Faire, marketplaces & platforms
Net 60 on a wholesale marketplace means the shop that ordered from you has sixty days after delivery to pay. Your brand does not wait sixty days: the platform pays you on its own schedule, usually shortly after the order ships, and carries the risk of the retailer paying late or not at all.
That asymmetry is the single most valuable thing a marketplace offers a small brand, and it is the reason net 60 shows up as a selling point to retailers rather than a warning to you. Understanding exactly where the money sits at each point in the sixty days tells you what you can promise, what you should refuse, and what your own direct terms ought to look like.
What net 60 actually means in a wholesale order
Payment terms are just a stated gap between delivery and payment. Net 30 means the invoice is due thirty days after it is issued or the goods arrive. Net 60 doubles that gap.
In classic wholesale, that gap is yours to fund. You buy materials, you make the product, you ship it, and then you wait two months while the shop sells through and pays you out of the proceeds. A brand with twenty accounts on net 60 has a permanent, growing pile of its own cash sitting on other people's shelves.
On a marketplace, the gap is intermediated. The retailer's relationship is with the platform: they order, they receive, they pay the platform in sixty days. Your relationship is with the platform too: you ship, and the platform pays you. The two clocks are decoupled, and that decoupling is the product being sold.
Who is carrying the credit
Somebody is always funding those sixty days. On a direct order it is you. On a marketplace order it is the platform, which is underwriting a small business it has data on and you do not.
This is worth sitting with, because it explains the fee. When a brand looks at a marketplace commission and thinks of it purely as a finder's fee for the introduction, the number looks steep. When you count what it replaces — the credit check, the collections email, the invoice that goes unpaid when a shop closes quietly in February — it looks different.
Consider a shop that orders four hundred dollars of product and then closes. On a direct net 60 invoice you have made the goods, shipped them, and lost the four hundred dollars plus your cost of production. On a marketplace order you shipped, you were paid, and the bad debt is not yours. You will not have many of those, but the first one is the reason to have the arrangement in place before it happens.
When your brand actually gets paid
The practical answer is: after the order ships, on the platform's cycle, not after the retailer pays. The exact timing varies and changes, so check the current payout schedule in your account rather than trusting any article about it, including this one.
What matters for planning is the shape. Money arrives in a predictable lump a short time after dispatch. You are effectively selling on something close to prepayment, even though your customer is buying on two-month terms. For a brand used to funding materials out of DTC revenue, that is a much easier channel to scale than direct wholesale, because inventory converts to cash quickly.
The catch is that it teaches you the wrong reflex. A brand whose entire wholesale experience is marketplace orders will assume all wholesale pays on dispatch, then grant net 60 directly to a shop that asked nicely and discover what the gap feels like when it is theirs to carry. The mechanics of running terms yourself are covered in Shopify net terms.
What it changes about your cash planning
Three things.
Your production planning gets easier. Because platform orders convert to cash fast, you can plan a season's materials against expected orders rather than against a collections calendar. A brand producing in batches of two hundred units can reorder components with more confidence.
Your growth is less cash-constrained on that channel. Doubling the number of shops ordering through a marketplace roughly doubles the cash cycling through, rather than doubling the amount of money tied up in unpaid invoices. That is the opposite of how direct wholesale scales.
Your blended margin drops. You are paying for that. Every order that arrives through the platform carries a commission, and if you never build any direct accounts, your entire wholesale line runs at the lower margin forever. That is the real cost of relying on one channel, and it is the argument in wholesale marketplace vs own website.
Run the numbers on a single case. Twelve-dollar wholesale unit, case of six, a shop orders three cases: two hundred and sixteen dollars. Cost of goods at four dollars a unit is seventy-two. If the platform takes a quarter on that first order, fifty-four dollars leaves you, and you are paid roughly a hundred and sixty-two dollars shortly after dispatch instead of two hundred and sixteen dollars two months later. For most small brands, faster and smaller beats slower and larger until the reorders start.
Should you offer net 60 on your own direct orders?
Not to a new account, and rarely at sixty days.
The sensible ladder is prepayment on the first order, no exceptions. Net 30 on the second or third order once a shop has paid you on time and you know they exist. Net 60 only for a large account whose volume justifies the exposure, and only with a credit limit written down.
A shop that opens the conversation by demanding net 60 before they have bought anything is telling you something about how they manage cash. That is not disqualifying, but it means you ask for a card on file, or you ask them to place the first order through the marketplace where the credit is underwritten, which is a perfectly graceful way to say no.
The mechanics for running a terms ladder without spreadsheets — assigning different terms to different accounts at checkout — are in Shopify B2B payment terms.
What a retailer choosing net 60 is telling you
Mostly, that they are a normal small shop, because almost every buyer takes the longest terms offered. It is not a red flag on a marketplace order.
It does carry one piece of useful information. A shop taking sixty days on a first order is typically planning to sell your product through before paying for it, which means they expect it to move in under two months. If it does not move, they have every incentive to push it: discount it, move it to the counter, mention it. That incentive is the quiet reason wholesale works at all, and terms make it sharper.
It also gives you a timing signal for follow-up. A retailer who ordered on net 60 in early September is looking at their shelf again in November, which is exactly when a short, specific email about reordering ahead of the gift season lands well.
Questions brands ask about net 60 on a marketplace
Does the retailer pay more for taking 60 days? From your side it does not matter. Whatever the platform charges retailers for terms does not change the amount you are paid.
Can a retailer return the order instead of paying? Returns policies exist and vary. What you should do is make the case pack and the product description precise enough that nobody orders by mistake, and keep your dispatch fast enough that nothing is refused for arriving late.
Does offering net 60 myself make me look bigger? It makes you look like you have cash. A small brand that cannot fund it should not pretend, because a missed payroll is worse than a lost account. Offer prepayment with a small early-payment incentive instead.
Which shops would even be plausible accounts for my product? Before you build terms for accounts you do not have, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products. Knowing the shape of the buyer base tells you what terms you will actually be asked for.