A wholesale website is one page on your existing site that tells a retail buyer what you sell, on what terms, and how to get started — plus whatever ordering mechanism sits behind it. The page is the part that matters. Brands spend months choosing a portal and then hide it behind a link in the footer that says "trade" and wonder why nobody applies.
Start from what the buyer is doing. A shop owner has seen your product somewhere — a show, another stockist, a customer asking for it — and they are on your site at eleven at night checking whether you are a real wholesale supplier or a hobby. They want five facts in under a minute. If they get them, they apply. If they have to email to find out your minimum, most do not bother.
The five facts a buyer is looking for
Put these above the fold, in plain language, without making anyone log in.
What the range is, and roughly what it costs at retail. A buyer needs to place you on a shelf and next to a price point before anything else matters.
Your minimum order. This is the single most common reason a buyer leaves a wholesale page, and hiding it does not make it smaller. State it as a dollar figure, and if you have a lower reorder minimum, say that too, because it makes the first number less frightening. How to set it is in wholesale minimum order.
Case sizes and lead time. Six to a case, ships in seven to ten business days. Two lines, enormous reassurance.
Terms. Prepaid on the first order, and what happens afterwards. Being upfront that you do not offer terms to new accounts is far better than being vague and having the conversation on order day.
Where you already sell. Two sentences about the kinds of shops that stock you, or a short stockist list. Buyers buy what other buyers have bought, and this is the closest thing to social proof that wholesale has.
Public page, gated prices
The useful split is that everything a buyer needs to decide whether to enquire is public, and the actual wholesale price list sits behind approval.
Keeping the page public matters for two reasons. Search is one: a buyer typing your category and the word wholesale will never find a page behind a login. The other is credibility — a locked door with no explanation reads as a brand that is not really open for business.
Gating the prices matters too. Wholesale pricing in public confuses consumers who can now see your cost structure, annoys existing stockists who feel their margin is on display, and invites requests from people who are not retailers. The options for putting a login in front of pricing without rebuilding your store are in shopify wholesale login.
The middle path most small brands land on: a public page with the range, the minimum, the terms and the case sizes, and a sheet with prices emailed on approval. That is enough for years, and the sheet itself is covered in wholesale price list.
Where the page should live
Not in the footer. A wholesale link belongs in your main navigation, or at minimum in the top-level menu under a name a buyer will recognise.
Call it Wholesale, or Stockists, or Trade. Do not call it Partners, Collaborations or For Business — buyers scan for the word they use, and cleverness costs you applications.
Give it a clean address, something like your domain followed by /wholesale, and keep it there. That address ends up on your line sheet, in your email signature, on your packaging and in the bio of your Instagram, and a page that moves breaks all of them at once.
Add a short mention on your About page and in your footer as well. A footer link is not the strategy, but it catches the buyer who arrived at a product page and started scrolling.
What to put below the fold
Once the five facts are handled, the rest of the page is about removing doubt.
Photography a shop can actually use. Product on white for line sheets, product in a real retail setting for imagining it on a shelf, and a couple of lifestyle images they can reshare. Say explicitly that stockists may use these images. Buyers are used to asking permission and are pleased when they do not have to.
A short section on what you provide beyond the product. Display suggestions, shelf cards, a staff note, reorder reminders. This is a genuine differentiator for a small brand and almost nobody mentions it. What belongs in that offer is in retailer support.
Answers to the questions you keep getting by email. Do you have barcodes. Is there a shelf life. Are you exclusive in a territory. Do you sell on marketplaces. Every one of those answered on the page is an email you do not write and a buyer who does not stall.
And one clear next step. One button, one form, one instruction. The design of that form is its own decision, and it is covered in wholesale application.
Do you need a full ordering portal
Not at first, and the temptation to build one early is expensive.
Up to roughly ten accounts, emailing an order sheet and sending an invoice works fine and costs nothing. The friction is yours, not the buyer's, and buyers generally prefer replying to an email over learning a new system.
Between ten and thirty accounts, the maths changes. Rekeying orders starts eating real hours and mistakes creep in. This is usually the point to put a simple gated catalogue with price lists behind a login in front of your existing store rather than building a second site.
Past that, you are choosing between a proper business-to-business channel on your existing platform and a separate storefront, and that is a platform decision rather than a page decision.
The mistake to avoid is building the portal before you have the accounts. A polished ordering system with four users is a project that felt like progress. The page that gets you applications is the thing that produces those users.
Making the page findable
A wholesale page that only your existing contacts can find is a form, not a channel.
Write the page in the words buyers use — wholesale, stockist, trade enquiries, minimum order, line sheet — because those are the terms they search for. Name your category plainly too; a buyer looking for a supplier searches for the product, not for your brand.
Link to it from everywhere your brand already exists: your email signature, your packaging insert, your social bios, the footer of every invoice.
Then accept that inbound will always be the smaller half. Most wholesale accounts come from you contacting shops, and the page's real job is to make that outreach land — a buyer who gets your email and clicks through to a serious wholesale page replies at a much higher rate than one who lands on a consumer homepage. The outreach side is in wholesale outreach.
If you are not sure which shops to point at the page, paste your store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock comparable products. A wholesale page plus a list of shops that plausibly want your category is the whole channel in its simplest form.
Questions brands ask about a wholesale page
Should wholesale prices ever be public? Only if your category expects it and your consumer customers will not be confused. For most maker brands, keeping them behind approval is the calmer choice.
Can the wholesale page live on a different domain? It can, but it rarely helps. A page on your main site inherits the credibility and the search presence you already have.
What if the range changes constantly? Publish the categories and the terms rather than a fixed list, and keep the changing detail in the sheet you email after approval.
Do buyers actually read the terms on the page? The good ones do, and the ones who do not still benefit from them existing, because you can point at them later without it feeling like a new rule.