A wholesale order is a small production run, not a parcel. The way to ship one without losing a day is to split it into five fixed steps — confirm, pick, pack, document, release — and never let two of them happen at the same time.
That sounds bureaucratic for a business that ships four cases to a boutique. It is not. The first wholesale order most brands send goes out in an afternoon of improvisation, and the second one goes out short by two units because somebody counted in the middle of packing. The routine below exists to remove counting from the packing step, because counting while your hands are full is where errors come from.
Step one: confirm before you touch stock
The gap between an order arriving and stock moving is where money is saved.
Read the purchase order against your own records and check four things. Is every line a product you still make in that variant. Do the quantities land on whole cases. Does the order clear your minimum. And is this account cleared to receive goods — meaning a new account has paid, and an existing account is not sitting on an overdue invoice.
Then send a confirmation email the same day, even if the order ships a week later. It should state what you are shipping, the total, the ship date and the payment terms. Buyers forget what they ordered at a show three weeks ago, and a confirmation is the cheapest way to catch a wrong variant before it is in a box.
If the order is short of your minimum, this is the moment to say so, politely, with a suggestion of what to add rather than a refusal. The logic behind holding that line is in wholesale minimum order.
Step two: pick to a sheet, not to memory
Print the order. Paper, on the bench, with a pen.
Pick each line onto a staging area and tick it. Do not pick two orders at once, ever, no matter how similar they look. Picking two orders together is the single most reliable way to send one shop eight units and another shop sixteen when both should have had twelve.
Pick whole cases where the order allows. A case that is already sealed, counted and labelled is faster to handle and impossible to miscount. If your cases are not doing that job for you, the sizing is wrong, and case pack covers how to fix it.
Mark short lines on the sheet as you find them rather than at the end. A line you cannot fill completely becomes a decision: ship what you have and drop the rest, or hold the order until Friday. Either is fine. Deciding silently is not.
Step three: pack for the journey
Wholesale packing has one rule that DTC packing does not: the outer carton is not the presentation.
Your retail-ready box is designed to sit on a shelf under a light. It is not designed to be stacked, dropped and belted through a sorting hub. Put it inside something. An outer carton with proper fill costs a dollar or two and saves you the entire value of the order the first time a shipment is thrown.
Pack to the case, not to the void. A box with three cases and a large empty corner will crush. Cut the box down or add fill until nothing moves when you shake it.
Weigh and measure each carton as you seal it, and write the numbers on the sheet. You need them for the label, you need them for the shipping quote, and you will want them next quarter when you work out what fulfilment actually costs you. That cost analysis is in wholesale shipping cost.
Step four: documents that agree with each other
Three documents, three destinations, one set of numbers.
The packing slip goes inside carton one. It lists units and cases per line, your order number, and the buyer's purchase order number if they issued one. No prices — the stockroom is checking quantities, not approving spend. If the shipment is multiple cartons, write "1 of 3" on the outside of each and list the box split on the slip.
The label goes outside. Trading name, delivery address as given, and a delivery instruction if the shop told you about hours. Getting this and the receiving side right is covered in shipping to retailers.
The invoice goes by email, on the day of shipment, with the same line quantities and the terms you agreed. Same order number, same totals, no surprises. The fields that belong on it are set out in wholesale invoice.
Here is the check that catches nearly everything: before you tape the last carton, read the packing slip aloud against the staged goods. Twelve of the lemon, six of the cedar, four of the fig. It takes ninety seconds and it is the reason experienced shippers almost never send short.
Step five: release and tell someone
Hand the cartons to the carrier, then send one email.
It should say the order shipped, give the tracking number, name the number of cartons, and repeat the payment due date in plain words. That last part is not aggressive. A buyer who knows on shipping day that payment is due in thirty days is a buyer who pays in thirty days, and the alternative is a chase in week six that damages a relationship you are trying to build.
Then record the shipment somewhere you will look again: date, account, value, cases, carton count, carrier cost. Six months of those rows tell you which accounts are worth the effort and which order is small enough that you are subsidising it.
What to do when it goes wrong
It will, and the recovery matters more than the error.
A short shipment gets an email before the shop notices, not after. Say what is missing, when it ships, and whether you are crediting it. A shop that hears from you first treats it as a hiccup. A shop that has to count and complain treats it as a pattern.
A damaged carton gets replaced on the next order rather than as a fresh shipment, unless the damage makes the delivery unsellable. Paying freight twice on two broken jars is a bad trade for everybody.
A wrong variant is the one to take seriously, because it usually means the pick sheet was ignored. Do not add a rule. Go back to picking one order at a time.
When the routine outgrows the bench
Somewhere around ten to fifteen active accounts, the paper sheet starts to creak. You will notice it as small things: two invoices with the same number, a reorder you forgot to confirm, an account you cannot remember whether you shipped.
That is the signal to move order entry, inventory and invoicing into one place rather than three, and the options for doing that without a large platform bill are in wholesale software.
Before any of it, though, the constraint is usually not tooling — it is having enough of the right shops to ship to. If you are still building that list, paste your product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock similar things, so the routine you are building has somewhere to send orders.
Questions brands ask about fulfilling wholesale orders
Should you ship partial orders? Only with the buyer's agreement. A partial shipment they did not expect reads as a short shipment, and it makes the invoice harder to reconcile.
How long should a wholesale order take to go out? Publish a lead time and hold it. Five to ten business days is normal for a maker brand and nobody objects. Silence for three weeks is what damages accounts.
Do you need a formal packing slip template? Anything printed and legible works. What matters is that the order number, the units and the case counts are on it and match the invoice.
Can a fulfilment centre handle wholesale for a small brand? Some can, but most are built around single-unit consumer orders and will price case picking and retailer paperwork awkwardly. Keep it in-house until the volume genuinely hurts.