Faire, marketplaces & platforms
Faire Direct is the brand-referred route: you send a retailer you already found — at a market, through a cold email, through a friend — to order from you on the platform, and the commission on that account is reduced or waived rather than charged at the normal discovery rate. The buyer still gets the platform's terms and its checkout; you keep most of the invoice.
Whether to use it comes down to one comparison: what the platform gives your own account that you cannot, against what routing it there costs you. The answer differs by brand, and it changes as you grow, so it is worth doing the arithmetic rather than picking a side on principle.
What each route gives the buyer
Start from the shop's point of view, because that is what actually determines whether the order gets placed.
Routed through the platform, a buyer gets terms without applying for credit with you, a checkout they already use, returns handled under the platform's rules, and one account across dozens of brands. For a shop owner who buys from twenty suppliers, consolidation is a real convenience.
Invoiced by you directly, a buyer gets your terms — which for a new account means prepaying by card — your invoice, and a relationship with a person. Some buyers prefer this, particularly the ones who already know you. Most new ones do not.
The gap is credit. A boutique that has met you once at a market is far more likely to place a two-hundred-dollar first order when somebody else is carrying the risk.
The arithmetic, on one case
The candle: twenty-four dollars retail, twelve wholesale, six to a case, landed cost five dollars twenty a unit. A case invoices at seventy-two, costs thirty-one dollars twenty, and leaves forty dollars eighty of gross contribution.
Invoiced directly through your own store, the card fee on a seventy-two dollar order is about two dollars, so you net roughly thirty-eight dollars eighty.
Routed through the platform under the brand-referred arrangement, you pay a reduced cut. Rates and windows change, so read your current terms — but suppose the reduced rate takes around two dollars fifty on that case. You net roughly thirty-eight dollars thirty.
On a single case the difference is pennies. That is the point people miss when they argue about commission: the brand-referred route is not primarily a cost decision, it is a decision about who carries the credit and who runs the checkout.
Now run the same case at the normal discovery rate, where the platform might keep eighteen dollars of a first invoice. You net twenty-two dollars eighty. Sixteen dollars a case is a real difference, and it is the difference you are avoiding by using the brand-referred route for accounts you sourced yourself.
When routing your own accounts there is the right call
Four situations.
You have no trade area of your own. If wholesale currently means a PDF line sheet and a bank transfer, the platform is a better ordering experience than anything you will build this month, at almost no cost under the reduced rate.
The buyer wants terms you cannot carry. Thirty days on a two-hundred-dollar order is two hundred dollars of your cash tied up for a month, times every account. Letting the platform carry it is how a small brand adds accounts without funding them. The cost of carrying that yourself is in Shopify net terms.
You are collecting accounts faster than you can invoice them. Ten new shops from a trade show is a lot of manual order entry. A checkout that works without you is worth a small cut.
The buyer already buys on the platform. Fighting a shop owner's existing workflow to save two dollars a case is a bad trade.
When to keep the account on your own paper
Three situations.
You already run a trade portal. If wholesale prices, case packs and minimums are already enforced at your own checkout, sending an account you found to a third party adds a cut and subtracts a relationship. The build is described in Shopify wholesale store setup.
The account is large and reorders often. A shop taking eight cases a month is worth owning outright. Small per-case differences compound, and a large account is exactly the one you want to be able to call directly about a new scent.
You want the data. Order history, buyer contact details, reorder timing. Platform rules vary on what you can export and how you may use it, and for a brand building a real stockist list, that matters more than a few dollars a case.
The thing to check in the terms
Two rules govern this area on every marketplace, and both are worth reading in the version you actually signed rather than a summary.
The first is how an account gets classified. Bringing your own retailer in through a referral link is what the arrangement is for and is entirely fine. What is restricted is the reverse: taking a buyer the platform introduced and moving them off it, usually for a defined window after the first order.
The second is what happens over time. Reduced rates often come with a period or a set of conditions attached. Note the dates. A brand that assumed a rate was permanent and discovers otherwise mid-season has a budgeting problem, not a platform problem.
In practice the honest line is simple: bring your own accounts on freely, do not poach the platform's, and make your own direct route attractive on service rather than on price.
How this fits with everything else
The shape most brands converge on has three lanes.
Shops that found you on a marketplace order on the marketplace, at full commission, because the marketplace produced them. That is a customer acquisition cost, and the comparison against building your own demand is in Shopify wholesale vs Faire.
Shops you sourced yourself but who want terms or a familiar checkout go through the brand-referred route, at the reduced rate.
Shops you sourced yourself who are happy to prepay, or who are large enough to matter, go on your own paper.
One wholesale price across all three. Twelve dollars is twelve dollars on your line sheet, in your portal and on the platform. Channel costs come out of your contribution, never out of the buyer's price, because a buyer who finds two prices for your candle will ask about it and you will not enjoy the conversation. Where that price should sit in the first place is in wholesale vs retail price.
The part that actually limits you
Notice that all three lanes start with "shops you sourced yourself" or "shops that found you". The commission rate is a second-order question. The first-order question is how many shops are in the list at all.
If that list is short, the highest-value hour of your week is not optimising a rate, it is finding the next forty candidates. Paste your store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, then work through it a few at a time and route the ones who say yes wherever they are most comfortable ordering.
Questions brands ask about the brand-referred route
Can I move an existing marketplace account onto it? Generally not — the arrangement is for retailers you bring, and accounts the platform introduced are usually excluded. Check your terms rather than assuming.
Does the buyer see a different price? No. They see your normal wholesale price. The difference is on your side of the invoice.
Is it better than building my own portal? It is faster and cheaper up to a point. Past fifteen or twenty active accounts, the margin and the relationship data usually justify your own trade area, and most brands end up running both.
What about buyers in other countries? The same logic applies, but freight and minimums matter more than commission does. The cross-border version of the decision is in Ankorstore.