Many companies who use Quickbooks and sell wholesale, also sell to individual consumers by using a shopping cart. However, the order fulfillment and billing processes for these two types of customers can be very different. eCommerce systems used for selling to wholesale customers need to accommodate the different requirements of selling B2C vs B2B. There are also differences in how these two types of customers should be set up in QuickBooks that will help in reporting and order management.
There are many differences between wholesale and consumer customers. Wholesale customers are almost always repeat customers who order again and again, while consumer customers might order only once. Wholesale customers generally order a wide range of products in large quantities and consumer customers probably order only one or maybe just a few items. B2B customers will certainly pay a much lower price than B2C customers. Wholesale customers will also have special shipping terms (prepay-and-add and freight collect are common), while shopping cart customers will often pay a shipping charge along with a handling fee. Wholesale customers probably enjoy extended payment terms and sales tax exemptions, while individual consumers pay with a credit card and pay the sales tax.
Each individual wholesale customers are very important and require special individual attention, while shopping cart customers are important as a group. For this reason the way many businesses set up and track these two types customers in QuickBooks is very different. It is very common to group all B2C customers together under one QB customer record (“web store sales” or “shopping cart sales” are common names for this). Reports can be run for this one customer record so the performance and tendencies of the entire consumer side of the business can be tracked and evaluated at once.
QuickBooks has standard and custom fields in the customer record that can accommodate all the pertinent information for customers. It is especially important to fill out this information as best as possible for wholesale customers. Some of this information is pulled from QuickBooks and printed on sales confirmations, packing lists, and invoices. It sounds obvious, but it is still a best practice to make sure the wholesale customer’s name and address are correct. Double check their payment terms, ship vias, price level, and any other info that is in the customer record. This info will also display in wholesale eCommerce systems that integrate with QuickBooks, and errors in the customer record will also show in the online B2B portal. Learn more about setting up your QuickBooks' custom pricing in your order management system.
Having your quickbooks set to distinguish B2B vs B2C customers is very important to improving bookkeeping efficiency. The better the segmentation of your customer lists, the less headache you will experience later on when trying to pull up previous customer invoices and orders. Click on the link below to request a free demo from Now Commerce to learn more about our online order management software. We also invite you to share any problems you have had with handling customer orders, and perhaps some solutions that have solved the problem or helped you streamline your process.
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