WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form Getting Started Guide
Thank you for purchasing the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form!
This document is a getting started guide for the WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form plugin for WooCommerce.
Based on tons of research and observing wholesale transactions we know that happy wholesale customers are profitable wholesale customers. And the quicker your wholesale customers can order, the happier they’ll be because their mission is to get in, make the order, and get out.
The Wholesale Order Form is all about providing an efficient one-page ordering form for your wholesale customers so you can fulfill that promise.
Here’s what this guide will cover:
- Overview – we describe at a high level what the plugin does exactly
- Setup Wizard – learn how to complete the setup wizard
- Multiple Order Forms – create multiple order forms and put them anywhere you like
- Drag and Drop Form Builder – we show you how to use and customize the order form elements
- Add To Cart Options – we explain the difference between two different ways you can display the Add To Cart buttons
- Extra Product Columns –
- Search, Filtering, and Sorting Options – this is important because it helps your customers find what they are after in the form interface
- Lazy Loading – the pros and cons of using pagination versus lazy load to handle more products than can fit on a single page
- User Role Permissions – restrict which user roles can access the order form
- Getting Help – we understand this can be an intricate tool, we’ll show you where to get help if you need it
Overview
WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form is a completely stand-alone plugin for WooCommerce that provides a highly optimized ordering interface. It’s designed to work hand in hand with the rest of our suite of tools.
There are hundreds of features included in the Order Form tool, which you can see here for a full list, but today we’ll go over just a few of the major features so that you can get up and running as fast as possible.
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First, we’re going to make some high-level decisions about how to display the form.
Setup Wizard
Upon installing and activating your WooCommerce Wholesale Order Form, you’ll be redirected to a setup wizard. This wizard will guide you through setting up your first order form.
Multiple Order Forms
To create a new form, go to Wholesale > Order Forms > click the “Add Form” button.
This “Wholesale Order Forms” page also shows the list of all order forms you have created
The ability to create multiple order forms in different configurations allows you to create order forms for various occasions. You can also display a different selection of products on each form.
You may use the shortcode to add the forms anywhere you like, including multiple forms on one page if needed.
Drag and Drop Form Builder
Our new drag and drop interface lets you create order forms easily without learning how to code. It is a better way to be able to alter the configuration of order forms and tweak the settings of parts of your order form in a more intuitive way.
There are three main sections on the form:
- Order Form Header
- Order Form Table
- Order Form Footer
For the header and footer, you can add sections and determine how many columns you want on each section. You can then drag elements from the “Edit Form” tab over to those sections and arrange them how you like.
Extra Product Columns
The product listing table only has one section which contains columns to show information about the product.
On each element, you will find the “⚙” icon on the left. When you click it, it will show you the options to style the element and the additional options that you can tweak such as renaming the column title, making the column sortable, etc.
Only show the stock quantity if you are tracking stock on your WooCommerce installation or via a compatible system like Inventoroo.
For the product SKU to show you must have it filled in under the Inventory tab on your product data information on the product. Likewise, for variable products, you should have the SKU filled in on each variation.
The product thumbnail will show the thumbnail image of the product and once you have that enabled you’ll also be able to provide an image size for the thumbnail on the form.
Add to Cart Options
There are two ways to display the “Add To Cart” button on the order form, each with its advantages and disadvantages.
On the “Edit Form” tab, you will find the “Add To Cart Button” element and the “Add To Cart Checkbox” element.
The first one will display the form with the “Add To Cart” buttons on the right-hand side of each row. This has a number of advantages:
- It’s faster for the customer
- Fewer mouse clicks (every mouse click adds time and frustration)
- It’s all AJAX so no page reloading happens when clicked
If you choose this style, we recommend also adding a sidebar to the page so you can add a cart widget. See our guide for that here.
The other one displays the form with checkboxes next to the products on the right-hand side of each row and you will need to add the “Add Selected To Cart Button“ element at the bottom of the form which adds all the selected products to the cart in one go. This also has advantages:
- Customers can add products all at once
- Feels more like a traditional order sheet
- Also fully AJAX driven so doesn’t reload the page when clicked
Search, Filtering, and Sorting Options
These settings relate to the searchability and filterability of the order form as well as the sorting.
If you click the “⚙” icon of the “Search Input” element, you can find the option to allow customers to search by SKU.
On the “Settings” tab, you will find the option to sort the products by name, date added, SKU, and more.
We also have the option to show products that are out of stock and choose which products should be included or excluded. You can even create a separate order form for each product category.
Lazy Loading
The next display decision you should make is how you want to handle when the form has so many products to show that they spill over to the next page.
By default, the order form will display 10 products per page. This is a pretty common number to load initially and it also applies when the customer is filtering or searching for products.
However, you still can determine how many products should be displayed per page by clicking the “⚙” icon of the “Pagination” element.
When you enable the Lazy Loading option on the “Settings” tab, more results are loaded into the page based on the user scrolling.
Both options are great so at the end of the day, it’s up to you how you want it to work.
Pagination will show the customer how many pages there is upfront which gives them an indication of the depth of your product catalog.
Lazy Loading just keeps the user scrolling and scrolling down until it runs out of products to show, either in the catalog as a whole or for that particular search.
User Role Permissions
If you do not wish to display the order form to everyone, you can restrict which user roles can access the order forms at WooCommerce > Settings > Wholesale Ordering > Permissions tab.
Advanced Features
When it comes to solving wholesale for WooCommerce we believe in a holistic approach. You need to solve all three of the big problems:
- Setting wholesale prices, visibility, tax, etc. This is solved with Prices Premium as you’ve seen in this guide.
- Efficient ordering – this is very important and greatly affects the happiness of your customers when they do business with you
- Recruiting and managing wholesale level customers