3 Ways To Get More Wholesale Orders for Your Handmade Business

are you currently selling your handmade products wholesale but you're not quite sure how to get more wholesale orders well in this video I'm going to show you four ways how you can get more wholesale orders in your handmade business hi my name is Mei Pok and I help makers artists and creatives create a consistent income selling their handmade products online the very first tip that I have for you is to just place some sort of wholesale information on your website this could be just information that you do sell wholesale along with your terms or it

could be a page that has a contact form so that people were interested in buying wholesale form you can put in their information so you can reach out to them with more information I know this sounds kind of like duh Captain Obvious of course I put postal information on my website but you'll be surprised at how many people that do sell wholesale don't make it obvious for people now keep in mind that when you're driving traffic to your shop online there are probably a small percentage of those people or actual store owners and wholesale buyers

for brick-and-mortar stores make it easy for them to see that you sell wholesale and if they like your product that they can work with you and carry your product in their store I remember when it was me and I didn't have information on my website about that I sold wholesale and I decided to put in kind of like a contact form wholesale information page I instantaneously got so many wholesale requests every week until up to this point just because I have that page on my website it sounds simple but you know just making buyers aware

that you do sell wholesale is going to make a huge difference so this is something that you can do right now in the next 10 minutes my second tip for you is to make it so stupid easy for buyers to buy from you now the traditional way of doing wholesale some by your emails you to say hey I want to carry your products a lot more information than you email them with a bunch of document attachment usually that's going to include your wholesale catalogue or your line sheet and your terms and conditions in your order

form now your order form is probably gonna be like a PDF format maybe it's a Word document maybe it's an Excel document and unfortunately that's just not as user friendly as it could be a couple of things so buyers like to look at catalogs while they're like sitting at their shop and they're browsing through your catalogue and if that's a document say for example them and I have had our laptop they're browsing on it on their laptop they need to have kind of a separate place where they're are taking notes on what items they want

and how many of each item they want so what usually happens is people will print out the order form so that they have a hard copy of it and then they're hand writing it down you can kind of imagine where I'm going from here once they're done with entering all your information on the order sheet they're gonna have to then scan it in and then email that back to you do you see like how many different steps you are requiring the buyer to take just to place an order with you even if it was a

Word or Excel document you're making the assumption that the buyer has those software that they can access while they're browsing your catalogue there's a chance they may not even be able to open your order form so a lot of times what buyers like to do is skip all of that order form stuff so they don't have to download and print and scan and upload and they're just gonna open an email to just write in an email reply the products they want the quantities they want and here's their credit card information now you can see that's

not a very sophisticated or a very easy process so the best thing that you can do is if you have a Shopify site is to have a page where they can literally order online there are a lot of different solutions for this some people have like one Shopify site for their retail orders second duplicate Shopify site for their wholesome order there's also another way where with using some sort of password protect app and wholesale a discounting app for Shopify you can have the buyer create a customer count on your website first once they've created the

account you put a wholesale tag on their customer account and then the next time they come they can log in and they can shop what I don't like about that process is it's still quite a lot of steps and a lot of barriers which means a lot of potential for the customer to drop out of that process so if you make them go through three different steps there are three different opportunities for the buyer to get distracted to change their mind and then never place an order with you so my favorite way is to actually

just have a page in your Shopify site where it's just an order form and it's literally just a table with a little picture of each of your products the title of your product the price and then a little box where they can put in how many quantities of that product they want and then a button that says add to cart when you click on that it adds everything to the Shopify cart yes there is some custom coding involved with this but if you're invested in selling wholesale that's a cost that will pay itself back over

time very quickly actually when I implemented this on my own website I saw an instant increase in conversion rates from every time buyer requested wholesale information to actually completing a sale whereas before when I was doing the traditional method of emailing all these different documents and kind of just expecting my buyer to do all that work of downloading printing scanning uploading those documents it's just been a huge game-changer for my wholesale business and I encourage you to do the same thing make it easy for them to buy kind of going along that same note if

you're actively reaching out to potential wholesale customers one thing a lot of people like to do is send an email pitch right but then you're including all of your different catalog and your terms and your order form one great way to reach out to wholesale buyers is by sending them an email page well the problem that I see often is people sending an email pitch but not including every single bit of information necessary for the buyer to place an order with you right there and then if they're interested once they get your email so what

do people normally include they normally include just a catalog but with no pricing information and I understand that people like to do that because they're protective of that sensitive data but you're not making it easier for them because you're requiring the buyer to reply to your email in order to get pricing information and pricing it has so much to do with whether or not a buyer wants to buy from you or to even consider buying from you because if your pricing is way off what they think they can sell in their shop they're not even

going to open that conversation with you also want to make it super easy for them to pain the traditional way when you have an order form it's usually just a PDF document and there's usually a space on there for them to handwrite or type in their credit card information now you can imagine how potentially unsafe this is and then they're gonna just scan it and email it to you what a can of worms right so if you have your wholesale ordering process systematize and if you're using custom code in your Shopify site and you have

an order form on a page like I do what I can easily utilize is Shopify's checkout feature so the old way of collecting wholesale information is you can't even charge their card until the order is ready to ship this is the standard expectation but of course as the business owner and as the product maker what we all want is to get paid before we even make the product so that we have that guarantee that we are going to get paid and so that we have that money that we can spend on buying materials and supplies

right so by utilizing Shopify built-in checkout features we can easily collect pre payment for a wholesale order before we even start making the order now even if you don't have some fancy schmancy order form on your Shopify site that's totally fine you and still use Shopify check out features and credit card processing features to collect payment let's say you're still going the traditional route where you're emailing the buyer your wholesale catalog your terms and conditions and your credit information you can just tell the buyer to just email you back with whatever product name and quantities

that they want and you can take that information and you can go into Shopify and create what is called a manual order when you're creating a manual order you can just type in the products that they want you can set the different prices and then you can make it so that you click a button and Shopify just emails the invoice to the customer and then when the customer opens the email they click on a button which leaves them and to Shopify checkout page and they can enter in their credit card securely through that and of

course if you don't want to use Shopify there's of course PayPal invoices that you can use as well to collect payment now before I share with you the next steps I have a question for you what are some ways that you have seen and done that has helped increase your wholesale orders I would love for you to share with us in the comments so our community and so that I can learn from you too my third tip for you today for if you want to make more wholesale orders is to have a good looking website

to have a great looking brand and have really good products and product photos buyers often find you in social media or through a magazine or through a blogger or an influencer and when they click the link to come over to your website you really want to blow their socks off why is this important consider that as a wholesale buyer they are taking on 100% of the risk from buying from you there is a chance that if they buy your products and they carry in their shop that they won't sell any of it so they need

to have a lot of trust and confidence that you have a good solid product that customers already love that is validated by an existing market now this is not to say that if you are just starting out and you have no customers yet that you can never get into starting to do wholesale that's whoo but you do definitely want to have a very strong foundation if you want to attract more wholesale buyers my fourth tip for you is to schedule out a time every month or every week where you're actively reaching out to stores so

instead of waiting around for a store owner to come knock on your door and say hey I want to carry your product you can reach out to them so a good benchmark is if you can reach out to 20 new stores every month you're going to get so many more new wholesale orders and if you were not doing that right my bonus tip for you is to make a list of other brands and other products that are similar in style as you not necessarily similar products but similar style so if your style is really boho

chic then you want to make a list of brands we're also very boho chic then you want to go to their website and do some digging around and see if they have a page where they talk about or list all of the different retailers that carry their work that is always a goldmine of information because I know a common question people have and they get kind of stuck when it comes to selling wholesale is they're not sure what stores that they should reach out to they're not sure what stores that would like to carry their

products well doing it in this process eliminates that challenge for you and it gives you no excuses doing it in that kind of process will remove that challenge for you and you'll never be stuck with wondering who to sell your products to if you want to learn more about how to get more wholesale orders and your handmade business stay tuned and watch the next video thanks for watching and I'll see you there