Shipping to a store is not shipping to a person. The box arrives at a receiving door with opening hours, the paperwork inside has to make sense to someone who did not place the order, and once a shipment gets heavy enough the parcel carriers stop being the cheap answer and freight takes over.
For a brand that has spent two years putting one candle in a mailer with a thank-you card, the change is mostly about scale and paperwork. A shop wants four cases delivered to a back door on a weekday morning, with the order number written somewhere the owner can find it, so they can match the delivery to the purchase order sitting on their counter.
None of that is difficult. It is just different, and getting it wrong is the quickest way to turn a promising first account into a shop that quietly stops reordering.
Parcel, freight or your own vehicle
Three ways a wholesale order reaches a store, and the right one is almost always decided by weight.
Parcel covers most small-brand wholesale. Under roughly a hundred and fifty pounds, in boxes one person can lift, a regular carrier account moves the order for a few dollars a pound and gives the shop tracking they already understand. If you sell candles, soap, stationery, hot sauce or anything else that travels in cases of six or twelve, you will be a parcel shipper for a long time.
Freight, usually sold as less-than-truckload, starts to make sense when an order fills a pallet or weighs more than a person wants to carry. Ceramics, furniture, cases of beverages in glass. Freight is cheaper per pound and slower, it is quoted on density and class rather than simple weight, and it assumes the receiver has somewhere to put a pallet. Plenty of boutiques do not, and a pallet left on a narrow high street is a problem you created.
Your own vehicle is the underrated third option for accounts within an hour's drive. Delivering the first order yourself is not a shipping strategy, but it is an excellent excuse to see the shop, meet the owner and watch where your product lands on the shelf.
| Order size | Usual method | Who normally pays |
|---|---|---|
| One to six cases | Parcel | Buyer, or you above a threshold |
| A pallet or more | Freight | Buyer, on their carrier account |
| Local, any size | Your own vehicle | You, as a relationship cost |
Who pays for the shipping
The default in wholesale is that the buyer pays. Your prices are already cut to about half of retail, and freight on top of that is normally the shop's cost of getting stock. Say so plainly in your terms rather than leaving it to be discovered on the invoice.
Two sensible variations. The first is a carriage-paid threshold: shipping is on you once an order passes a number you have chosen deliberately, often somewhere around twice your minimum. That turns a shipping line into a reason to add two more cases, which is exactly what you want it to do. The arithmetic for setting that number sits in free shipping wholesale.
The second is the shop's own carrier account. Larger accounts and anything resembling a chain will hand you an account number and expect you to ship collect on it. This is good news — it costs you nothing and removes the argument entirely. It also comes with rules, which is the next section.
Whatever you pick, put it in writing before the first order rather than after. A one-line shipping clause in your wholesale terms prevents almost every awkward conversation on this subject.
What a receiving door expects
Consumers accept anything. Stores have preferences, and a few have requirements.
Delivery windows are the common one. A shop with one owner behind the counter cannot take a pallet at nine in the morning during a school run. Ask on the order confirmation whether there are days or hours that do not work, and pass that to the carrier as a delivery instruction rather than hoping.
Case integrity matters more than it does in DTC. A shop opens one box and counts. If a case of twelve has been split across two cartons with no note, someone on the shop floor will conclude the order is short, and you will spend a week on emails proving otherwise. Ship whole cases where you can, and where you cannot, write it on the packing slip in words. How to build cases that behave this way is covered in case pack.
Bigger accounts add routing guides: an approved carrier, a label format, a required appointment, sometimes a barcode on the outer carton. These are not negotiable and they are not personal. Read the guide, follow it exactly, and price the extra work into whether that account is worth taking.
The paperwork that rides along
Every wholesale shipment carries three pieces of information, and they should agree with each other.
A packing slip inside the box, listing what is in that box, in units and cases, with your order number and the shop's purchase order number if they gave you one. No prices. The person opening the carton is checking quantities, not approving spend.
An outer label with the shop's trading name, not the owner's personal name, and the delivery address they gave you rather than the billing address on their card. Boutiques with an upstairs flat get this wrong constantly, so confirm it.
An invoice, sent by email on the day the order ships, with the same numbers on it as the packing slip. Sending the invoice separately from the box is deliberate: the shop's bookkeeping and the shop's stockroom are usually two different people. The fields that belong on it are in wholesale invoice.
When those three documents match, a receiving check takes four minutes. When they disagree, you have created a small mystery, and small mysteries become late payments.
Damage, shortages and the claim you will file eventually
Glass breaks. Cartons get dropped. At some point a shop will send a photograph of a cracked jar and ask what you intend to do about it.
Decide the answer now, before it is emotional. A workable default for a small brand: report damage within five business days with photographs, and the replacement units go out on the next order at no charge rather than as a separate shipment. That keeps you from paying freight twice on two broken candles, and it keeps the shop whole.
Pack for the trip rather than the shelf. Retail-ready packaging is designed to look good under a spotlight, not to survive a conveyor belt. An outer carton with real dunnage costs a little and prevents most claims. The freight-cost side of that decision is in wholesale shipping cost.
Insure freight shipments properly. The default liability a carrier offers on a pallet is calculated on weight, not on what your goods are worth, and on a pallet of ceramics the gap between those two numbers is large.
A worked example
A boutique orders four cases of a twelve-dollar-wholesale candle, six to a case. The order is two hundred and eighty-eight dollars.
Four cases weigh about twenty-two pounds each once they are in outer cartons with padding. Parcel ground across two states runs perhaps eighteen dollars a carton, so seventy-two dollars of shipping on a two-hundred-and-eighty-eight-dollar order. That is a quarter of the order value, which is why your minimum exists and why a four-case order should probably have been a six-case order.
At six cases the order is four hundred and thirty-two dollars and the freight is about a hundred and eight. The shipping share falls, the picking time barely moves, and if your carriage-paid threshold sits at four hundred dollars the buyer has a concrete reason to round up. This is the whole argument for setting the threshold where it changes behaviour instead of where it sounds generous.
Getting the first shipments right
Ship the first order to a new account yourself, personally, and watch every step of it. Pack it, weigh it, buy the label, note how long it took. That single data point tells you more about your true wholesale margin than any spreadsheet.
Then write the process down so the second one takes half as long. The desk-side routine — picking, counting, slips, tracking emails — is its own subject, and the practical version is in ship wholesale orders.
If you are still working out which kinds of shops are realistic for your product before you invest in cartons and a carrier account, paste your store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products. It is a cheap way to find out whether your first shipments will be four cases to a boutique or a pallet to a regional distributor, because those two futures need different packaging decisions today.
Questions brands ask about shipping to stores
Should you charge shipping on the first order? Yes. Prepaid card, shipping added, no exceptions. Carriage-paid offers belong to accounts that have already proven they pay.
Is a shop allowed to refuse a delivery? Yes, and they will if it arrives damaged or outside an agreed window. That is why the delivery instruction on the label matters.
Do you need a barcode on the outer carton? Not for independent shops. Any account with a routing guide will tell you the format they need, and it is worth doing exactly as specified.
What about international accounts? Treat them as a separate decision. Customs paperwork, duties and the question of who is the importer of record change the economics enough that a first-year brand is usually better off saying not yet.