A wholesale order form is the one page a shop fills in to buy from you. SKUs down the left, case pack and wholesale price across, quantity boxes the buyer writes in, a total at the bottom, and your terms underneath. That is the whole document.
It is not a line sheet. The line sheet sells the range with photographs and a suggested retail price. The order form collects the decision. Most DTC brands find out they need a separate one the first time a boutique replies with some version of "we would love to carry this, what do we do next," and there is nothing to send back.
What the order form is actually for
Your Shopify checkout does three jobs at once: it shows the product, takes the decision, and takes the money. A wholesale order almost never works that way. The buyer decides on Tuesday, their bookkeeper pays in thirty days, and somewhere in between you need a written record of exactly what was agreed.
The order form is that record. It exists so that when the shop says the twelve-count case was supposed to be lavender, you can point at a line the buyer filled in themselves. It also exists so you can stop retyping orders out of email threads, which is where most first-year wholesale mistakes are born.
Think of it as the document that turns a conversation into something your production plan and your accounting can both read.
The fields every order form needs
Start with the header block, which is about who and when:
- Business name, and the trading name if the shop trades under something different
- Buyer name, email and mobile number
- Billing address and shipping address, kept separate because they differ more often than you expect
- Resale or tax exemption number, which you will need before you can leave sales tax off the invoice
- Requested ship date, or "as soon as ready"
- Purchase order number, if the shop uses one
Then the line items. One row per SKU, and the row has to carry the case, not the unit:
- SKU code
- Product name and variant
- Units per case
- Wholesale price per unit
- Case price
- Number of cases ordered
- Line total
Then the foot: subtotal, freight, any early-payment discount, and the grand total. Underneath, in small but readable type, the terms that apply to this order — minimum, payment terms, lead time, damage window, and your retail pricing expectation.
The single biggest formatting mistake is asking for units instead of cases. A buyer who writes "20" in a box next to a candle that ships in sixes has told you nothing useful, and you will spend an email round trip finding out whether they meant twenty units or twenty cases. Label the column cases and print the case pack on the same row.
A worked example
Take a brand with three candle scents. Retail is twenty-four dollars, wholesale is twelve, and the case is six units, so a case is seventy-two dollars. The minimum is two hundred dollars.
A boutique fills in two cases of the first scent, two of the second, one of the third. Five cases, three hundred and sixty dollars, above the minimum, with no back-and-forth about whether it qualifies. Freight is calculated at shipping and added as a line. The form footer says net thirty on reorders and prepayment on a first order, so the buyer already knows what the invoice will say before they send the form.
That form takes about ninety seconds to fill in and saves you three emails. The arithmetic behind those two numbers, twelve and twenty-four, is a separate decision — how to calculate wholesale price covers it properly.
Where the form should live
There are three sensible homes for it, and they suit different stages.
| Format | Good for | Main drawback |
|---|---|---|
| Fillable PDF | First accounts, trade shows, buyers who want paper | You retype every order |
| Spreadsheet | A range with many SKUs and sizes | Buyers break the formulas |
| Password-protected store page | Reorders, growing account list | Setup time before the first order |
Start with the PDF or the spreadsheet. A brand with four accounts does not need software, and the time spent configuring a portal is time not spent emailing shops.
Move the form onto your store once reorders start arriving, because at that point the retyping is the bottleneck, not the selling. On Shopify that usually means a hidden collection behind a login with wholesale prices attached to a customer tag. A wholesale order form on Shopify walks through that setup, and a separate wholesale store is the heavier version of the same idea.
What happens when the buyer sends their own purchase order
Larger shops and every chain will ignore your form and send a purchase order out of their own system. That is normal and it is not a rejection of your paperwork.
When it happens, read the purchase order like a contract, because it is one. Check four things before you accept it: the prices match what you quoted, the quantities are in the unit you expect, the ship-by or cancel date is one you can actually hit, and there are no terms attached that you have not agreed to, such as automatic discounts for late delivery or a right to return unsold stock.
If anything is wrong, say so in writing before you ship. A price discrepancy caught before production is a two-line email. The same discrepancy caught after delivery is a deduction off your invoice that you will spend a month chasing.
Then take the purchase order number and put it on everything: the packing slip, the carton label, the invoice. Shops match payments by purchase order number, and an invoice without one sits in a pile.
The terms that belong on the form
Everything on this list saves an argument later, and all of it fits in one paragraph of small type.
State your minimum, in dollars, and whether it applies to reorders. State the lead time in business days from receipt of payment or purchase order, not from "order date," which is ambiguous. State payment terms and that the first order is prepaid. State the damage reporting window, because a shop that reports a broken jar five weeks later is asking you to insure their storeroom. State that title passes on delivery and that the prices are yours to change with notice.
Also state, briefly, what you expect on retail price. You cannot dictate it everywhere, but a line saying you build the range around a suggested retail price and expect accounts to hold it during the first season sets the norm. The fuller version lives in wholesale terms and conditions.
From form to invoice without retyping
The form and the invoice should be the same numbers in a different wrapper. Line items, quantities, totals: identical. The invoice adds a date, an invoice number, the due date and how to pay.
The habit worth building early is a single order number that travels the whole way through. Order 1041 becomes packing slip 1041, carton labels reading 1 of 3 for order 1041, and invoice 1041. When a shop calls about a missing case, you say a number and everyone is looking at the same thing. What a wholesale invoice needs covers the accounting end, and wholesale order management covers the tracking in between.
If you are still at the stage of working out which shops to send the form to at all, paste your store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers that stock products like yours. An order form with nobody to send it to is a formatting exercise.
Questions DTC brands ask about wholesale order forms
Should the order form show retail price too? Yes, as a suggested retail column. It reminds the buyer what their margin is while they are deciding, and it anchors the price you want them to sell at.
Can I just use my Shopify checkout with a discount code? It works for one or two friendly accounts and breaks quickly. Discount codes leak, checkout collects payment immediately when the account expects terms, and your order shows up in DTC revenue where it distorts every report you run.
How do I handle a buyer who orders below the minimum? Send the form back with the minimum highlighted and suggest the one extra case that gets them there. Most buyers add it. Waiving the minimum once teaches the account that it is not real.
Do I need a signature? A typed name and date is enough for a small brand. What matters is that the buyer, not you, entered the quantities.