Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
A B2B price list is a set of fixed prices per item, assigned to a company, that replaces your retail pricing for that account. Build it with fixed amounts rather than a share off retail, keep the number of tiers to two or three, and put volume breaks inside the list rather than inventing a new tier for every account that asks.
That is the whole recommendation. The rest of this is why each part matters, because every one of them is a decision brands make casually and then live with for years.
Fixed prices, not a share off retail
A price list that says each item is half of retail looks efficient and creates four problems.
Rounding. Half of 27.99 is 13.995. Your line sheet now shows a price nobody wants to type and your invoices carry a rounding difference that accumulates across a 200-unit order.
Retail price changes drag wholesale with them. Raise a consumer price for a seasonal promotion strategy and every trade price moves silently. Buyers notice, and the conversation that follows is about trust rather than pricing.
Different items have different economics. Your candle and your ceramic dish do not share a cost structure. One may support half of retail comfortably; the other may not survive it. A single share applied across the catalog means some items are quietly sold at a loss.
It exposes the relationship. A price expressed as a share invites the buyer to negotiate the share. A price expressed as a number invites them to decide whether the number works. The second conversation is far better for you.
Set each wholesale price deliberately, as a number you chose, and write it once. The mechanical reasons discount-based approaches break are covered in wholesale discounts.
How to arrive at the number
Work from landed cost and from the buyer's margin requirement, then check they are compatible.
Take a ceramic serving bowl. Retail 48 dollars. Landed cost 17 dollars — clay, glaze, firing, the box and the packing that stops it arriving in pieces.
A boutique needs to roughly double its cost to stay viable: rent, staff, the items that sit unsold. So the wholesale price a buyer will accept is around 24 dollars, half of retail. That leaves you 7 dollars of gross margin per bowl.
Compare that to consumer economics honestly. At retail you keep 31 dollars before payment fees, shipping and the advertising that brought the order. Depending on your acquisition cost, the real contribution may be closer to 15 dollars. So the wholesale unit earns you less, but it earns it on an order of forty-eight bowls with one shipment, one payment and no ad spend, and it repeats on a schedule.
If the arithmetic does not work — if half of retail lands below your landed cost plus a sane margin — the answer is not a thinner buyer margin. Buyers will simply decline. The answer is a different cost structure, a different pack size, or leaving that item out of the wholesale catalog entirely.
How many tiers to run
Two or three. More than that and nobody, including you, can say what a given account pays without looking it up.
Tier one: standard wholesale. Half of retail, or whatever your structure supports. Every independent shop gets this. It should cover the large majority of your accounts.
Tier two: volume. A better price for accounts ordering meaningfully more, with a stated threshold — annual volume, order size, or committed quantity. The threshold is what makes it a tier rather than a favour.
Tier three, only if you need it: distributor. A distributor resells to shops and needs margin between your price and the wholesale price those shops pay. That is a genuinely different structure, usually a deeper price against much larger quantities and full-case-only ordering. Do not create it speculatively.
The rule that keeps this clean: a buyer moves tiers by meeting written criteria, not by negotiating. When someone asks for a better price, the useful answer names what would qualify them. That converts a negotiation into a target, which is how their other suppliers already work.
Volume breaks inside the list
Volume breaks are quantity tiers within a single price list — 24 dollars at one case, 22 at four cases, 20 at twelve. They do a lot of work for you.
They raise average order size without you asking, because a buyer sitting at three cases can see what the fourth is worth. They make the pricing structure feel like a system rather than a set of relationships. And they let you say yes to a price request without creating a new tier: the better price exists, at the quantity that justifies it.
Two cautions. Keep the breaks few — three steps is plenty, five is noise. And make sure the deepest break still works for you at your real cost, including the freight on a larger shipment, because a buyer will eventually order at that level.
Currency, and selling across borders
If you sell wholesale into another country, the price list should be denominated in the buyer's currency with prices you chose, not converted automatically at whatever today's rate is.
Automatic conversion produces prices that move week to week, which makes your line sheet unusable for a buyer planning their margins, and it produces the rounding problem again in a new currency. Set a considered number, review it a couple of times a year, and absorb the small movements in between.
The harder parts of exporting are outside the pricing layer anyway: duties, incoterms, labelling compliance, who is the importer of record. Decide those before quoting, because a price that does not specify whether duty is included is a dispute waiting to happen.
Keeping the list from drifting
Three habits, all cheap, all skipped by brands who later cannot explain their own pricing.
One source of truth. A spreadsheet with item number, case pack, landed cost, wholesale price, suggested retail and status. Generate both the store price list and the PDF line sheet from it. Brands that maintain the two independently eventually send a buyer prices that do not match what the portal charges.
Review against cost annually. Landed costs creep — materials, packaging, freight. A price set two years ago against a cost that has risen twice is a margin you are no longer earning. Review once a year, and give existing accounts notice before a rise takes effect.
Never publish it openly. A public wholesale price list becomes a negotiating lever for every buyer who finds it, including the accounts already paying more. Behind a login or inside a PDF you send, always.
The list matters less than the accounts on it
A perfectly structured set of tiers assigned to five stockists earns less than a rough one assigned to fifty. Pricing work is finite and satisfying; finding accounts is neither, which is why brands over-invest in the first.
Get the standard tier right, write down what qualifies an account for the volume tier, and then spend the time on buyers. If you do not yet know which shops, distributors or chains carry products in your category, paste a product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of buyers that would plausibly stock something like it — which also tells you whether you need a distributor tier at all.
Questions brands ask about B2B price lists
Can one company have more than one price list? Usually one list applies at a time, which is why volume breaks belong inside the list rather than being expressed as a second list. Confirm the behaviour in your setup before designing around it.
Should suggested retail be on the line sheet? Yes. Buyers want to know what you expect the item to sell for, and it signals that you have thought about their margin. It is guidance, not enforcement.
What if a buyer sells below suggested retail? It happens, and your practical leverage is limited. What you can control is who you sell to. If a discount-driven account is damaging the price on the shelf for everyone else, the answer is to stop supplying them, not to build a pricing rule.
How do I handle a one-off concession? As a documented exception with an end date, not as a permanent price. An opening-order incentive that quietly becomes the account's standing price is the most common way wholesale margin disappears.
Does this differ on other platforms? The structure is identical. BigCommerce implements price lists and customer groups natively; WooCommerce needs a role-based pricing plugin; Wix and Squarespace brands usually keep the list in the PDF and invoice manually. The Shopify feature set it sits inside is described in Shopify B2B features, and the minimums that pair with it in quantity rules.