Wholesale orders

What you’ll learn

• What is wholesale pricing
• Data model review
• How to create orders when the wholesale pricing model is used

Wholesale pricing

Traditionally, Marketplacer has focused on a Business to Consumer (B2C) model, where products are offered for sale to retail consumers. By also allowing products to be priced using a wholesale pricing model, products can be offered for sale to other businesses using the Business to Business Model (B2B).

The key characteristics of wholesale prices are:

• Lower than Retail Prices: This is the most fundamental characteristic. Wholesale prices are set significantly lower per unit than retail prices to allow for associated (upward) adjustments.
• Bulk Purchase Requirement: Wholesale transactions almost always involve buying goods in large quantities, often with minimum order quantities (MOQs). This volume allows the seller to achieve economies of scale and offer the discounted price.
• Business-to-Business (B2B) Focus: Wholesale pricing is primarily for transactions between businesses, such as a manufacturer selling to a retailer, or a distributor selling to a smaller business for resale.
• Exclusion of Sales Tax (typically): Since wholesale transactions are part of the supply chain and not direct sales to the final consumer, sales tax is generally not applied at the wholesale level.

The remainder of this article focuses on creating orders in Marketplacer when wholesale pricing has been adopted for some or all of the products hosted on Marketplacer.

Model Review

Order model

The following model is discussed in more detail in the main Creating Orders article, but it’s worth recapping here:

The key takeaways are:

• An order is a marketplace-level object, that contains 1 or more invoices
• An invoice is a seller’s view of the order
• Invoices (and by extensions orders) have 1 or more line items
• Line items have a line of sight back to the product variant

Product model

When talking about products in Marketplacer, we’re really talking about 2 related entities:

• Adverts (aka Products)
• Variants

The following model describes the relationship between the 2:

Key takeaways are:

• Adverts act as the product container for variants
• An advert must have at least 1 variant
• Variants are the container for the following fields:
  • Stock position (called countOnHand in Marketplacer)
  • Barcode
  • Sku
  • Pricing Model (Marketplace or Wholesale)
• It is the variant that is purchased (and used when creating an order)
• As mentioned above, the Pricing Model is set at the variant level
• A seller can sell variants that use either of the following pricing models:
  • Marketplace
  • Wholesale
• An Advert can have variants that use either of the following pricing models:
  • Marketplace
  • Wholesale

To illustrate how different pricing models can be adopted, we have updated the product model diagram as follows:

Creating wholesale orders

Creating orders with wholesale variants is no different to creating any other type of order - as described here.

However, when it comes to creating orders where there is a mix of pricing models, the following rules apply:

In short, a single order can contain both Marketplace and Wholesale priced variants for the same seller.

When this occurs, Marketplacer raises 2 separate invoices for that seller for the order - one for the Marketplace-priced line items, and one for the Wholesale-priced line items.

Example - Mixed Pricing / Different Sellers

To round out the conversation, below you can find an example of orderCreate where we are using mixed pricing models for 2 different sellers (which is permitted):

• Variant 1 (variantId: VmFyaWFudC01MzU2) is a wholesale priced variant for Seller 1
• Variant 2 (variantId : VmFyaWFudC01MzU0) is a marketplace priced variant for Seller 2

Note: The cost amount supplied for both line items should be the retail cost charged to the end customer, even when wholesale pricing is being used. For a Wholesale priced line item, you can additionally supply wholesaleTotalPrice, which is the amount the seller is charging the operator for that line item (as distinct from the retail cost).

This will result in:

• The successful creation of 1 order
  • The creation of 1 invoice for Seller 1 (Wholesale pricing used)
  • The creation of 1 invoice for Seller 2 (Marketplace / Retail pricing used)

mutation {
  orderCreate(
    input: {
      order: {
        firstName: "Trisha"
        surname: "Connors"
        phone: "07944242424"
        emailAddress: "trisha.connors@email.com"
        address: {
          address: "34 Casino Road"
          city: "Melbourne"
          country: { code: "AU" }
          postcode: "3000"
          state: { name: "Victoria" }
        }
      }
      lineItems: [
        { 
            # Seller 1: Wholesale priced variant
            variantId: "VmFyaWFudC01MzU2",
            # Even though this is a Wholesale priced variant
            # the cost value supplied should be the retail price
            cost: { amount: 3000, tax: 30 }, 
            # wholesaleTotalPrice is what Seller 1 is charging the operator
            # for this line item, as distinct from the retail cost above
            wholesaleTotalPrice: { amount: 1000, tax: 10 },
            quantity: 1 
        }
        { 
            # Seller 2: Marketplace priced variant
            variantId: "VmFyaWFudC01MzU0", 
            cost: { amount: 1000, tax: 10 }, 
            quantity: 1 
        }
      ]
    }
  ) {
    order {
      legacyId
      invoices {
        nodes {
          id
          legacyId
          seller {
            businessName
          }
          lineItems {
            id
          }
        }
      }
    }
    errors {
      field
      messages
    }
  }
}