A wholesale minimum order is the smallest order you are willing to produce, pick, pack, invoice and ship without losing money on the work. For most small brands making a physical product, that number lands somewhere between one hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars, and it should be a dollar figure rather than a unit count.
The reason is arithmetic, not policy. Every order costs you a fixed amount of attention no matter how small it is, and below a certain size that fixed cost is larger than the margin the order carries.
Minimum order value and minimum order quantity are different things
The two get used interchangeably and they solve different problems.
A minimum order quantity is about production. It exists because your filler runs in batches of two hundred, or your printer will not do fewer than five hundred labels, or your contract manufacturer has a setup charge. The full version of that constraint is in minimum order quantity.
A minimum order value is about the cost of serving an account. It exists because pulling six units off a shelf, printing a packing slip, taping a carton, booking a label, sending an invoice and chasing it three weeks later takes about the same forty minutes whether the order is eighty dollars or eight hundred.
You need both, and they answer to different numbers. A brand with a low production minimum can still need a high order-value minimum if the handling is fiddly.
What the fixed cost of an order actually is
Write it down once, honestly, for your own operation.
Picking and packing a mixed order of three or four case packs: twenty to thirty minutes. Generating the invoice and entering the account: ten minutes the first time, two minutes afterwards. Carton and dunnage: two or three dollars. Booking freight and handing it to a carrier: ten minutes. Chasing payment on terms: another ten minutes spread over a month, more if the shop is slow.
Call it an hour of your time plus a few dollars of materials. If you value that hour at forty dollars, a wholesale order costs you somewhere north of forty-five dollars before a single unit moves.
Now apply your margin. A candle at thirteen dollars wholesale with seven dollars of landed cost contributes six dollars a unit. A hundred-dollar order is about eight units, or forty-eight dollars of contribution, which is almost exactly what the order cost you to serve. You worked for nothing.
At two hundred and fifty dollars the same order contributes about a hundred and fifteen dollars, and after the handling you have kept roughly seventy. That is a real order. That is where the minimum belongs.
Setting the number without scaring the first order away
Here is the tension every new brand feels. The minimum that protects your margin is high enough that a cautious boutique owner hesitates, and the minimum low enough that nobody hesitates does not pay you.
Three things resolve it.
Set the minimum at the case-pack grid, not between it. If cases are six units at seventy-eight dollars, then two hundred and fifty dollars is an awkward number because it is three and a bit cases. Two hundred and thirty-four is three clean cases. Buyers order in cases, so price the minimum in cases. How the grid itself should be built is covered in case pack.
Let assortment count toward it. A shop that takes three different scents, one case each, hits the same number as a shop taking three cases of one scent, and is far more likely to sell through because the shelf looks like a collection rather than a stack.
Separate the opening order from the reorder. The opening order can be higher because it is the one where you commit production time and set the account up. The reorder minimum can be a single case, because the account already exists, the price list is agreed and the picking is quick. Sizing the opening order is its own decision, laid out in first order minimum.
Should the minimum ever be waived?
Rarely, and never quietly.
There is one case where it is clearly right: a shop that has already ordered three times and wants two cases to cover a gap before a market weekend. Serving that order keeps the account warm, and the account has proven it reorders. Take it, and say plainly that you are making an exception because they are an established account.
There is one case where it is clearly wrong: the first order from a shop you have never dealt with, asking you to halve the minimum to "test" the product. That is not a test, it is a discount on the exact order where your costs are highest. The answer is to offer a smaller case pack rather than a smaller order, so the shop can spread the same money across more of the range.
And there is a third case that comes up constantly: a marketplace listing where the platform sets the minimum for you. On those channels you are working inside somebody else's floor, usually a low one, which is why brands price marketplace orders differently from direct ones.
What the minimum does to the rest of your terms
It is load-bearing for three other numbers, and moving it moves them.
Your covered-freight threshold sits above it, usually at roughly double, so there is a visible reason to grow the order. The logic for that is in free shipping wholesale.
Your volume break sits above that, so the discount arrives only at a size where the discount is affordable.
Your payment terms follow the same ladder. A first order at the minimum should be paid before it ships. Terms are something an account earns by ordering repeatedly and paying on time, not something attached to the smallest order you accept.
Keep all four numbers on one page so a buyer sees the shape of it at a glance. A minimum that appears in an email and nowhere else gets forgotten, then argued about.
How to say the number to a buyer
Put it in writing in three places: the terms page, the line sheet, and the reply to the first enquiry. Then do not apologise for it.
The wording that works is flat and short. Opening order two hundred and thirty-four dollars, three cases, mix as you like. Reorders from one case. Freight covered above five hundred dollars. That is the whole conversation, and a buyer who was going to order is not put off by it.
What does put buyers off is a minimum that appears halfway through, after they have picked a selection. Most cancelled first orders in a small brand's inbox are not price objections, they are surprise objections.
If you are not yet sure which shops your minimum has to be acceptable to, paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of the retailers and distributors that stock products like yours. A minimum that a two-till gift shop cannot reach may be trivially small to a regional chain, and knowing which of those you are selling to sets the number better than any rule of thumb.
Questions brands ask about wholesale minimums
Should the minimum be in units or dollars? Dollars, with case packs as the increment. Units break as soon as your range contains products at different prices.
What if my product is expensive? Then the minimum is a small number of units and the real constraint becomes assortment. A brand selling a ninety-dollar wholesale item might set the floor at four units and still be fine.
Does a high minimum cost me accounts? It costs you the accounts that would have ordered once and never again. Those accounts are not actually revenue, they are unpaid work with a nice photo attached.
Can I run a lower minimum at the start to get the first stockists? You can, for a defined window, and say it is for a defined window. What you must not do is run a low minimum indefinitely and then raise it, because every account you signed at the low number now experiences the change as a price increase.