When Amy Cazin—mother, athlete and fitness trainer—decided she wanted her children to have chemical-free deodorant and other hygiene products, she set out to whip up her own products prepared with materials like organically grown coconut and pumpkin seed oils, organically grown Shea butter and aluminum-free baking soda.
Then she and her husband Jim formed Primal Products LLC and learned how to go online in May 2012 to sell their products, which they branded Primal Pit Paste. Sales quickly grew, including through their listings on the Amazon.com marketplace, and their own e-commerce site on software from Bigcommerce.
As business started to take off, an unexpected challenge came up: Retailers—including large national chains as well as small one- or two-store operations and web merchants—started contacting them with requests to buy their products wholesale to resell on their shelves and on their web pages. “It was super flattering,” Jim Cazin recalls.
But it was an opportunity for which they weren’t quite prepared. “Amy and I had never run a business before,” he adds. “We originally wanted to just sell a few products to our friends and a few others.”
Besides, running their online business kept them busy enough. And to take on sales to retailers, they wanted to avoid selling to merchants who would compete with them on third-party marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay and Google. And they wanted some control over the type of stores they would take on as wholesale customers.
The Cazins reviewed a number of technology options, and decided to work with Bigcommerce to develop a sister wholesale site—GoPrimalPitPaste.com—on the same platform as its retail site, PrimalPitPaste.com. Like on the retail site, visitors to the wholesale site can view product images and descriptions of the company’s deodorants, body oils and other products, and click to make retail purchases. But buyers looking to buy wholesale can click into a “Wholesale Contact Form,” where prospective clients provide information on their business and their product interests, and state whether they will abide by the Cazins’ rule against selling their products on online marketplaces.
Although the wholesale site is not set up yet to take online wholesale orders, the online contact form has enabled the Cazins to more easily manage the flow of requests for bulk-sale contracts without having to answer phone calls, entertain in-person visits or open paper mail. “We can weed out prospects rather than take each one individually,” Amy Cazin, who is CEO of the company, says.
For now, wholesale customers call, email or fax their orders, which clerks enter into the Bigcommerce order management system. That enables the Cazins to keep all sales records updated in their financial accounting systems, and to quickly see how many sales are going through their online retail operations and their wholesale channel. With annual sales in seven figures, the retail/wholesale split is about 70/30.
But the wholesale business holds strong promise. Retail clients include the Whole Foods Market and Natural Grocers supermarket chains. And while wholesale orders still pale in number to consumer orders—at hundreds per month for wholesale, compared with thousands for retail—the average order value for wholesale orders range relatively high at $100 to $150.
When the wholesale site begins to accept online orders as planned later this year, one of the site’s built-in features will automatically assign prices for each customer based on its contract terms.
The cost to deploy Bigcommerce e-commerce software ranges from about $30 to $80 per month, depending on the number of online features. A higher level of customization is also available for a cost that varies for each contract. Bigcommerce is deployed as software-as-a-service, which lets clients access the software via web browsers without running it on their own infrastructure.
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