Faire, marketplaces & platforms
From the brand side, a wholesale marketplace is a catalogue, an inbox and a payout schedule. You upload products with wholesale prices, case packs and a minimum order. Shop owners browse and order without speaking to you. You pack and ship, the platform pays you shortly after dispatch, and it takes a commission on the orders it brought.
Everything else is detail — but the detail is where brands lose margin, so it is worth walking the whole loop once before you build the listing.
What the platform is doing, and what it is not
It is doing discovery and underwriting. Retailers who would never find you are browsing a category page you sit on, and when they order, the platform carries the payment risk so you are paid whether or not the shop settles its bill. That combination is genuinely hard to replicate alone, and it is what the commission buys.
It is not doing your merchandising, your photography, your production planning or your relationships. A listing with weak images sits quietly forever. A brand that cannot ship within a few days gets ranked down and stops appearing. And a shop that ordered once will not reorder just because it can.
Hold that split in your head and the rest of the decisions get easier: spend your effort on the parts the platform does not do.
Setting up a catalogue a buyer can actually order from
The catalogue is a wholesale document, not a consumer storefront. Write it for someone deciding what to put on a shelf.
Each listing needs a wholesale price and a suggested retail price, and the gap between them has to leave the shop a real margin — the working assumption in most independent retail is that retail is about double wholesale. If your suggested retail is twenty-four dollars, your wholesale is twelve, not seventeen.
Each listing needs a case pack that makes sense. Six of one scent is a sensible unit for a small shop; forty-eight is not. Mixed cases are attractive to first-time buyers and a nuisance to pick, so offer one or two, not twelve.
Each listing needs the boring facts: unit size, case dimensions, weight, materials, barcode, country of origin, shelf life where relevant. Their absence is the most common reason a buyer moves on, because it reads as a brand that has not done wholesale before.
And you need a minimum order. Somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty dollars is where most small brands land: high enough that picking, packing and invoicing are worth doing, low enough that a shop will risk it on a brand they have not met. The reasoning behind that number is in wholesale vs retail price.
What happens when an order arrives
An email lands, the order sits in your dashboard, and a clock starts. Marketplaces care a great deal about dispatch speed because a slow brand makes the platform look bad to the retailer it spent money acquiring.
Practically that means you should never list stock you cannot ship this week. The temptation — list the whole range, make to order — ends with a cancelled order and a ranking penalty. List what you have, keep the numbers current, and mark things out of stock rather than hoping.
Read the order before you pick it. First orders from a new shop are usually small and assorted; a buyer testing three scents wants three scents, and substituting one because you are short is how a first order becomes the only order.
Send a short note through the platform's messaging when it ships. Two lines: what is on the way, when it should land, and one specific suggestion about display or a bestseller. That message is the only relationship-building the platform gives you, and most brands never use it.
Shipping, labels and lead time
You pack the box and you ship it, usually on a label the platform provides at a negotiated rate, with the cost deducted from your payout or absorbed depending on the arrangement in force.
Two things are worth getting right early. First, packaging for freight rather than for unboxing: a case that arrives dented becomes a return, and a return on a two-hundred-dollar order wipes out the margin on three more. Second, the case dimensions and weights in your listing have to be accurate, because that is what the shipping quote is built on and a wrong number comes out of your side.
Set your lead time honestly. If you make in batches and can genuinely ship in two days, say two days. If you need five, say five. A brand that promises two and ships in seven accumulates the sort of feedback that no amount of good product fixes.
Getting paid and what it costs
You are paid on the platform's cycle after dispatch, not when the retailer pays. Retailers commonly take extended terms, and the platform carries that gap — the mechanics are in Faire net 60.
The commission is deducted before the payout, and it is normally higher on a retailer's first order than on their reorders, with a reduced or waived rate for orders from retailers you brought to the platform yourself. Run it once on a real case so it stops being abstract.
A shop orders three cases of six at twelve dollars a unit: two hundred and sixteen dollars. Cost of goods at four dollars a unit is seventy-two. If the platform takes a quarter of a first order, fifty-four dollars comes off, and freight on a single carton is maybe twelve. You net around seventy-eight dollars of contribution on an order that cost you no marketing and no chasing. On the same shop's third order at a lower reorder rate, that number is meaningfully better.
The complete list of the fees and the ones brands forget to count is in Faire fees for brands.
Making reorders happen
This is where a marketplace channel is won or lost, and it is almost entirely your job.
Track sell-through per account, even roughly. A shop that took three cases in September is either out of stock by November or sitting on them. Both are worth knowing, and both justify a message.
Time the follow-up to the buying season, not to your calendar. Gift categories get bought in late summer and again after the new year. Food gets bought tighter and more often. A generic "just checking in" email in the wrong month is noise; a specific "you took the amber and it usually sells through before December, shall I hold six for you" is an order.
Give reorders a reason to be bigger. A price break at a higher case count, or a small assortment of a new scent added at no charge to a reorder, moves an account from three cases to five without discounting the line.
And once an account is ordering reliably, decide where you want that relationship to live. Reorders you would have received anyway are the expensive ones to pay commission on, and the case for moving them onto your own system is set out in wholesale marketplace vs own website. Read your agreement first — most cover retailers the platform introduced for a defined period.
What you own when it is over
Assume, as a planning habit, that any platform can change its terms. What survives that is a list: shop name, buyer name, email where you have it, city, what they bought, case counts, dates.
Export it monthly. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a brand with forty stockists and a brand with forty rows in someone else's dashboard.
The same list is what makes direct outreach work, because the shops that ordered tell you exactly what kind of shop your product suits. If you want to find more of them, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products — it works from the product outward, which is how a buyer thinks about a shelf.
Questions brands ask about selling on a wholesale marketplace
Do I have to offer the whole range? No. Many brands list a tight core assortment and keep newer items for direct accounts until they are proven.
What happens if a retailer does not pay? On a marketplace order, that is generally the platform's problem rather than yours, which is a large part of what the commission covers.
Can I set different prices for different retailers? Not usually within a marketplace listing. Tiered pricing by account is something you run on your own B2B store.
How many orders should I expect in the first month? Possibly none. Wholesale moves in buying seasons, and a listing that goes live outside one can sit quiet for weeks before the category starts shopping.