Wholesale with WooCommerce and Broadcast

A product broadcasted to a log of blogs

Scenario

You have products you wish to sell with WooCommerce.

The products are white label-friendly enough to be sold under different names, to different markets by sharing or syndicating them across stores in a wordpress network.

Optionally, you have a central warehouse.

The normal way would be to set up several WooCommerce stores, add the products to each webshop and, optionally, keep track of all orders on each store.

The Broadcast WooCommerce add-on can help you avoid the manual labor of adding the products to each store and trying to keep all of the products updated.

Broadcast makes product sharing simple

Using Broadcast you can quickly and easily share your products to several stores at once and keep them updated automatically. Here’s how:

Setup your WordPress network

Install WordPress, create a network / multisite, and create one or more blogs where you plan to sell the products.

If you wish to have different domains that are not related to each other by either subdomains or subdirectories of the main domain, use domain mapping to get unique domains per blog.

Setup WooCommerce

Enable WooCommerce on each blog, not network-wide, since each blog requires its own special WooCommerce database tables.

Setup WooCommerce on one of the blogs from which you wish to share your products. If you don’t want to manually setup WooCommerce settings on each blog, and you want the stores to share the same settings, you can then use the copy settings tool in the Broadcast WooCommerce add-on to quickly copy the WC settings between blogs.

Settings copy tool

Add your product(s)

After creating a product, you are ready to begin sharing it.

Broadcast your products

If the product is a simple product, you’re fine using the basic Broadcast plugin. Just add the product custom post type into the Broadcast settings.

If the product has variations, you’ll need the Broadcast WooCommerce add-on.

If the product has an image gallery, the Custom Field Attachments add-on will broadcast over the gallery images.

Products can be broadcasted from any stores in the network to any other stores in the network. You don’t have to use only one source stores for all products either. The restriction being, like other post types, there can only be one child or a parent per product per blog.

Products can be broadcasted freely

That’s it!

You’re now either selling wholesale or selling via several different stores.

But wait! There’s more!

Broadcast is flexible enough to adapt to your needs and offers several options that can make broadcasting and selling your product even easier:

  • Do you have a lot of webshops you wish to broadcast to? Encountering timeout errors when broadcasting? You’ll probably want to use the Broadcast queue add-on to broadcast the products in the background.
  • Do you need to offer different prices on different webshops? Visit the Broadcast custom field settings and enter _price in the protect list. This will prevent the product’s price on the child blogs from being updated when the product is updated and broadcasted.
  • Do you have a central warehouse for your products and need to keep the stock synced on each blog? The Broadcast WooCommerce add-on has a stock sync option.

 

Comments

  1. does your plugin just broadcast to word press site or can it also broadcast to Big Commerce shopping carts
    BTW I’m a Broadcast user
    1. Broadcast can only handle products broadcasted between blogs in a network.

      I’m not familiar with this “Big Commerce” thing you speak of.

  2. I have a downloadable products shop with woocommerce, but i want to make a version in different laguage, it is possible to broadcast the content but modify or change language between sites?
    1. Depends on what you’re using to translate the product, a plugin or just the text description?

  3. Will bookable procts sync work with the WooCommerce addon ? Resources and Person types are not broadcasted with the basic plugin
    1. I’m unfamiliar with bookable products. Is that part of Woocommerce or an add-on?

      It might be sufficient to add the two post types to the Broadcast post type settings.

      E-mail me if you have further questions about bookable products, and we can take it from there. In a “worst”-case scenario, I add support for it to the WC add-on.

    2. The WooCommerce add-on now has support for the Bookings plugin.

  4. Assume I have a multisite setup that sells various fashion products on a variety of independently controlled subdirectories. That is to say, the vendors have their own subdirectory to sell their wears.

    I obviously want to have woocommerce setup on each WordPress multisite subdirectory.

    Products sold on these subdirectories are to be promoted on the original main website (clicking on the promoted product will link back to the subdirectory).

    Is this possible? If so, does it also work with woocommerce subscriptions so that only paid-up subscribers who run subdirectories will have their products promoted on the main website?

    1. The broadcasting of products from subdirectory sites to the main site (or anywhere on the network) is perfectly possible with the WooCommerce add-on.

      The limiting of broadcasting to users that have paid their subscriptions is something you’ll have to ask your webdev to code. On the snippets page there are various snippets that add or remove broadcast access.

  5. I’m trying to figure out how to broadcast products from Site A to Site B, but instead of being a physical product on site B I’d like it to be a link back to the product on site A.
    1. Because of limitations in WordPress, the products must exist on both sites, but if you visit

      Admin > Broadcast > Settings tab > SEO subtab

      and check the “use parent permalink” box, all links to the product on site B are overriden with a link to the parent product on site A. That should solve your problem.

  6. I have a cosmetics store and retailers that buy and sell my products. But I noticed these retailers don’t have a website to promote and sell these products better, so I’m looking to offer this solution where they can set up their own store on my MU network, and pick and display products from my synced inventory of products on the entire network.

    So I would prefer to probably do a commission or affiliate compensation. Yes, I would be controlling the pricing. I actually have a warehouse, I would be fulfilling the orders and shipping directly to the retail client.

    How do you think your product(s) can help achieve this without having to do a lot of manual work? Like everything should be automated.

    I’m also open to suggestions on the best way to go about this.

    Thanks.

    1. It sounds like the automation will require some custom work to make a nice UI for your signups: input their data, create the site, select the products, etc.

      It’s not really something that Broadcast can offer, other than the broadcasting of products and the syncing of product stock, which the WooCommerce add-on does.

Leave a Reply to Coach Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *