Finding stockists & retail buyers
A wholesale sales rep is an independent salesperson who carries your line alongside several others and sells it into stores for a commission on what those stores order. They do not buy your stock. They open doors, present the line, write orders, and take a cut of everything their accounts buy for as long as the arrangement lasts.
For most Shopify brands going wholesale for the first time, the honest answer is that a rep is a second-year decision, not a first-year one. A rep multiplies a product that already sells. They cannot make one sell, and no good rep will take on a line with no sell-through history.
What a rep actually does for you
The value is not effort, it is relationships. A working rep has thirty or eighty buyers who take their calls, because that rep has been right about products before. When they add your line to their bag, you are borrowing a decade of trust that you would otherwise spend two years building one cold email at a time.
In practice, the job is: carry samples, show the line during buying season, write orders, chase reorders, handle small complaints about a late delivery, and tell you what buyers said about the price. That last part is worth more than it sounds. A rep who reports that four buyers flinched at the same price point has just saved you a season.
What a rep does not do is fix your line sheet, build your packaging, set your terms, or ship your boxes. You still own all of that, and a rep will drop a brand that is disorganised faster than a buyer will.
The three shapes a rep arrangement takes
The independent multi-line rep. One person, a territory, and a bag of eight to fifteen non-competing lines. They work on straight commission. This is what most small brands mean by "a rep", and it is the realistic option.
The showroom. A group of reps with a permanent space at a trade market, plus a stand at the major shows. They take a higher commission and sometimes a monthly fee for the showroom space, and in exchange your line sits in front of buyers all season without you being there. Good for homeware, gift and apparel; usually too expensive for a brand under a certain volume.
The in-house salesperson. Your own employee or long-term contractor, on a base plus commission. This is a different thing entirely and belongs to a brand that already has accounts to service, not one that needs the first ten.
There is also the distributor, which people confuse with a rep constantly. A distributor buys your stock at a deeper discount and resells it; a rep never owns the stock and is paid on your invoices. They are separate channels with separate economics.
What a rep costs
Commission on independent lines commonly sits in the low to mid teens as a percentage of the wholesale invoice, with showrooms higher. Say your candle wholesales at twelve dollars in cases of six, and a rep at fifteen percent writes a four-case order: two hundred and eighty-eight dollars of invoice, forty-three dollars to the rep.
The number that catches brands out is that commission is usually paid on reorders too, for as long as the account is active or for a stated period after the rep stops carrying you. That is fair — they opened the account — but it means a rep is a permanent reduction of your wholesale margin, not a one-off acquisition cost.
So the test is simple: does your wholesale price survive losing a further slice? If your cost of goods is around a third of retail and you wholesale at half, there is room. If your cost of goods is closer to half your wholesale price, a rep will take you to nothing. Run the numbers before the conversation, using how to calculate wholesale price if you have not set them yet.
Beyond commission, expect to pay for samples. A rep needs a full set of every product they are selling, in every colourway, and those samples are gone. Budget for that as a real cost of signing one.
When a brand is actually ready for a rep
Four conditions, and skipping any one of them wastes both your time and theirs.
You have ten to twenty accounts of your own. A rep will ask what your sell-through looks like. "We have not started yet" ends the conversation, because they do not want to be your test.
You can fulfil reliably. A rep's reputation is the asset they are lending you. One late delivery to a buyer who trusted them is worse for them than for you, and they will quietly stop mentioning your line.
Your paperwork is finished. Line sheet, terms, minimums, case packs, barcodes, lead times, a way to place a reorder that does not involve a personal email exchange every time. If the wholesale readiness checklist still has gaps, fill them first.
You have margin to give away. See above.
Until those are true, the fastest route is still you, writing to shops yourself, using the method in how to get stockists. It is slower per door but it teaches you what buyers say, and that knowledge is what makes a rep productive later.
How to find and vet a rep
The best route is through buyers. Once you have a handful of stockists, ask each one which reps they buy from and enjoy dealing with. Shop owners answer this question happily and their answers are worth more than any directory, because they are telling you which reps they actually let in the door.
The second route is the trade shows in your category. Walk them as a visitor before you ever exhibit, see which showrooms represent lines that sit beside yours, and introduce yourself with a sample rather than a deck.
When you talk to one, ask four things. Which lines do you carry, and do any of them compete with mine. Which accounts would you take this to first, by name. How do you usually work an opening season, and what would you expect from me. And how do you get paid, and on what.
A rep who cannot name five target accounts on the spot does not know the territory. A rep who wants an exclusive on your whole country before selling anything is asking you to bet the channel on one person. And a rep who asks for a monthly retainer with no commission link is selling you activity, not orders.
The terms worth writing down
Keep the agreement short, but have one.
Define the territory precisely, by region or by named accounts, and keep the right to sell direct to accounts you opened yourself. State the commission rate, when it is paid — usually after you are paid, not when the order is written — and what happens to commission on reorders after the relationship ends, which is commonly a few months of tail.
Set a review point. Six months, with a number attached: a count of new accounts opened, not a vague promise. Agree who handles samples, who pays for them, and what returns if you part. And make exclusivity, if you grant any, conditional on that number being met.
Say clearly that pricing and terms are yours. A rep who discounts to close orders trains your accounts to expect it, and undoes the price discipline that makes wholesale worth running. The same principle sits behind your minimum order quantity: the floor is the floor, for everybody.
Managing a rep once you have one
A rep with fifteen lines sells the ones that are easy to sell and easy to be paid on. Being the easy line is most of the management.
Send them sell-through news they can repeat to a buyer: which product moved fastest in which kind of shop, what reorders look like. Reply to them within the day, ship on the date you said, and never let a buyer find out about a stock shortage from someone other than you. Give them a short seasonal update with one new thing to talk about, because a rep needs a reason to reopen a conversation.
And keep your own outreach running. A rep covers a territory, not a market, and the accounts you open yourself are the ones with no commission attached. If you want a quick sense of which retailers and distributors stock products like yours before deciding which territories need help, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview.
Questions DTC founders ask about sales reps
Can I pay a rep a salary instead? You can, but an independent rep on commission has no reason to prefer it, and a salaried salesperson only makes sense once there is an account base to service.
How many reps should a small brand have? One, in the region where your product already sells, until they prove the model. Signing four at once means managing four and learning from none.
Will a rep take a brand with one product? Rarely. A bag of samples has to justify the visit, and a single item is a hard sell against a line with six.
Do reps work for online-only wholesale? Less well. Their edge is the in-person relationship. If your channel is mostly a marketplace, spend the money on samples and outreach instead, and read wholesale sales strategy for how the channels fit together.