Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
Quantity rules are three separate settings that get confused with each other: a minimum quantity per item, an increment the quantity must step in, and a minimum value for the whole order. Wholesale needs all three, because each one stops a different bad order.
The per-item minimum stops a shop ordering a single unit at trade price. The increment keeps orders aligned to your case pack so you are not breaking cartons. The order minimum makes sure the total is worth picking, packing and invoicing. Set only the third and you get an order for one of everything; set only the first two and you get a 90-dollar order that costs more to fulfil than it earns.
Choosing the case pack
This is the decision everything else inherits, and it belongs in packaging rather than in settings.
The case pack is how many units travel in one shipping carton and how many a buyer must take at a time. Common choices are four, six, eight and twelve, and the right one is set by three constraints.
What fits in a carton you can actually ship. A box that is too heavy to lift, too large for standard freight dimensions, or too fragile to protect is the wrong pack regardless of what the arithmetic says.
What a shop can sell through in a season. This is the constraint brands underweight. A boutique that takes twelve of one scented candle and sells four by spring will not reorder, and worse, will remember your brand as the one that sat on the shelf. Six that sell out in eight weeks produces a reorder; twelve that linger produces silence.
What makes the order worth fulfilling. A case of two turns every order into a picking exercise. If your item is small and inexpensive, the pack needs to be larger to be worth handling.
When those pull in different directions, favour sell-through. A smaller pack that reorders beats a larger pack that does not, and you can always add a volume break that rewards buyers for taking more.
For items with variants, decide whether the case is a single variant or an assortment. Six of one colour is simpler to pack and easier to reorder. A mixed case of six colours reduces the buyer's risk on a new brand and is often what gets a first order placed. Many brands offer a mixed opening case and single-variant cases for reorders, which is a good compromise.
Setting the two minimums
Opening order minimum. The smallest first order you will accept, and it exists to make sure a new account is a real shelf presence rather than a trial of three items. A common structure for a small home goods brand: 400 to 600 dollars, which is roughly two or three cases across a few items.
Too low and you acquire accounts that consume a full onboarding — the certificate, the pricing setup, the first shipment, the follow-up — and never reorder. Too high and you exclude the small shops that are often the best early stockists, because they make decisions quickly and talk to other shop owners.
Reorder minimum. Usually lower than the opening minimum, often half. The point of the opening minimum is commitment; the point of the reorder minimum is fulfilment economics. Once an account is established you want reordering to be easy, and a high reorder threshold delays orders rather than enlarging them.
Set both as numbers you can state on the line sheet, in your terms, and in the order confirmation. Rules that live only in your head get negotiated away one buyer at a time.
Enforcing increments without losing the order
The increment is what turns a case pack from a suggestion into a rule. With an increment of six, a buyer can choose six, twelve or eighteen, and cannot choose seven.
Enforce it in three places, because buyers find every gap.
In the cart and at checkout both. A rule that applies only in the cart is defeated by a buyer editing quantities on the checkout page, and the order goes through broken. Test a real order all the way to completion. The other checkout differences worth configuring are in the B2B checkout.
On the line sheet, printed beside every item number. Buyers work from the PDF far more than from your store, especially for a first order, and an item number without a case pack next to it is an invitation to order five.
At a market or trade show, on the order form. This is where discipline breaks, because the buyer is standing in front of you and saying yes feels like the way to win the order. Decide your answer to a broken-case request before the show, as covered in taking orders at trade shows.
The worked example
A candle brand, to make the interaction concrete.
Retail 26 dollars, wholesale 13, landed cost 5, case of six. Opening order minimum 450 dollars, reorder minimum 250.
A new boutique's opening order: two cases of the bestselling scent, one case each of three others — thirty candles, 390 dollars. Below the minimum, so the buyer adds another case and lands at 468 dollars. That single rule added 78 dollars to the order and, more importantly, put one more scent on the shelf where it can be discovered.
Your side of that order: 468 dollars of revenue, 180 dollars of landed cost, one shipment, one invoice, no advertising cost. Thirty-six units out the door in one transaction, where the consumer equivalent would be thirty-six separate parcels, thirty-six payment fees and thirty-six acquisition costs.
Ten weeks later the shop reorders the two scents that sold — two cases, 156 dollars. Below the reorder minimum, so they add a third case and reach 234 dollars, still short, and take a fourth. The reorder becomes 312 dollars. Without the rule it would have been 156 dollars and you would be shipping twice as often for the same revenue.
That is what quantity rules do. They are not obstacles to orders; they are the structure that makes each order worth shipping.
When to make exceptions
Three situations where bending is reasonable, and one where it is not.
A sample or tester order. A shop that wants to try two units before committing. Fine, at retail price or close to it, and stated as a one-time arrangement. You are selling a trial, not opening an account.
A key account with a genuinely different format. A large retailer that needs an inner pack different from your case. This usually means new packaging rather than a settings change, and it should be priced accordingly.
An end-of-life item. Clearing discontinued stock in whatever quantities move it. Rules exist to protect a repeating system; a discontinued item is not part of one.
Where not to bend: a standard account asking for a broken case because they are unsure. The right answer is to help them choose a smaller assortment across items that reaches the minimum, not to break the pack. Saying yes once creates a precedent you will be asked to repeat, and every exception makes your pricing and packing harder to run. The same discipline applies to price tiers and to catalogs.
Rules without buyers do nothing
Quantity rules improve orders you are already getting. They do not create accounts, and a carefully configured set of minimums on a store with four stockists is a rounding error.
The sequence that works: pick a case pack you can ship and a shop can sell through, set two minimums you can state plainly, then spend the remaining time finding buyers. If that list does not exist yet, start from the product — paste a product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of shops, distributors and chains that plausibly carry something like it. What you learn there also informs the pack decision, because the right case for a gift boutique is rarely the right case for a regional grocery chain.
Questions brands ask about quantity rules
Should minimums be per item or per order? Both, and they do different jobs. Per item keeps cases intact; per order keeps the shipment worth fulfilling.
What if a buyer asks to mix a case across scents or colours? Offer it as a defined mixed case rather than as case-by-case flexibility. A mixed six with a fixed composition is easy to pack and easy to reorder; an arbitrary mix is neither.
Do minimums scare off small shops? Stated clearly on the line sheet, they mostly filter rather than scare. A shop that cannot reach a 450-dollar opening order is usually not a shop that will reorder either. What does cause friction is discovering a minimum at checkout after building a cart.
Should the opening minimum differ by account type? It can, and the cleanest way to express that is as a tier with stated criteria rather than as a per-account decision. Distributors should have a much higher minimum and full-case-only ordering.
Does this work the same on other platforms? The rules are identical in substance. BigCommerce supports order and product minimums natively; WooCommerce handles it with a plugin; Wix and Squarespace brands often enforce minimums on the line sheet and at invoicing rather than in the cart. The wider feature set on Shopify is described in Shopify B2B features.