Miva Merchant is a very powerful shopping cart platform. Because you can extend its functionality by installing 3rd party modules, the things you can do with it are almost limitless.

Eventually there will come a time when you will find you need a section of your website which caters to wholesale customers. As your business grows you will start to expand into other areas and selling wholesale, in bulk, usually is where most storeowners venture to first. Even though you give your wholesale customers a discount, this can be a very profitable area because they are buying large amounts of your product to resell.

Miva Merchant has many different features available to allow you to use your current website to sell to wholesalers. The easiest solution is a built in Miva feature called Price Groups.

Price Groups allow you to put your products (you can use all of them, or just a certain group of products) into a price group, where any customer who is also a member of that price group will get a percentage discount. You can either do a discount from the retail cost, or a markup from your actual cost.

This is a very nice feature to have. It is very simple to setup. You choose the discount, add the products, and then add the customers you want to be apart of that group. Once a customer has been assigned to the price group, every time they login to your store they will automatically be shown the discounted prices for your products.

Most companies use a tiered wholesale system, where the more the customer buys, the bigger discount they are given. This can easily be achieved using Miva. Here is an example.

The company Widgets Inc. makes and sells widgets online. They have a retail website, which does great. Now they are expanding into a wholesale side as well. Instead of creating a totally new website for its wholesalers, it decides to use Price Groups to solve the problem. Widgets Inc. wants to have 3 different levels of wholesalers. Their bronze wholesalers get a 10% discount, their silver wholesalers get a 20% discount, and their gold wholesalers get a 30% discount. Because they are using Miva Merchant, they create 3 different price groups, each with the appropriate discount (10%, 20%, and 30%).

They put up a wholesale application on their website in order to attract new wholesalers. When someone’s application is approved, they create a customer account for them in the Miva backend, and also assign them to the Bronze price group. Because Widgets Inc. created the customer account for them, they email the wholesaler with their new username and password for their wholesale account. Now when that customer logs in to their account, they will automatically be given the 10% discount on all the products.

When customers reach a certain level of products purchased, Widgets Inc, simply un-assigns the customer from the bronze price group, and moves them to the silver price group. Now the customer sees a 20% discount on all the products.

As you can see from this example, Miva’s built in price groups is a very useful feature. You are able to run an entire wholesale program using your same retail website. You only have to manage one website, and one set of products.

This is a good method for a general wholesale program, but what if you want to offer different products only available to your wholesalers. For example, say wholesalers are the only ones who can buy shirts on your website, and you only sell them by the case. This situation requires a little more customization, using Emporium Plus’s Took Kit.

Part II coming soon…

You can read Miva's full documention on Price Groups here.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.