A wholesale price list is the one-page table a buyer uses to build an order: every product you sell, its case size, its wholesale price per unit, and the retail price you suggest. It is not a catalogue and it is not a pitch. It is the document a shop opens on their second visit to your brand, when they have already decided they are interested and now need to know what things cost.
Most first-time brands send something that is half brochure and half spreadsheet, and buyers quietly find it annoying. Splitting the two apart — one document that sells, one that prices — makes both better.
The columns a buyer actually needs
Run a hot sauce brand through it. Eleven dollars retail, five fifty wholesale, cases of twelve, so a case is sixty-six dollars.
The row for that product needs eight things and nothing else.
The item code, short and stable, something like HS-CHI-150. The product name as it appears on the label. The size or variant. The case pack, written as a number of units. The wholesale price per unit. The case price, because buyers order in cases and doing twelve times five fifty in their head twenty times is friction you can remove for them. The suggested retail price. And the unit barcode, because a shop that scans at the till cannot stock what they cannot scan.
That is the whole row. Everything else — ingredients, heat level, the story of the farm — belongs on the line sheet or the product page, not here.
Two optional columns earn their place in some categories. Inner packs, if a case of twelve is made of two inners of six and a shop can buy the inner. And lead time, if it varies by product, because a buyer planning a season needs to know that one line ships in three days and another in three weeks.
Price list versus line sheet versus catalogue
These three words get used interchangeably and they are three different documents with three different jobs.
A line sheet is visual. One photo per product, the name, the case pack and the price, laid out so a buyer can scan it and feel something. It is what you attach to a first email. Building one is covered step by step in how to make a line sheet.
A price list is a table. No photos, every product, every price, every case size, designed to be printed or read on a laptop while filling in an order. It is what a buyer asks for when they say "send me your pricing".
A catalogue is the long version: the full range, the story, the merchandising suggestions, often seasonal. Brands with large ranges need one; a brand with nine products does not.
If you only make one, make the line sheet, because it can carry the prices. The moment your range passes roughly twenty products, split the price list out, because a table of forty rows with photos is unreadable and a table of forty rows without photos is perfectly clear. The distinction between the two is unpacked further in wholesale line sheet.
The lines above and below the table
The table is the easy part. The framing around it is where disputes get prevented.
At the top: the brand name, the season or effective date, and a validity window. "Prices effective 1 September, valid through 31 January" ends the argument about whether last year's sheet still applies. Put a version number on it too, something as simple as a date in the file name, because buyers keep old files forever.
At the bottom, in six or seven short lines: the minimum opening order, the minimum reorder, the case-only rule if you have one, the freight policy and threshold, payment terms, and lead time. That block is the most-read part of the document and it is usually the part brands forget.
One sentence on prices changing is worth including: prices are subject to change with thirty days' notice, orders already confirmed are honoured at the confirmed price. Nobody objects to it and it saves a conversation every time your cost of goods moves.
Where the discount tiers go
If you run quantity breaks, they go on the price list, under the table, as a small block of their own — not sprinkled through the rows.
For the sauce: five fifty per bottle at one to five cases, five twenty at six to seventeen, four ninety at eighteen and above. Three lines, cumulative across the order, stated plainly.
Keep the tier table visually separate from the price column so a buyer never misreads which number applies to them. And state whether the tier is per product or across the order, because that ambiguity produces an invoice argument roughly every third time it is left open. The design of those breaks — where to put them and what they should cost you — is in volume discounts.
Should the list show your retail price?
Yes, on every row, and a surprising number of brands leave it off.
The suggested retail price is doing two jobs at once. It tells the buyer what margin they get without making them calculate it, and it tells them what you expect the product to sell for, which is the quiet start of every pricing-policy conversation you will later have.
For the sauce, eleven retail against five fifty wholesale is exactly keystone, a margin of fifty percent. A buyer scanning twenty rows and seeing keystone on all of them relaxes. A buyer seeing a jumble — one line at keystone, one at forty percent, one at sixty — starts checking each row, and checking turns into questioning.
So keep the relationship between the two numbers consistent across the range even when your costs are not. A product that only supports a thin margin either gets its retail price raised or gets left off the wholesale list entirely.
Different lists for different accounts
Once you have more than a handful of accounts you will want more than one price list, and the way to do it without chaos is to make the differences structural rather than personal.
Acceptable reasons to hold a second list: distributors buy at a distributor price because they resell to shops. Accounts in another country buy in another currency with different freight assumptions. Very large accounts with committed annual volume buy at a committed price.
Not acceptable: a shop that negotiated hard once. That is not a price list, that is a leak, and it will surface the first time two buyers compare notes at a trade show.
If your wholesale orders run through your own store rather than documents, the same principle holds. Build named price lists for the account types you actually have, assign accounts to them, and resist creating a list with one member. The store-side mechanics of that are in shopify b2b price lists.
The format to send it in
Send a PDF. Not a spreadsheet, not a link that needs an account, not a document that reflows differently on the buyer's screen.
The reason is unglamorous: buyers print price lists, annotate them, and pass them to whoever places the order. A PDF survives that. A spreadsheet invites edits, and an edited price list will come back to you as a purchase order with numbers you did not agree to.
Name the file so it is findable a year later: brand, price list, effective date. Not "pricelist-final-v3". Buyers have dozens of these and the ones they cannot identify in a folder do not get reordered from.
Keep it to one page if you can, two at most. If the table will not fit, the answer is usually that your range is too broad for wholesale rather than that you need a third page, and trimming to the lines that actually sell through is the better fix. Sequencing which products to put in front of a new account is covered in opening order.
If you are not yet sure which stores should be receiving the list at all, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products. The shape of that list tells you whether you need one price list or three.
Questions brands ask about wholesale price lists
Should the price list be public on my website? Put it behind a short form rather than on an open page. Not because the prices are secret, but because you want to know who is looking, and because customers finding your wholesale prices creates awkward conversations about your own retail price.
How often should prices change? Once a year for most small brands, at a predictable time, with notice. Mid-season changes are the thing buyers remember, and not fondly.
Does every product need to be on it? No. Limited runs, seconds and personal-order items can stay off entirely. A shorter list with clear availability beats a long one full of things you cannot reliably supply.
What if a buyer asks for the price list in their own template? Fill it in. Chains and distributors often have one, it is usually a sign the account is real, and refusing over formatting is a strange place to make a stand.