Net 60 means the store pays you sixty days after the invoice date, not sixty days after they sell your product and not sixty days after they get round to it. For a brand whose Shopify payouts land two days after checkout, that is a different business, and it is worth understanding exactly what you are lending before you agree.
The short answer for most first-time wholesale brands is no, not yet, with one large exception: buyers who genuinely cannot pay any other way. Those exist, and turning them down is sometimes the right call and sometimes the expensive one.
What sixty days actually costs you
A serum that retails at thirty-eight dollars, wholesales at eighteen, ships in cases of six. A case is a hundred and eight dollars. Landed cost is six dollars eighty per bottle, so a case costs you forty dollars eighty to make.
A regional chain orders forty cases. Two hundred and forty bottles, four thousand three hundred and twenty dollars of invoice. Your materials and filling for that run come to sixteen hundred and thirty-two dollars, and you spend it in week one. The invoice dates when you ship, in week three. Payment lands in week eleven.
So the brand is out sixteen hundred dollars for about ten weeks, plus whatever else it could have done with that money. If the same ten weeks would otherwise have funded two production runs for boutique accounts paying up front, the real cost of net sixty is not an interest rate, it is the orders you could not take.
That is the honest frame. Terms are not a discount you give, they are stock you finance. The question is never whether sixty days is generous. It is whether you can afford to lend that much to that buyer for that long, and what you get for it.
Who asks for net 60, and why
Four kinds of buyers ask, and they are not equally worth accommodating.
Chains and buying groups. Their accounts payable runs on a fixed cycle and the buyer often has no authority to change it. When a regional grocery chain says net sixty, that is a system, not a negotiation. This is the case where saying no means not having the account.
Distributors. They are buying to resell to stores who will themselves pay on terms, so their cash cycle is genuinely longer than a shop's. Net sixty is normal here and usually comes with volume that makes it survivable.
Boutiques who heard it somewhere. A single-location shop asking for sixty days is usually asking because a rep once offered it, or because they are short. Either way the answer is thirty at most, and often prepayment. The standard version of that conversation is in net 30 terms.
Accounts in trouble. The tell is a request to extend terms on an existing account that used to pay faster, often alongside a larger order. A shop trying to buy its way out of a cash problem will take your stock and then take longer than sixty days.
The first two are real business decisions. The last two are usually a polite no.
The conditions that make yes affordable
If you do grant sixty days, do not grant it bare. Three conditions turn it from exposure into a deal.
A deposit or a first-order prepayment. Nobody gets sixty days on the first order. Terms are earned on the second or third, after the account has proved it pays. Even then, a deposit against materials on a large run changes the arithmetic completely, because your exposure drops from the whole invoice to the balance. That logic is worked through in wholesale deposit.
A credit check and a signed application. For an order worth four thousand dollars you are extending four thousand dollars of credit, and you would not do that to a stranger in any other context. Trade references, the legal entity name, and a signature from someone who can bind the business. It takes an afternoon and it is the single highest-return piece of admin in wholesale.
A cap. Set a limit on how much any one account can owe you at once, write it down, and hold it. If the cap is three thousand dollars and the account wants five, they ship the balance when the first invoice clears. This is the rule that stops one good account becoming an existential problem.
Should the price change for longer terms?
There are two defensible positions and one indefensible one.
The first defensible position: the price is the price, terms are a service decision, and you simply decline accounts you cannot fund. Clean, easy to explain, and fine for a brand with more demand than capacity.
The second: publish one price and offer a small settlement reduction for early payment — something like a modest deduction if the invoice clears within ten days. Buyers on sixty-day cycles usually cannot take it, buyers who can will, and your cash improves without you ever running two price lists.
The indefensible one is quietly pricing a sixty-day account higher than a prepaying one without saying so. Buyers talk, especially in the same region, and being caught with two prices for the same case is a much worse problem than the cash gap you were trying to solve. If you do want different numbers for different account types, they belong in a stated structure, laid out the way wholesale price list describes.
Making the date real
A lot of terms disputes are not disputes about willingness, they are disputes about which day counts, and they are entirely preventable.
Date the invoice on the day the goods ship, not the day the order came in, and say so on the document. Put the actual due date on the invoice — the calendar date, not the phrase. Send the invoice with the shipment rather than after it, because an invoice that arrives a week late in a buyer's inbox starts its sixty days a week late in their system.
Then diarise the follow-up. A short note a week before the due date is not chasing, it is bookkeeping, and it dramatically changes how many invoices land on time. The first genuinely uncomfortable email is the one after the due date, and the trick is to have made it boring by then. How the document itself should be laid out, including where the terms line goes, is in wholesale invoice.
What happens when a net 60 account pays at ninety
This is the scenario to plan for, because it is common and it is not always bad faith.
Stop shipping. Not angrily, and not as a threat — as a policy that was on the terms sheet from the start. New orders ship when the account is current. Almost every late-paying account pays as soon as their next order is blocked, because the stock matters more to them than the float.
Do not solve a late invoice with a bigger order. The instinct to keep a large account happy by shipping more is how a two-thousand-dollar problem becomes a six-thousand-dollar problem.
And keep the relationship with the buyer separate from the relationship with accounts payable. The person who chose your product is usually not the person cutting the cheque, and treating a late payment as a personal slight by the buyer will cost you the account without getting you the money.
Is net 60 worth it for growth?
Sometimes, clearly. A distributor or chain that takes forty cases at a time and reorders on a schedule is worth financing, because the order size and the reliability together mean the cash comes back in a rhythm you can plan around. One such account can be worth more than twenty boutiques, and the terms are the price of entry.
What is rarely worth it is granting sixty days to small accounts to seem accommodating. Small orders on long terms give you the worst of both: the admin of many accounts and the cash profile of few. A brand in that position usually finds its growth is not limited by demand at all, it is limited by the money sitting in other people's shops.
If you are weighing which kind of account to chase next, it helps to see who actually stocks products like yours. Paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors, because the mix of independents and chains in that list tells you how much of your future revenue will come with terms attached.
Questions brands ask about net 60 terms
Does net 60 include weekends and holidays? Yes, it is sixty calendar days from the invoice date unless your terms say something else. Do not invent a working-day variant, it only creates arguments.
Can terms be offered on some products and not others? In practice no. Terms attach to the account, not the line item, and a buyer building one order will not accept two payment dates on one invoice.
Is it normal to charge interest on late payment? A stated late fee is normal and worth including in your terms. Actually charging it on a small account usually costs more goodwill than it recovers, so treat it as leverage rather than income.
What if a marketplace offers the store sixty days? Then the platform carries the credit and you are paid on the platform's schedule, which is a genuinely different arrangement from you lending the money. Check who is actually on the hook before assuming it is the same thing as your own terms.