Starting a wholesale business from an ecommerce store is mostly an operations job, not a sales job. Before you can take a purchase order you need a wholesale price list, a case pack for every item, an opening minimum, stated payment terms, an invoice that looks like a business wrote it, and a way to pack and ship a carton rather than a parcel. That setup takes a weekend and it is what separates a brand that can take a second order from one that cannot.
This is the unglamorous half of the channel. The pitching side is covered in the sequence into retail stores; what follows is everything a buyer's yes lands on.
Decide what you are selling wholesale, and in what unit
Your wholesale range is not your website. Start by choosing which products go in, based on margin and on whether they can survive a shelf without a product page beside them.
Then define the unit, which is the part that ecommerce brands consistently get wrong. Online you sell ones. Wholesale sells cases. A case pack is the smallest quantity of a single item a store can buy, and it exists for your benefit as much as theirs: it turns a picking job into a counting job.
Pick case packs that match how the product displays. Small items that live in a bowl by the till go in sixes or twelves. A 34-dollar mug goes in fours. Something large and expensive can be sold in ones, and then say so explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous.
Give every item a code. Not the Shopify variant ID, a short readable one, MUG-SLT-4 for a four-pack of the slate mug. Buyers write these on purchase orders by hand, and your picker reads them off a carton.
Build the price list
A wholesale price list is a table, and a simple one is better than a clever one.
For each item: code, name, case pack, wholesale price per unit, and the suggested retail price. Optionally a second tier for larger orders, though most brands should not bother in year one.
Anchor the wholesale price at about half of your standard retail price. A 34-dollar mug wholesales at 17. The temptation to go to 19 because your margin feels tight is a trap; a store working on less than a doubling will either price the product higher than your site, which makes you look expensive, or decline.
Then check the arithmetic from your side. At 17 dollars a unit and a landed cost of 7, a four-case order is 68 dollars of revenue and 40 dollars of gross margin, out of which come the carton, the tape, the label and whatever freight you absorb. Do that sum before you print anything, and do it again at the order sizes you expect rather than at one unit. The full channel-level version of this arithmetic is in wholesale for ecommerce brands.
Publish the price list nowhere public. It goes to buyers as a PDF attached to an email or behind a login. A wholesale price on an open web page is a price your retail customers will find.
Set minimums and terms, and put them in writing
Three numbers and one sentence, decided now and repeated on every document.
Opening minimum. What a new account must spend on its first order. For a small-format product, 250 to 400 dollars is reasonable, low enough for a shop owner to approve without a meeting and high enough to be worth packing.
Reorder minimum. Usually lower, often half the opening. You want reorders to be easy.
Lead time. State it as a range and pad it. Two to three weeks that you always hit beats one week that you sometimes miss.
Payment terms. The sentence most small brands should use is: payment in full before shipping on the first order, net 30 available after two paid orders. No buyer will be offended. Terms extended to a shop you have never dealt with are an unsecured loan, and small retail has a failure rate you cannot assess from an email.
Add two more lines while you are at it: no returns except for damage reported within a short window, and a note that your suggested retail price is expected to be held. Neither is enforceable in the way a contract is, but stating them changes behaviour and gives you a reference point later.
The documents a buyer expects
Four pieces of paper, and only one of them is design work.
The line sheet is the sales document: photos on white, names, codes, case packs, wholesale and retail prices, minimums, lead time, terms and where to send an order. One page if possible.
The purchase order is the buyer's document. Larger shops will send you one with their own number on it; independents will simply email "two cases of the slate, one of the ivory." Either way, you confirm it back in writing with quantities, prices, total and ship date, because that confirmation is what prevents the argument.
The invoice carries your business details, a unique invoice number, the order reference, line items with codes and quantities, the total, the payment terms and how to pay. Your accounting tool does this; use it from the first order rather than sending a note in an email.
The packing slip goes in the carton, lists what is in it, and has no prices on it. Shop staff use it to check the delivery in.
Two more things you will be asked for in the United States: your business details for the retailer's vendor file, and a resale certificate from the buyer, which is what lets you ship without charging sales tax. Collect and file that certificate before you ship, not after.
Packing, freight and the physical side
A wholesale order is a carton, not twelve parcels, and the difference shows up in your costs immediately.
Work out your standard carton. If four mugs travel safely in a box you can buy in bulk, that box is your unit of shipping, and you can quote freight because you know the weight and dimensions. Brands that pack every order differently cannot quote anything.
Label the outside with the item code, the quantity and the account name. A shop receiving three cartons wants to know what is in each without opening them.
Decide who pays freight and say it on the line sheet. The common arrangements are that the buyer pays actual freight, or that you ship free above a threshold, for example free over 600 dollars. Free shipping thresholds are familiar territory for a DTC brand, and they work the same way here: they push order size up, and you pay for them out of margin, so set the threshold where the freight is a small part of the order.
Keep wholesale stock separate from your DTC stock if you can, even if separate means a different shelf. The failure mode is selling the last forty mugs online on a Friday and discovering on Monday that they were promised to a store.
The systems, and how little you need at first
The honest answer for the first ten accounts is a spreadsheet, a PDF and your existing accounting tool.
A spreadsheet with one row per account: shop name, buyer name, email, first order date, what they bought, the amount, the reorder date and a note. That single sheet is your pipeline, your forecast and your customer record until it is too big, which takes longer than you think.
Your accounting tool issues the invoices and tracks who has paid. Do not run wholesale payments through your store checkout as if a buyer were a consumer; you lose the terms, the invoice numbering and the record.
When manual becomes the bottleneck, usually somewhere past twenty accounts, you move ordering onto your store platform so buyers self-serve at their own prices. What that looks like on Shopify specifically, with price lists, customer tagging and catalogs, is covered in selling wholesale from your online store.
The mistake is doing that first. A portal with no accounts in it is a month of work that teaches you nothing, and you will build the wrong one because you have not yet learned how your buyers order.
A first-month plan
If you want this as a checklist, here is the order that works.
Week one: choose the range, set case packs and codes, compute landed cost per unit, set wholesale prices.
Week two: write the line sheet, set minimums, lead time and payment terms, set up an invoice template, buy cartons.
Week three: build a list of shops that fit your category and price point, and send the first ten emails. To get that list started quickly, paste a product page into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of retailers and distributors that plausibly stock something like it.
Week four: handle the replies, send samples, and pack whatever comes in. Then write down everything that was annoying, because that list is your roadmap for the systems you actually need.
Questions ecommerce brands ask when setting up wholesale
Do you need a separate legal entity? No. The same business sells both channels. What you do need is clean separation in your bookkeeping so you can see the two margins apart.
What about a minimum advertised price policy? For a young brand with independent stockists, a stated expectation on the line sheet is usually enough. A formal policy is worth writing when you have enough doors that one of them undercutting the others matters.
Should wholesale prices be on your website? Behind a login or by request, never open. A wholesale page that says "apply for an account" with a short form is the standard pattern.
How do you handle a store that wants one of everything? That is what case packs prevent. Hold the pack sizes, and offer a smaller opening minimum instead if you want to make the yes easy.
What if a buyer asks for net 60? Chains ask, independents rarely do. For a first order, say the terms are payment before shipping and offer net 30 after two paid orders. If a chain genuinely requires net 60, price the order knowing you are financing two months of inventory.