Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
Squarespace has no wholesale pricing layer, no customer groups and no minimum order rules, so the working pattern is different from the other platforms: you keep the consumer store exactly as it is and run the trade channel beside it, on a gated page and an invoice.
That sounds like a compromise and mostly is not. For a maker brand with a beautiful Squarespace site and its first handful of stockists, running trade on invoices is faster to set up, cheaper to maintain and less likely to break the site that is currently paying the bills.
What Squarespace can and cannot do for trade
Useful and present: password-protected pages, member areas, file downloads for a line sheet, forms that route to your inbox, and invoicing with due dates. Those five cover a surprising amount.
Absent: a second price on a product, a customer group that sees different prices, minimum order quantities, case pack increments, and terms as a payment method at checkout. There is no plugin ecosystem that fills those gaps the way a self-hosted stack does, so the honest approach is to stop trying to make the cart do trade work.
The consequence is a clean split. The store sells to consumers. A gated page and an invoice sell to shops. Nothing has to be compromised on either side, which is not true of platforms where the trade layer is bolted onto the consumer cart.
The setup, in four parts
A trade page, password-protected. One page, one password you share with approved accounts. On it: the line sheet as a downloadable file, a short version of your terms, the case packs, the lead time, and the email address orders go to. Rotate the password once a year, because it will get shared.
An application form. Shop name, trading address, website or social profile, tax or resale registration where relevant, and what they currently stock. That last field is the useful one, because it tells you whether the shop is a fit before you spend an hour on them.
Invoices with due dates. This is the engine of the whole setup. The buyer sends quantities, you raise an invoice with a payment link and a due date, they pay, you ship. Prepay for the first order every time.
A tag or a note per trade sale. However you record sales, mark trade ones from the first order. A year later, being able to say what the channel actually produced is what justifies any further investment in it.
Build these in that order and you can take a first wholesale order this week rather than next month.
Why the invoice route works better here than elsewhere
On a platform with a trade layer, invoicing by hand is a workaround. On Squarespace it is the design, and it has two real advantages.
It never breaks the consumer store. No price rules to misfire during a sale, no role that accidentally shows a member a trade price, no cache that serves the wrong number. Every ugly failure mode of the gated-pricing approach simply does not exist.
And it keeps you close to the accounts in the first year, which is where the learning is. Each invoice is a conversation, and those conversations tell you which products shops actually take, whether your case pack is right, and how often a shop sells through. A brand that automates that away too early skips the part where it works out what its wholesale offer should be.
The equivalent setups on other builders are covered in wholesale on Wix and WooCommerce wholesale, both of which trade more configuration for more automation.
The ceiling, and how to tell you have hit it
The invoice pattern runs out somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five active accounts, and the symptoms arrive in a predictable order.
First, you start getting reorder emails you have not had time to answer, and an order sits unbuilt for three days. Second, you find yourself looking up what price a particular shop pays, because you agreed something on a call last spring. Third, somebody pays late and you only notice because you happened to look.
Those three are the same signal: the channel has more moving parts than one person can hold in their head. At that point the choice is between a purpose-built tool for orders and invoices alongside Squarespace, or moving commerce to a platform with a trade layer and keeping Squarespace for the site if you love it.
Do not move before the symptoms. A brand that rebuilds a working site to solve a wholesale problem it does not yet have loses the site it had and gains configuration work. The comparison, when the time comes, is in three ways to sell to stores.
Pricing and minimums without enforcement
With no rules engine, your prices and minimums live in text, and text works better than brands expect.
Write the trade price as a fixed number per unit and per case, never as a share off retail, so a consumer promotion cannot reach it. Put suggested retail next to it so the buyer sees their spread without doing arithmetic. The method for arriving at those numbers is in wholesale pricing.
State the minimum in three places: the line sheet, the terms, and the reply you send when an order comes in under it. That reply should be one friendly sentence, and it should never be waived quietly, because a waived minimum becomes the new minimum for that account.
For a worked shape: a soap at four dollars trade in cases of twelve, suggested retail eight dollars, minimum first order two hundred dollars, which is four cases mixed. That is small enough for a nervous shop to say yes to and large enough that packing it is worth the hour.
Two habits that keep the manual channel from fraying
The invoice pattern survives on record-keeping, and there are only two records that matter.
The first is a single sheet, anywhere, listing every account: shop name, contact, what they pay, what they last ordered, when, and whether they are on terms. One row per account. This sheet is the thing a trade layer would otherwise hold for you, and keeping it by hand costs a minute per order. Skipping it is why brands end up guessing at prices they agreed a year earlier.
The second is a saved reply for each of the five conversations you will have hundreds of times: the approval and welcome, the order confirmation with a ship date, the order that came in under the minimum, the reorder prompt, and the polite late-payment chase. Writing each one properly once makes every later version faster and more consistent, and consistency is most of what makes a small brand feel established to a buyer.
Both habits transfer intact to whatever platform you move to later, which is more than can be said for most configuration work.
The part no platform solves
Everything above takes an afternoon. Finding shops takes months, and it is the part that decides whether this channel exists.
A password-protected trade page with nobody behind it is the most common artefact of a wholesale plan that never started. Work in the other direction: identify twenty plausible shops, contact them one at a time, get one yes, invoice it by hand, and let the setup follow the accounts.
If you do not yet 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. That list is the input that tells you whether the channel is worth building for at all.
Questions brands ask about wholesale on Squarespace
Can you show trade prices to logged-in members? Not as a different price on the same product. You can put a price list behind a member area or a password, which is the practical equivalent for a small brand.
Should you build a second Squarespace site for trade? Rarely. A second site means a second set of product information going stale, and it does not add any pricing capability you did not already have.
How do trade buyers pay? By invoice with a payment link, or by card on a prepay basis. Terms, when you grant them, are an invoice due date rather than a checkout option, and the decision of who gets them is in should you offer net terms.
Does gating the trade page hurt search visibility? The trade page is not a page you want ranking anyway. Keep one public page that says you sell wholesale and invites applications, and gate only the prices.
What is the first thing to automate? Order building. The moment you are transcribing quantities from emails more than a few times a week, that transcription is the job worth removing.