Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
There are two different things a brand means by a B2B marketplace. One is a third-party platform where thousands of shops browse thousands of brands and you pay a commission on what sells. The other is your own trade storefront, where buyers you already found log in and order at their prices.
They solve opposite problems. A marketplace solves discovery and charges you for it. Your own store solves cost and finds nobody. A brand that understands that runs both, deliberately, with a rule about which orders belong where.
How discovery works on a marketplace, and who is on it
Marketplaces are search engines for shop owners. A boutique owner sits down with a budget and a season to fill, filters by category and price, sorts by what is new or what is selling, and places small opening orders with several brands at once.
Two consequences follow from that behaviour.
The first is that your listing competes on the things that survive a thumbnail: the photograph, the price on the shelf, the case pack, and whether the product reads instantly as a category the buyer was already shopping for. Nobody reads a brand story at that stage.
The second is that opening orders are small and experimental. A buyer trying four new brands in an afternoon is not committing to any of them. The money is not in that first order; it is in whether the product sells through and the buyer comes back.
The population is mostly independent shops: gift, home, apparel, stationery, food, skincare. Larger chains buy differently, through buyers you contact directly, which is the process described in how brands get into stores.
What the commission does to your margin
Marketplaces take a share of each order, usually higher on a buyer's first order with you and lower on repeats, and payment processing sits on top. Rather than quoting figures that change, model the shape.
Take a candle at fifteen dollars wholesale in cases of six. A case is ninety dollars. Landed cost is forty-three, so seventy-seven dollars of gross margin on two cases would be your own-channel result on a one-eighty order.
Now apply a first-order commission in the region marketplaces charge and the same order leaves you materially less, before you have paid for freight. On repeat orders the commission drops and the arithmetic improves, but it never disappears for as long as the buyer stays on the platform.
So the real question is not whether the commission is high. It is whether that buyer would have found you otherwise. For a brand with no trade presence, paying for a first order from a shop three states away is a reasonable price for a stockist who did not know you existed. For the shop that already found you at a trade show, paying commission forever on orders you sourced yourself is just a leak.
Two other costs that are easy to miss
The first is pricing pressure. Marketplaces make comparison trivial, and when a buyer can see forty comparable products in one grid, the ones that look expensive without an obvious reason get skipped. That pushes some brands into discounting their trade price, which then becomes the price every account expects. Decide your wholesale number from your own costs first, using the method in how to price wholesale, and list at it rather than at a number reverse-engineered from the grid.
The second is that the relationship is not yours. You often do not own the buyer's contact details in any usable way, terms and returns are set by the platform, and a policy change can alter your economics without your agreeing to it. That is the same trade every intermediated channel involves, and it is worth comparing with the version most DTC brands already know, in wholesale versus selling on Amazon.
Your own B2B storefront, and what it is actually good at
A trade storefront on your own domain does three things a marketplace cannot.
It keeps the margin. No commission, and payment fees only.
It lets you vary everything per account: prices, assortment, minimums, terms. A chain and a single independent can be treated completely differently, which is what the company model exists for. What the native tooling provides is covered in what the B2B features do.
And it holds the relationship. You have the buyer's details, their order history, and the ability to email them when the new season lands.
What it does not do, ever, is bring a shop that has never heard of you. A trade storefront is a conversion tool, not an acquisition channel, and brands that launch one and wait are waiting for nothing.
Running both without undercutting yourself
The workable arrangement is a routing rule you write down once.
Buyers who found you on the marketplace stay on the marketplace, at least for their first few orders. Trying to pull a buyer off a platform immediately after it introduced you is both against most platform rules and a bad look with the buyer.
Buyers you found yourself, through outreach, a trade show or a customer who owns a shop, go straight onto your own storefront. Never list them through a marketplace to make the paperwork easier, because that is paying a finder's fee to a party that found nobody.
Over time, established accounts migrate naturally when you give them a reason: earlier access to a new season, a slightly better freight arrangement, or simply a reorder link that is faster than the platform's. Move them on service, not on price, because a price difference between channels is the one thing guaranteed to annoy both the buyer and the platform.
And keep one price. A brand with a marketplace price and a direct price spends the rest of its life explaining the difference.
Which to start with
If you have zero stockists and no list of shops, a marketplace listing is a fast way to find out whether shops want the product at all. Treat the commission on early orders as the cost of that answer rather than as a permanent tax.
If you already have a handful of accounts that came from your own effort, build the direct channel first. Those accounts are the ones that will reorder, and every order that goes through your own store rather than someone else's is margin you keep.
The third option, and the one most brands eventually run, is both: a listing that catches buyers who are actively shopping, and a direct channel for the accounts you source yourself. The direct list is the one that needs work. If you do not know which retailers stock things like yours, paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of shops and distributors that carry comparable products, then contact them directly rather than waiting to be found.
Questions brands ask about B2B marketplaces
Does listing on a marketplace hurt your direct wholesale? Only if your prices differ between the two. Keep the trade price identical and the channels coexist without tension.
Will marketplace buyers reorder? Some will, and sell-through is what decides it. A case that sits on a shelf unsold produces no second order regardless of how good the platform is.
Is it worth listing an entire range? No. List the products that photograph well, sit in an obvious category and have a case pack a small shop can commit to. Depth can follow once a buyer knows you.
Can you set a minimum on a marketplace? Usually yes, within the platform's own rules, though the pressure is always towards smaller opening orders than you would accept directly.
What is the one thing worth measuring? Repeat rate per buyer, not order count. A channel that produces first orders and no second orders is an expensive way to give away samples.