Softminal B2B Suite for WooCommerce: First Look at Running Retail and Wholesale From One Catalog
By Day Zero Guides Editorial · How we produce guides
Some links in this guide are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, Day Zero Guides may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This never affects which products we cover or what we say about them. See our affiliate disclosure for details.
The scenario this is built for
Picture a mid-size coffee roaster running WooCommerce. Retail customers browse the site normally, pay list price, and check out with a card. But the roaster also supplies 35 cafes who order in bulk, pay net-30 on an invoice instead of a card, and get 22% off the catalog — minus a few SKUs the roaster doesn't wholesale at all. Right now, that roaster either runs two separate WooCommerce installs (one retail, one wholesale), manually emails PDF price lists, or uses a patchwork of coupon codes and user roles that breaks the moment a cafe owner forwards their login to a new employee.
This is the exact gap Softminal B2B Suite is built to close. You keep one product catalog, one checkout flow, and one admin — but logged-in wholesale accounts see their negotiated prices and terms, while anonymous retail shoppers see normal pricing (or no pricing at all, if you want prices hidden until someone applies for a trade account). That's the use case to evaluate this plugin against: not "do I need a wholesale plugin" in the abstract, but "do I need to serve two different buyer types from the same storefront without duplicating infrastructure."
What it actually does
Softminal B2B Suite for WooCommerce is a free plugin listed on the WordPress.org repository that layers B2B and wholesale functionality on top of a standard WooCommerce store. The core pieces, based on the plugin's own feature set:
- Customer groups with their own pricing rules — you can define groups (e.g., "Wholesale Tier 1," "Wholesale Tier 2," "Retail") and set percentage or fixed discounts per group, per product or category.
- Hidden pricing — prices can be hidden entirely from guests or non-approved users, replaced with a "Request Access" or "Apply for Trade Account" prompt.
- Trade account approval workflow — customers register as a B2B buyer, and the store owner manually approves or rejects the account before wholesale pricing unlocks.
- Net terms — approved accounts can check out with invoice-based payment terms (e.g., net 15/30) instead of paying at time of order.
- Quote requests — buyers can request a custom quote on a product or cart instead of buying at the listed price, useful for large or custom orders.
- Bulk ordering — a quantity-based ordering table/grid so wholesale buyers can order many SKUs at once instead of clicking through single product pages.
All of this runs through what the plugin describes as a single pricing engine, meaning group pricing, quotes, and net terms are meant to interact consistently rather than being bolted on as separate modules that conflict with each other.
Pricing
As of this writing, Softminal B2B Suite for WooCommerce is distributed as a free plugin on the WordPress.org plugin directory. No separate pricing page, tiered paid version, or add-on marketplace was published at the time of this guide — the WordPress.org listing itself doesn't disclose a premium tier. That's worth flagging rather than guessing at: if you're comparing total cost of ownership against B2BKing or Wholesale Suite, you currently can't do an apples-to-apples pricing comparison because Softminal hasn't published paid tiers. Treat it as free-to-try today, and check the plugin's own site or changelog before assuming it stays that way — most plugins in this category (B2BKing, WholesaleX) start free and gate advanced features like net terms or quote PDFs behind a paid upgrade eventually.
Who should actually install this today
- A store currently juggling two WooCommerce installs (one retail, one wholesale) that wants to consolidate into one catalog.
- A B2B seller still doing wholesale manually — quoting over email, invoicing outside WooCommerce — who wants trade account approval and net terms without rebuilding the store.
- A brand that wants prices hidden from the public entirely (common in medical supply, industrial parts, or exclusive distributor setups) until a buyer is vetted.
- Anyone testing wholesale functionality before committing budget to a paid plugin, since there's no cost to try it on a staging site first.
It's less of a fit if you need deep ERP sync, multi-currency wholesale pricing, or a very mature support/documentation ecosystem — the plugin is new enough that its install base and track record are both thin compared to the alternatives below.
How it compares
| Softminal B2B Suite | B2BKing | Wholesale Suite | WholesaleX | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (no paid tier published as of this writing) | Free core version; Pro plans start around $149/year for a single site | Free "Wholesale Prices" plugin; Premium bundle (Prices + Order Form + Lead Capture) around $299/year | Free core version; Pro starts around $89–$99/year for a single site |
| Hidden pricing / registration-gated catalog | Yes, built in | Yes, a flagship feature with granular rule builder | Limited — mainly role-based pricing, hiding is more manual | Yes, available on Pro |
| Net terms / invoice payment | Yes | Yes, on paid plans | Not native — typically needs a separate invoicing plugin | Not native in core; limited on Pro |
| Quote requests | Yes, built into the core pricing engine | Yes, including quote-to-order conversion on paid plans | Not included | Yes, as an add-on module |
| Bulk/quick order forms | Yes | Yes | Yes, this is the plugin's original strength | Yes, grid-based ordering is a core feature |
| Maturity / track record | New, limited install base and reviews | Established, large install base, frequent updates | One of the oldest wholesale plugins for WooCommerce, long track record | Newer than B2BKing/Wholesale Suite but backed by WPDeveloper (Essential Addons team) |
| Best for | Stores wanting to trial full B2B functionality at zero cost before committing | Stores wanting the most configurable, enterprise-leaning B2B rules engine | Stores whose main need is tiered pricing and a clean bulk order form, without quotes or net terms | Stores already using Essential Addons/WPDeveloper tools wanting a modern bulk-order UI |
The honest take
Softminal's pitch — group pricing, hidden prices, approval workflow, net terms, and quotes under one pricing engine — covers the same ground as B2BKing's free-to-paid funnel, but it does it without a published price tag yet, which makes it an easy first install if you're validating whether your store even needs this category of plugin. The risk is the flip side of "new": fewer reviews, less documentation depth, and no visibility into long-term support commitment compared to Wholesale Suite, which has been maintained for years, or B2BKing, which has a much larger user base to surface bugs and edge cases. If your wholesale operation is small and you want to test the workflow — trade account signup, hidden prices, a net-30 order — before paying for anything, install this on staging first. If you're migrating a high-volume wholesale operation that already depends on stable net terms and quote-to-invoice flows, weigh the lack of published pricing and track record against the maturity of Wholesale Suite or B2BKing before switching your production store over.