WooCommerce powers a huge share of the web's online stores, but its defaults assume a retail buyer: one published price, an open catalog, and immediate card payment at checkout. Wholesale and trade selling works differently. You approve who can buy, you quote negotiated prices, you sell in case packs, and you often invoice on terms rather than collecting payment up front. None of that ships in core.
The good news is that you do not have to rebuild WooCommerce. A mature ecosystem of B2B plugins adds each of these behaviors. The trick is knowing which category of plugin solves which problem, so you can assemble a clean stack instead of bolting on overlapping tools that fight each other. Below are the categories that matter for almost every wholesale store, plus well-known options in each. For the full strategic picture, see our full B2B WooCommerce guide.
All-in-One B2B Suites
Before you assemble a stack of single-purpose plugins, consider whether one suite covers most of what you need. An all-in-one B2B plugin bundles roles, role-based pricing, quotes, catalog visibility, and often net terms under a single settings model. Because the pieces are built to work together, you avoid most of the conflicts that come from mixing five vendors.
The two most established options are B2BKing and the Wholesale Suite family (Wholesale Prices, Wholesale Order Form, Wholesale Lead Capture). Wholesale for WooCommerce and several YITH B2B plugins also occupy this space. A suite is the right starting point for most stores. Reach for individual plugins only when you need one specific capability that your suite handles poorly, or when you are extending an existing store without disrupting it.
Customer Roles and B2B Registration
Everything in B2B starts with knowing who the buyer is. You need a way for trade customers to register, a review step so you approve real businesses rather than retail shoppers, and distinct customer roles that the rest of your pricing rules can target.
Look for a plugin that adds a custom registration form (capturing fields like business name, tax or resale ID, and intended order volume), a manual or automatic approval workflow, and one or more wholesale roles. B2BKing and the Wholesale Suite both cover this. WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture handles the registration-and-approval piece specifically if you only need that part. The roles you define here become the hook that every later feature, especially pricing and visibility, keys off.
Dynamic and Role-Based Pricing
This is the heart of a wholesale store. Retail visitors should see retail prices; approved trade accounts should see their negotiated rate. Two related plugin categories deliver this.
Role-based pricing sets a price (or a percentage discount, or a fixed markup) per customer role. A "Wholesale" role might see 30 percent off across the catalog, while a "Distributor" role sees 40 percent off. Dynamic pricing adds quantity breaks and conditional rules: buy 50 units, the per-unit price drops; buy 100, it drops again. Many stores want both, so a customer in the right role automatically gets tiered pricing on top of their base discount.
Representative options include WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing (the official extension) for rule-based and quantity-based discounts, the Wholesale Prices plugin for per-role wholesale rates, and B2BKing's built-in pricing engine, which combines role pricing with quantity tiers. When you evaluate one, confirm it can stack a role discount with a quantity break without double-counting, since that is where many setups go wrong.
Request-a-Quote
Plenty of B2B sales never start with a fixed price. The buyer assembles a list, asks for a number, and you reply with a negotiated quote. A request-a-quote plugin replaces the price and the add-to-cart button with an "Add to Quote" button, then collects the requested items so it can send you the inquiry. The better tools let you respond with an editable quote the customer can accept and pay, turning the quote directly into an order.
Common options include YITH WooCommerce Request a Quote, the quote features built into B2BKing, and the official WooCommerce Request a Quote style extensions. If your catalog mixes priced retail items with quote-only trade items, choose a plugin that can switch behavior per product or per role rather than forcing the whole store into one mode.
Net Terms and Purchase Orders
Established trade accounts rarely pay by card at checkout. They expect to place an order, receive an invoice, then pay on net 30 or net 60 terms, often referencing an internal purchase order (PO) number. To support that, you add a payment method that authorizes the order without capturing payment.
A purchase order / invoice gateway adds exactly this checkout option, usually restricted to approved roles so retail buyers never see it. WooCommerce Purchase Order Gateway plus several "invoice payment" gateway plugins cover the standalone case. B2BKing and other suites bundle a terms gateway you can limit by role or by individual account. Pair it with a clean invoice or PDF-invoice plugin so the paperwork your buyers need generates automatically.
Catalog Visibility and Hidden Prices
Many wholesalers do not want the public to see trade pricing at all. Catalog-visibility tools let you hide prices, hide the add-to-cart button, or hide entire products and categories from anyone who is not a logged-in, approved B2B customer. A guest might see the product with a "Login to see pricing" prompt, or a request-a-quote button, instead of a number.
This capability is built into B2BKing and the Wholesale Suite. Standalone catalog visibility or "hide price" plugins exist for stores that only need this one behavior. Decide early how strict you want to be: hiding prices from guests is common, while hiding the entire catalog behind a login wall protects margins but costs you the SEO and discovery that an open catalog provides.
Minimum Order Quantities
Wholesale sells in volume, so you often need to enforce floors: a minimum quantity per product, a minimum order subtotal, or case-pack increments (sold only in multiples of 12, for example). Minimum-order-quantity plugins enforce these rules in the cart, blocking checkout with a clear message until the buyer meets the threshold.
Look for WooCommerce Minimum Order Quantity / Step style plugins, or the MOQ controls inside your B2B suite. The detail that matters is flexibility: can you set rules per product, per category, and per customer role, so a distributor faces a different minimum than a small trade account? If your suite already handles this, do not add a second plugin for it.
Bulk Order Forms
One more category rounds out most wholesale stores: the bulk order form. Trade buyers reordering known SKUs do not want to click through product pages one at a time. A bulk order form (sometimes called an order form or product table) presents your catalog as a searchable grid with quantity boxes, so a buyer can fill a large cart in one screen.
Wholesale Order Form, WooCommerce Product Table, and the order-form features inside B2BKing all serve this need. It is not strictly required to launch, but it is one of the highest-impact additions for repeat buyers, and it pairs naturally with role-based pricing so each account sees its own rates in the grid.
Putting the Stack Together
If you are starting fresh, the simplest path is a single well-supported suite for roles, pricing, quotes, and visibility, with a dedicated PO/invoice gateway if your suite's terms handling is thin. Add a minimum-order-quantity plugin or a bulk order form only if the suite does not cover them well. Every extra plugin is another thing to update, test, and keep compatible, so fewer, better-supported tools beat a sprawling stack.
Whatever you choose, test the combination on a staging copy before it touches your live store. Pricing rules, visibility filters, and custom gateways all hook deep into WooCommerce, so conflicts surface at checkout, which is the worst place to discover them. Running on fast, well-configured managed WordPress hosting also matters more for B2B than for retail, because large order forms and per-role pricing calculations add real load to every page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can WooCommerce handle B2B and wholesale on its own?
Not fully. Core WooCommerce gives you products, a cart, and checkout, but it has no concept of customer-specific pricing, account approval, request-a-quote, net terms, or hidden catalog pricing. You add those capabilities with a B2B suite or a stack of focused plugins layered on top of core.
Should I use one all-in-one B2B plugin or several single-purpose plugins?
An all-in-one suite such as B2BKing or Wholesale Suite is usually cleaner because the features share one settings model, plus they are tested together. A stack of single-purpose plugins gives you more control over each piece but creates more update and compatibility work. Most stores are better served by one well-supported suite.
How do I show different prices to wholesale customers?
Use a role-based pricing plugin. You assign each approved customer a wholesale role, then set a percentage discount, fixed price, or tiered quantity break for that role. Retail visitors see retail prices while logged-in wholesale accounts see their negotiated rate.
Can I hide prices until a customer logs in or is approved?
Yes. Catalog-visibility plugins let you hide prices, the add-to-cart button, or the entire catalog from guests, then reveal them only to approved B2B roles. A request-a-quote button often replaces the price for visitors who have not been approved yet.
Do B2B WooCommerce plugins support net terms and purchase orders?
Yes. A purchase-order or invoice gateway adds a checkout option that lets approved accounts place an order without paying immediately, so you can invoice on net 30 or net 60 terms. Most B2B suites bundle this, or you can add a dedicated invoice/PO gateway plugin.
Build Your B2B Store With Us
Picking the plugins is the easy part. Making roles, pricing rules, quotes, terms, and visibility filters work together cleanly, without breaking checkout, is the real job. We build and maintain B2B WooCommerce stores end-to-end, from choosing the right stack to configuring it on hosting tuned for the load. Explore our WordPress development services or read the strategy behind it in our guide to building a B2B WooCommerce store. When you are ready, we will scope the build, then deliver a wholesale store your trade buyers actually enjoy using.
Related reading: WooCommerce for B2B & Wholesale • WordPress Development Services • Managed WordPress Hosting