E-Commerce Website for Retail AND wholesale

Question

I work for a clothing designer company (Kit + Lili) that has been in business for 5 years. We currently sell our product wholesale using a company called Groupe BDM and retail through Shopify. It is an incredibly inefficient system, and I'd like to find a platform for a website that allows both retail sales/pricing and wholesale login/pricing.

Things to consider:

-I do not having programming experience - in fact the ability to upload seasonal clothing, pricing, and sku's with minimal to no coding is essential. Shopify provides the templates for this. They just don't yet have an app in place to allow wholesale login/pricing.

-For the wholesale part of the site, we need the ability to place orders and check out, but not require payment through a shopping cart app. At the same time, we need the shopping cart for retail. With the clothing industry, orders are usually made 6 months prior to shipping and receiving payment.

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Does such a platform exist or do I need to find a web designer who can create a site to our specifications?

Also, let me know if this question might be better posted in a different forum. Thanks.

Answer 1

To get this to exactly fit your needs will probably require a custom built web application with interfaces to your databases for inventory control, billing and such. Just what needs to be built depends on your current systems for inventory control and operational workflow. It won't be cheap to do this, at least to do it well. There are some potential "off-the-shelf" solutions that might work but you need to be careful with them and make sure that they'll do everything you need.

Most companies I've worked with have struggled along with a system like you have now until the pain became so great that they had to develop an in-house solutoin.