Faire, marketplaces & platforms
A wholesale marketplace finds retailers you do not have. Your own B2B website keeps the ones you do. They are not competing options, they are two halves of one channel, and a brand that treats either as the whole thing is either paying introduction prices on reorders or waiting patiently in an empty room.
The useful decisions are about sequencing and about when an account should move from one to the other. Both are easier once you can see exactly what each side is doing for you.
What a marketplace is good at
Discovery, first. A shop owner in a city you have never visited is browsing a category page on a Tuesday evening and your product is on it. No amount of work on your own site produces that, because your own site has no retailer traffic.
Credit, second. Retailers on marketplaces buy on extended terms that the platform underwrites, so you are paid around dispatch and the default risk is not yours. For a small brand, that is the difference between wholesale being a growth channel and wholesale being a cash trap. The mechanics are in Faire net 60.
Trust, third. A shop that has bought through a platform before will place a first order with an unknown brand in a way they will not by wiring money to a website they have never heard of.
What a marketplace is not good at: keeping the relationship, protecting your pricing, and being cheap on repeat business.
What your own B2B store is good at
Margin, first and obviously. A reorder placed on your own site costs you a payment fee. The same reorder on a platform costs a commission. Across a year of a repeating account, the gap is not small.
Control, second. Your own store is where you can run tiered pricing by account, set different minimums for different customers, hold a product back for accounts you want to reward, or run a price list in a different currency. None of that is available inside a marketplace listing.
Relationship, third. On your own store, the buyer has a login, a saved address, an order history and your email. They think of you as a supplier rather than as one of forty tabs.
What it is not good at: bringing anyone. A B2B area with no retailer traffic produces nothing, which is why building it first and expecting orders is the most common way a brand concludes wholesale does not work.
The margin difference on a real order
Take the standard case: a twelve-dollar wholesale unit, cases of six, a shop orders three cases. Two hundred and sixteen dollars. Cost of goods at four dollars a unit is seventy-two.
On a marketplace first order with a quarter taken in commission and twelve dollars of freight on your side, you keep about seventy-eight dollars.
The same order on your own B2B store, paid by card, costs you a payment fee of a few dollars and the same twelve dollars of freight. You keep around one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
Neither number is the point on its own. The point is the second order, and the third. A shop that orders four times a year is worth roughly one hundred and eighty dollars more annually on your own store than on a platform — and the platform did nothing new to earn the difference after the introduction. Multiply by fifteen accounts and you have the reason this article exists.
When to move an account across
Not immediately, and not by breaking your agreement.
Nearly every platform's terms cover retailers it introduced for a defined period, and moving an account inside that window is the one mistake that gets a brand removed. Read the clause. Diary the date. Behave.
Outside it, the signals that an account is ready to move are easy to read. They reorder without prompting. They email you directly with questions. They ask about products that are not on the platform listing. They ask for a different case count or a specific delivery date.
The move itself should make the buyer's life easier, not yours. Send a short note saying you have set up a wholesale account for them on your own site, with their pricing already applied and their usual order saved, and that terms carry over. If moving costs the shop anything at all in convenience, they will not move.
What to build first if you have neither
List on one marketplace and build a simple B2B area at the same time, but expect all the early orders from the first.
The marketplace listing gives you something to learn from: which case packs sell, which variants a shop picks first, how fast you can really dispatch, what a buyer asks before ordering. Build the B2B store afterwards using those answers rather than guessing.
Keep the B2B store deliberately plain at the start. Logged-in wholesale pricing, correct case packs, minimum order, clear lead time, a downloadable line sheet, and a way to pay by card. Terms can come later, for accounts that have earned them. On Shopify this no longer requires an enterprise plan — the practical routes are in Shopify B2B without Plus, and the fuller feature picture is in Shopify B2B.
Direct all your own traffic to the B2B store, not the platform. Anyone who finds you through your DTC site, your packaging, a market stall or a press mention should land on your own wholesale page. Paying a commission on a retailer you introduced to a platform yourself is a genuinely avoidable mistake.
Keeping prices consistent across both
One rule: the wholesale price is the wholesale price everywhere.
Retailers compare. A shop that finds your candle at twelve dollars on a platform and eleven on your site will either ask for the lower one forever or quietly conclude you are disorganised. Neither helps.
Where you are allowed to differentiate is in things that are not price: an exclusive variant for direct accounts, a better case break at higher volume, first access to a new range, a longer payment term for an account with history. Those reward loyalty without creating a price conflict.
Keep one source of truth for wholesale data — prices, case packs, barcodes, stock — and export to each channel from it. The reason is drift, not effort. The general version of this discipline, and the rest of what has to be true before wholesale works at all, is in the wholesale readiness checklist.
Where the accounts actually come from
Worth saying plainly: neither a marketplace nor your own site will get you into the specific shops you want. Marketplaces bring whoever browses. Your own site brings whoever already knows you. The ten shops you can name come from a researched email to a named buyer, and those are the accounts that end up mattering most because nobody can reprice or remove them.
If you are building that target list, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products — it works backwards from products like yours rather than forwards from a category label.
Questions brands ask about marketplaces and B2B sites
Can I be on a marketplace and sell wholesale on my own site at the same time? Yes, and it is the normal configuration. Keep prices identical and route your own retailers to your own site.
Do I need an enterprise plan to run wholesale on Shopify? No. There are several workable routes at ordinary plan levels, at different levels of polish.
Should I offer payment terms on my own store? Eventually, and never on a first order. Prepay first, net 30 for accounts with history, longer only for volume that justifies it.
How many direct accounts make a B2B store worth the setup? Around ten reordering accounts is where the saved commission clearly covers the work, but building it earlier is fine because the setup is mostly one-off.