Shopify Wholesale Pricing Using Compare At Price Field

Question

We have a merchant requiring wholesale pricing on a per product basis. The built in Shopify promotion engine can obviously handle a store wide percentage discount for a specific customer group however this merchant has a specific requirement to set a wholesale price on a per product / variant basis (ideally with no promotion code requirement). We have looked at all of these suggestions but none of them seem like great solutions.

Our question is, is it possible to do something along the following lines:

1. Set the "Compare At Price" field to the wholesale price (we understand this is not its intended purpose but this is the only other available field)
2. Edit any templates to not use the "Compare at Field" for its original intended purpose (some themes do not display this field if it is less than the selling price in any case).
3. If the customer is part of the wholesale customer group then in the "Cart" template, modify the price the customer actually pays to be the "Compare At Price" rather than the normal "Selling Price". Or in the product template itself when the customer clicks on "Add to Cart" that a similar check like is done with the relevant price used (based on their customer group).

In other words is it possible to alter the price in liquid to something other than what is stored for a particular variant in the database? Or are there any other suggestions on how to solve this wholesale problem without creating duplicate items or duplicate stores?

Answer 1

Correct, again this is the downside to using a proprietary system. However you could use the general design to mask the inventory levels by doing the following…

1) Set option inside shopify to allow ordering when no stock is available 2) Set up your variants stock levels as follows: a)Retail Price Stock Level - 10 (or whatever actual stock level is) b)Wholesale Stock Level - 0 (leave at 0)

3) Use the following to track total stock level:

How to Display and Assign Total Inventory (Part 1): http://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/ecommerce-design/t/how-to-display-total-inventory-63060

How to Display and Assign Total Inventory (Part 2): http://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/ecommerce-design/t/inventory-analysis-36011

4) Use another if statement to display "Not Available text" or remove the order button IF total inventory is > 0

5) When someone orders on wholesale you will have to manually adjust the inventory levels. But at least you could control when inventory is available as well as only have one option box to worry about.

The alternative would be to allways keep your inventory split, which would run the risk of not allowing a wholesale price to order when retail price is available, or vise versa.

Answer 2

Unfortunately this is one of the many downsides to using a shopify E-commerce base, everything outside of main design is proprietary. Meaning you do not have access to the way in which shopify processes orders.

However, You may be able to use a product variant and then use the customer group to specify if they have view access to that variant or not.

Example: If customer is in wholesale group 1 display varient1, if customer is undefined display no variant.

http://wiki.shopify.com/Variant_variables http://wiki.shopify.com/Customer_Group_%28API%29