You do not need a second website to sell wholesale. You need a way for approved shops to log in, see a different set of prices, buy in case packs above a minimum, and either pay by card or be invoiced on terms. All of that can live on the store you already run, and for most brands under about fifty accounts it should.
The reason to keep it on one store is boring and decisive: one place where stock is counted. The moment wholesale lives on a separate system, your inventory is in two places and you will oversell something to a shop that had planned a window display around it.
What a wholesale catalogue actually has to do
Strip away the software question and there are five jobs.
Hide the prices from the public. Your wholesale price is about half your retail price. If a direct customer can see twelve dollars next to the twenty-four they paid, you have a problem that no amount of copywriting fixes.
Show a different price to approved accounts. Same products, same photos, different number, usually with tiers once an account grows.
Enforce case packs and minimums. Candles sell in sixes. An account that can add one candle to a cart will, and you will spend Saturday packing a single unit for eleven dollars of margin.
Take the order without a phone call. The point of putting wholesale on the web is that a shop owner can reorder at nine at night after closing, which is exactly when they do it.
Handle payment properly. Card up front for a new account, invoiced terms for an account with history.
Any setup that does those five things is fine. Anything missing one of them will leak time every week.
The three ways brands do it
A gated area on your existing store. Approved accounts get a login that unlocks wholesale prices and a separate catalogue. Modern store platforms handle this natively at higher plan levels, and dedicated apps handle it at lower ones. This is where most brands should start.
A password-protected page plus a form or a PDF. The account downloads a line sheet, emails or submits an order, and you invoice manually. It looks primitive and it works completely fine for the first ten accounts. The advantage is that you find out what your accounts actually want before you configure anything.
A separate wholesale site or a trade marketplace. A second storefront gives you clean separation and costs you unified stock, unified reporting and a second thing to maintain. A trade marketplace gives you discovery, which is real, at the cost of a commission on orders and a slice of the relationship. Both make sense later; neither is the right first move for a brand with two accounts.
Start with the manual version, move to a gated catalogue when the manual version becomes annoying, and consider anything else only when you have a reason you can name.
Set up the commercial rules before the software
The configuration is the easy part. The decisions are what take a week, and doing them in this order saves you rebuilding.
Fix the price ladder first. A twenty-four dollar retail candle wholesales at twelve, which requires a unit cost around six for the channel to breathe. If your numbers do not sit like that, sort it before you build a catalogue, using the arithmetic in wholesale vs retail price.
Then decide the case pack. Six candles, twelve soap bars, four totes. The case is the unit of sale on the wholesale side, and it should match the carton you actually ship.
Then the minimums. An opening order minimum of two hundred to three hundred dollars for a small brand, a lower reorder minimum because the relationship already exists.
Then terms. Prepaid card for the first order, net thirty available after two clean orders. Put this in writing so you do not have to negotiate it account by account.
Then the policy page: suggested retail price, where the product may and may not be resold, what happens with damages. It matters more than it looks, and the reasoning is in retail and resale.
Applications, not open sign-ups
Do not let anyone create a wholesale account by clicking a button. Put an application form in front of it asking for the business name, the shop address or website, what they currently stock, and how they intend to sell the product.
Read each one. It takes two minutes and it is your entire quality control on who resells your brand. A form with a real shop address and a website full of comparable products is an approve. A form with a personal email address and no trading history is a question, not a rejection: sometimes it is a genuinely new shop, and sometimes it is a consumer trying to buy at half price.
Approve manually until the volume makes that impossible, which for most small brands is never.
What the catalogue itself should contain
A wholesale catalogue is not your storefront with different prices, even though that is technically what it is.
Show fewer products. Your bestsellers, in the sizes and case packs that work on a shelf. A buyer looking at forty variants does not feel spoiled for choice, they feel unsure, and unsure buyers place smaller orders or none.
Show the numbers a buyer needs on the product itself: case pack, wholesale price per unit, suggested retail price, and the margin that implies. Spelling out the shop's own margin is not patronising, it is the single most persuasive line on the page.
Show stock and lead time honestly. A buyer planning a display in four weeks needs to know whether the order ships Tuesday or in a month. Being right about this is worth more than being fast.
Include a downloadable line sheet as a PDF, because buyers forward things to business partners and print them for planning meetings.
Make reordering the easiest thing on the site
Almost all of the money in wholesale is in the second, third and fourth order. Build for that specifically.
Save every account's previous orders and make a reorder button that fills the cart with what they bought last time. Let them edit it. That is the whole feature and it moves more revenue than any acquisition work you will do this quarter.
Send a short email six weeks after each shipment asking how it is selling, with a link that takes them straight to their reorder. Not a newsletter. A one-line question from a person.
Keep a note on each account of what they stock, what sold, and when they last ordered. A spreadsheet is fine. Knowing that a shop sells through a case of six every seven weeks turns your follow-up from a guess into a calendar.
What not to bother with yet
Tiered pricing across five volume bands. You will have one tier for a long time.
Custom catalogues per account. Useful for a handful of large accounts, an enormous time sink for twenty small ones.
Automated credit checking, electronic data interchange, integrations with retail ordering systems. These are real requirements when you sell to larger chains, and they are not requirements for independent shops, which is where your first two years of accounts will come from.
A separate brand identity for the trade side. Shops are buying the brand the public knows. Show them the same brand with commercial information attached.
The part the software cannot do
A wholesale catalogue does not find accounts. It removes friction for accounts you already have, which is worth a lot, and it does nothing for an empty account list. Brands regularly spend three weeks configuring a portal and then discover the hard part was always the twenty-five emails.
So build the minimum, then go find shops. The playbook for that is in how to start wholesale, and the targeting side is in how to get my product into stores. If you want a starting list rather than an empty spreadsheet, paste your product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that carry comparable products.
Questions about running wholesale from your online store
Will search engines index my wholesale prices? Not if the catalogue sits behind a login. Check with a logged-out browser once you have set it up, and check the price is not visible in any structured data on the page.
Can I keep using my normal checkout? Yes for card payments. Invoiced terms need either a platform feature or a draft order you send manually, which is perfectly workable at low volume.
How do I stop a consumer buying at wholesale? Applications with manual approval, plus a minimum order that makes it pointless for an individual.
Do I need a separate stock pool for wholesale? Not at first. Just keep a buffer: if two accounts can wipe out your stock, hold back a reserve for your direct store, because a stockout on your own site costs you paid traffic you already bought.