All about
SparkLayer turns any Shopify store into a B2B wholesale sales powerhouse.
Built around the Shopify tagging system, you create a bunch of pricing rules, login rules, and customer rules, to make a seamless wholesale experience for your B2B buyers, without having to create a new site or subdomain or anything like that.
You don’t have to create a separate Shopify store. SparkLayer replaces all pricing on the main store with wholesale pricing by recognizing each customer and adjusting accordingly. As quantity increases, the price per unit automatically drops.
You can import csv to mass order, they have their own checkout process, get shipping address, shipping rates, and payment method, including pay by invoice or request for quote.
If you do pay by credit card, it moves from the SparkLayer checkout process into the Shopify checkout method, otherwise, if not paying right away, you checkout within SparkLayer itself. When paying by invoice or request for quote, the order comes into your Shopify store as a draft order, where your team will review and approve. Once the order comes through, it goes through your existing order and fulfillment process. Orders through wholesale come in through a separate sales channel, which makes it easy to filter out wholesale as a channel when running your analytics/reporting.
They don’t really need their own analytics solution, because you are able to easily filter orders by B2B Ordering in Shopify analytics and see the results.
You can easily hide products from your consumers, and only show them to your wholesalers by tagging the product in Shopify as “b2b-only.”
They even have an integration with a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solution, Hokodo, that works specifically for larger orders/wholesales, which means you can get paid now while the B2B customer is paying for the product later (like when it arrives).
You can create base price lists, tiered price lists, promo price lists, or, by tagging the appropriate B2B customers, you can create custom pricing for each customer.
The app doesn’t load or affect page speed load time for non-logged in customers, meaning your consumer-facing experience is not affected at all by SparkLayer.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
SparkLayer is the (currently) only “all-in-one” solution with basically complete feature parity to a solution like BigCommerce’s B2B/wholesale functionality, but since you’re on Shopify/Plus, you are going to need a tool like SparkLayer to get this job done for you. Quick point on that, if you are migrating from BigCommerce to Shopify/Plus and were using BigCommerce’s wholesale functionality, this is an instant replacement for that.
SparkLayer is a massive time saver for Ecommerce teams, operations managers, Ecommerce managers, and those managing dozens or hundreds of wholesale accounts. By saving this time, it allows the team to focus on scaling wholesale sales, getting new B2B customers, and ultimately generating more revenue for the business.
Most of the time it’s the Ecommerce manager, operations team, or whoever is in charge of wholesale sales, who is looking for a solution like SparkLayer. They need to understand how their workflows and processes are going to change when implementing a solution like this. Typically when they see the front-end and how that works, it's an easy sell, but it can take a while to make sure the process changes will be done properly.
After you demo, you may review it with the team for a couple of weeks, or go into an enterprise agreement (for larger merchants), which leads to an onboarding process where their team will start working through your process, your pricing, and your B2B wholesale customers, to get everything setup in the system.
As you start onboarding your own customers into the new system/process, there will undoubtedly be stragglers or laggards - customers who want to call you and do it the old fashioned way. While you should continue to nudge them to the new and improved self-serve process, you can also use their sales agent ordering system to create orders for them.
It can take between 2 weeks and a month to get fully up to speed, get your team and customers onboarded into the new process, and really feel like SparkLayer is working to its fullest.
Once set up, aside from the regular process of approving draft orders and sending out the wholesale orders, you only need to come into SparkLayer to adjust pricing, add new customers (or delete past customers), order on behalf of the customer (Sales agent ordering), create wholesale pricing for new products, etc.
Oftentimes SparkLayer is a replacement for you doing a sort of hodge-podge spreadsheet and phone call and invoicing solution with your wholesalers. Or maybe you’re switching Ecommerce Platforms from Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus and need that missing wholesale functionality. (Why Shopify doesn’t have their own wholesale functionality is beyond me, but hey, that is good for SparkLayer!)
If you’re just starting your wholesale operation, bringing in SparkLayer first can be a really good idea. Having a setup system to create a seamless experience for each of your customers and onboard them into a long term solution is better than working with them via spreadsheets and phone calls, then transferring them to a new solution later can cause a bit of friction.