering 100 retail bags of ground coffee may receive a $9.00/bag price, while a local coffee shop ordering 10 retail bags per month may pay $10.50/bag for the same coffee.
With a wholesale ordering website, it’s critical to have the agreed upon price point reflected for each product.
Automated discounts can also be applied with a wholesale ordering website. No more dealing with spreadsheet calculations or last-minute calculations on your iPhone. From free shipping to automatic discounts based on order levels, the ideal wholesale website platform dynamically updates the total cost based on customer and order criteria.
From toll roasting and private label clients to coffee shops serving the best-selling blends from your brand, each of your wholesale accounts orders different products. Yet, so many wholesale websites only allow companies to create one product catalog, meaning clients need to scroll through irrelevant products before finding and ordering the coffee they need.
Aside from a user experience standpoint, offering exclusive products and customized product catalogs ensures client confidentiality where necessary. Some roasters enter into confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements when roasting for private label clients or toll-roasting contracts.
There are a few ways coffee roasters can go about launching a wholesale ordering website. But fair warning: not all website options are created equal…
If you’re tech-savvy and have time to spare, you can build a wholesale ordering website. Several website platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Squarespace will give you the foundation necessary for your wholesale website. Or, if you’ve got a background in website development, you may have the technical expertise necessary to build your wholesale website from scratch.
Building a website yourself is a noble pursuit and if you have the means (and expertise) to do so, it can be a way for your business to save money in the long run. But before you jump in, ask yourself: is building my own wholesale website a good use of my valuable time and resources, or can my focus and attention be better spent elsewhere like the production schedule or growing my wholesale client list?
👉On the surface, building your own website seems straightforward, but once you start factoring in the necessary functions like exclusive products, customized products, desired shipping/delivery methods, dynamic pricing, integrating with your accounting and production planning software… things can get complex fast. Is it truly so easy to build and maintain a DIY wholesale website if you are constantly dealing with errors, updates, and the need for complicated features?
Truthfully, if overall business growth is your goal, taking the DIY approach is typically not the most sustainable option for a growing roastery.
Do-It-Yourself:
Cost: 💰💰💰
Time to Implement: ⏱️⏱️⏱️⏱️⏱️
Difficulty of Maintenance: 🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️🛠️
Complex Features: ✅
Integrate With Accounting & Production Planning: ⚠️ (It’s a possibility, but it’s not easy!)
Sure, you can always hire a website developer to build you a fully functional and aesthetically pleasing wholesale ordering website. However, you will still run into a lot of the same concerns as the DIY route, especially regarding scalability and cost.
Top-quality website developers aren’t cheap and wholesale ordering websites require specific functionality that will escalate the project’s total cost. Hiring a website developer means paying thousands of dollars upfront for a wholesale ordering website (plus an hourly rate every time the site needs updates or has an issue!)
And, spoiler alert, it often requires an entire team of developers to create all of the intricate features a wholesale website needs such as:
Web developers may drink a lot of coffee… but they don’t always understand the coffee industry. This means your custom-created wholesale website may technically work on paper, but doesn’t integrate into your business efficiently. Unless you have a limitless budget to spend, opting for the web development path can create more headaches (and negative bank accounts) than desired.
Hire a Web Developer:
Cost: 💰💰💰💰💰
Time to Implement: ⏱️⏱️⏱️⏱️
Difficulty of Maintenance: 🛠️🛠️🛠️
Complex Features: ⚠️ (It all depends on the developer you hire!)
Integrate With Accounting & Production Planning: ⚠️ (It all depends on the developer you hire!)
If your coffee roasting business already has a website on a popular commerce platform such as Shopify or SquareSpace, there are various wholesale selling plugins available.
These plugins offer different wholesale functions such as:
A few of the top plugins and apps include:
Keep in mind, each of these plugins and apps have limitations! Unless you pay for the ultimate subscription plan, you’ll likely run into obstacles such as:
These extensions of your existing website provide a quick option for getting a wholesale website up and running. However, like most services on the Internet, these apps are an additional fee on top of the website expenses you already pay.
Wholesale Ordering Plugins
Cost: Ranges from 💰💰 to 💰💰💰💰💰based on the plan & app chosen.
Time to Implement: ⏱️⏱️⏱️
Difficulty of Maintenance: 🛠️🛠️🛠️
Complex Features: ✅✅
Integrate With Accounting & Production Planning: ⚠️ (Dependent upon the app and subscription chosen. But be careful! Certain accounting and production planning software may categorize these as ecommerce orders since they come from your ecommerce site, rather than wholesale orders.)
We were once in your shoes. We were growing the wholesale offerings at our roastery and needed a better way to manage the ordering process (after accidentally throwing away one too many sticky notes that contained pertinent order information!)
When you sign up for a RoasterTools account, your business automatically has access to a wholesale ordering website for no extra charge. This feature is included in EVERY plan we offer. We know how critical this technology is to the growth and profitability of a roastery and we want all roasters to have it!
The RoasterTools wholesale portal offers a multitude of pertinent ordering features, including:
Cost: 💰💰
Time to Implement: ⏱️⏱️
Difficulty of Maintenance: 🛠️
Complex Features: ✅✅✅✅✅
Integrate With Accounting & Production Planning: ✅✅✅✅✅
When you sign up for RoasterTools and launch your wholesale website, each of your clients will create unique login credentials that unlock the individual discounts, products, delivery methods, and payment types associated with their account. This means each of your clients has a dedicated wholesale ordering website created just for them, all at no additional cost to you.
Think of the marketing and relationship-building opportunities this presents to coffee roasters. Not only have you streamlined the wholesale coffee ordering process with a few clicks, but you’ve also created a unique and exclusive offering for every individual client.
Curious to learn more? Book a call here!
.png)