Pitching retailers as an Amazon brand
A Shopify store gives an Amazon brand three ways to take wholesale orders: send a draft order by email and let the retailer pay the link, tag approved customers and show them a separate price list, or run a full trade area with logins, net terms and minimums. They cost different amounts and suit different account counts, and picking the biggest one first is the most common waste of money in this whole exercise.
The short version: under about ten accounts, draft orders are enough and cost nothing. Between ten and forty, a price-list setup earns its keep. Past that, a proper trade area saves you a working day a month.
Why Shopify at all when you already have FBA
Because wholesale orders do not fit the marketplace. An Amazon listing sells one unit to a consumer at a fixed price with a fixed fee. A retailer buys three cases, expects a purchase order number on the invoice, pays on terms and wants a delivery note in the box.
You can do all of that with a spreadsheet and a payment link, and plenty of brands do for the first year. What a store gives you is a place where the retailer can see the range, the wholesale price they are entitled to, and their own order history, without you being in the loop for every reorder. That last part is where the time goes: reorders are the whole point of wholesale, and reorders that need a human are reorders that do not happen.
Keeping FBA for consumer orders and using the store for trade is a normal arrangement. Some brands even fulfil the wholesale orders out of FBA inventory, which has its own constraints and is covered in shipping to retailers from FBA.
Option one: draft orders
This is the version to start with, and it is built into every Shopify plan.
You create an order manually in the admin, set the quantities, apply a discount to reach the wholesale price, add the retailer's details and a note with their purchase order number, and send an invoice link. They pay by card or you mark it as pending and ship on terms. Shopify records the sale, deducts stock and produces the paperwork.
Cost: nothing beyond the plan you already pay for. Time: about ten minutes per order, which is fine at four orders a month and painful at twenty.
The limitation is that the retailer cannot self-serve. Every reorder requires you to build another draft. For a brand with a handful of stockists who order every eight weeks, that is a manageable two hours a month and it buys you a direct conversation with each account, which early on is worth having.
One habit to adopt immediately: put the retailer's purchase order number on every invoice, even when they have not given you one. Half of small retailers will not use them and half of larger ones will refuse to pay without one. Purchase orders for an Amazon seller covers what the number is for and what happens when it is missing.
Option two: tagged customers and a wholesale price list
The middle version. Approved retailers get a customer tag, and that tag unlocks a separate set of prices when they log in.
On current Shopify plans this is handled by the built-in business-to-business features on the higher tier, or by an app on the lower tiers. Either way the mechanics are the same: a company record, one or more locations, a price list attached to that company, and rules for minimum order value and payment terms.
What to configure, in the order that matters:
A price list per customer type, not per customer. Most brands need two at most: standard wholesale and distributor. Resist the urge to give every account a bespoke number, because bespoke pricing is impossible to maintain and invites a buyer to ask what the other stores pay.
A minimum order value enforced at checkout, so you never receive a two-unit wholesale order that costs more to pick than it earns.
Case-pack quantities. Sell wholesale in multiples of the case, not in singles, or you will be opening cartons to fill orders. The reasoning is in case packs for retail.
Separate shipping rates for trade orders, because consumer rates priced for a single unit will lose money on a 40-pound carton.
Option three: a full trade area with terms
The version worth building once wholesale is a real channel: retailer logins, a catalogue that only they see, net terms, order history, and reordering without you.
Net terms is the part that needs thought rather than configuration. Offering net thirty means shipping goods and waiting a month for the money, on top of the cash already tied up in inventory. For a brand whose Amazon payout arrives on a two-week cycle, extending terms to a dozen accounts at once can create a genuine cash squeeze. The rule most brands settle on is prepayment for the first two orders, then terms on request with a credit check. Net thirty terms for an Amazon seller walks through when to say yes.
The other configuration that matters is tax. Wholesale sales to a retailer who will resell are generally exempt, but only if you hold a valid exemption certificate on file. Collect it at account approval, store it, and set the customer to tax-exempt only after it is in hand. Getting this wrong is quiet and expensive. Sales tax on wholesale for an Amazon seller is the place to check the specifics for your situation.
What it costs
| Setup | Monthly cost | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Draft orders only | Nothing extra | Up to about 10 accounts |
| Wholesale app on a standard plan | 30 to 90 dollars | 10 to 40 accounts |
| Built-in business features, higher plan | Plan step up | 20 accounts and above |
| Custom trade portal | Build cost plus upkeep | Large catalogues, many tiers |
Two costs are easy to miss. Apps that gate prices behind a login often interfere with the theme, so budget a few hours of adjustment or a small developer bill. And any setup that hides prices from search engines changes how your own consumer traffic behaves, so keep the consumer catalogue fully public and put the trade catalogue behind the login rather than the other way around.
Keeping the channels from fighting
The risk is not technical, it is commercial: your Shopify consumer price, your Amazon price and your retailers' shelf price all have to make sense together.
Set one suggested retail price and keep the Amazon listing and the Shopify consumer price at it. Discount on the marketplace only with a plan, because a storewide promotion that undercuts a retailer by a third is how a stockist decides not to reorder, and they will not tell you why. If your marketplace strategy depends on frequent promotions, that tension needs resolving before the first wholesale account, not after. The full argument belongs in your pricing policy, written down once and applied to every channel.
Also decide what you will do when a retailer resells on Amazon. It will happen, usually from one account buying more than their store could sell. A short clause in your terms, plus lot codes on cases, is enough to identify the source. The mechanics are in wholesale customers reselling on Amazon.
A sensible order of work
Week one, enable draft orders and take your first three wholesale orders manually. You will learn what the invoice needs to say before you automate anything.
Month two, if the orders keep coming, create a wholesale customer tag and a price list, publish a trade sign-up form, and put minimums and case packs into the rules.
Month four or later, when reorders outnumber new accounts, move to a full trade area with logins and terms. By then you will know which accounts deserve terms and what your real case-pack economics are, and the configuration will take an afternoon instead of a week.
The step nobody can automate is finding the retailers to put into any of this. If that is where you are stuck rather than on the software, pasting your Amazon listing into WholesalePilot shows the kinds of stores and distributors that plausibly stock a product like yours, which is a more useful starting point than a blank customer list.