Amazon Seller to Wholesalers: How to Sell Into the Trade

Selling to a wholesaler means selling one layer further back than selling to a store. The wholesaler buys your case packs, holds them in their own warehouse, and resells them to hundreds of retailers you will never speak to. You get volume and one invoice. You give up roughly another ten to fifteen points of margin and most of your control over where the product ends up.

That trade is the whole decision. This article covers what a wholesaler actually buys, the numbers that have to work before a conversation is worth having, and the terms that quietly decide whether the channel makes money.

Wholesaler, distributor, jobber: what the words mean in practice

The Amazon world uses these terms loosely. The trade does not.

A wholesaler buys broadly and sells to anyone with a resale certificate. They rarely carry your brand story, they compete on price and availability, and they usually want no commitment beyond the purchase order in front of them. A distributor takes a narrower range, often within one category or one region, and does something for the brand: shows the line to buyers, holds stock for reorder, sometimes puts a rep in front of stores. A jobber or closeout buyer takes whatever is cheap and moves it fast, which is a useful relationship for discontinued stock and a dangerous one for your core range.

For a brand coming off Amazon, the distributor relationship is usually the one worth building and the pure wholesaler is the one worth being careful with. The detail on how the two differ in practice is in amazon seller distributors.

What a wholesaler is actually buying from you

Not your listing. Not your reviews. They are buying the probability that their retail customers reorder.

That probability is made of four things, and every one of them is something you can show from Seller Central. Proven sell-through, which your unit sales history covers. A price the retailer can make money on, which is your job to construct. Case packs and barcodes that fit their warehouse, which most Amazon brands have never thought about. And enough inventory depth that a reorder in six weeks does not arrive as an apology.

The pitch that works is short and numeric: here is the product, here is what it sells for at retail, here is what it does in units per month on Amazon, here is the case pack and the cost, here is the lead time. A wholesaler who has heard a thousand brand stories will read that in ten seconds and know whether to keep reading.

The margin stack, worked through

This is where most Amazon brands stop, because the number looks bad until you take the Amazon costs out of the comparison.

Take a product that sells for twenty-four dollars on Amazon. Landed cost is six dollars. Amazon takes a referral fee of about three dollars sixty, FBA fulfilment of about five dollars, and you spend three dollars per unit on advertising to hold rank. That leaves roughly six dollars forty of contribution per unit.

Now the wholesale version. Retail stays at twenty-four dollars so you are not undercutting anybody. The store buys at twelve dollars, which is the keystone the trade expects. The wholesaler buys from you at around eight dollars fifty and takes their cut in the middle. Your cost is still six dollars, plus maybe forty cents of case packing and freight allocation.

Two dollars ten against six dollars forty looks like a loss until you notice what is missing from the third row: no advertising, no returns processing, no storage fees, no rank to defend, and an order that arrives in cases rather than singles. A wholesaler placing a four-hundred-unit order every two months is eight hundred and forty dollars of contribution with almost no variable work attached, and it does not degrade when a competitor bids up your keyword.

The arithmetic behind each of those lines is laid out in wholesale pricing for amazon products, and the comparison against ad-funded Amazon contribution in acos vs wholesale margin.

The number that has to work before anything else

Your cost has to sit near or below a third of retail. If landed cost is six dollars and retail is twenty-four, you are at a quarter and the stack above works. If landed cost is ten dollars on a twenty-four dollar product, the wholesaler price would have to be around eight fifty and you would be selling below cost.

Many private label products priced for Amazon fail this test, because Amazon lets you carry a high cost and still profit on a high retail price with no middlemen. Before you pitch anyone, run the test. If it fails, the options are a larger production run to cut unit cost, a different pack size built for retail, or a higher retail price that Amazon can also support.

Case packs, barcodes and the boring things that kill deals

A wholesaler's warehouse is built around cases, not units. Send them loose polybagged singles and you have created a labour problem they will price back to you.

What they need is an inner pack and a master case with a fixed count, a case-level barcode that is not the same as your unit barcode, weight and dimensions that fit a standard pallet without overhang, and a carton that survives being stacked. Case counts of six, twelve and twenty-four are conventional for a reason: they divide neatly into a shelf and into a pallet layer.

Your Amazon barcodes carry over. The unit GTIN stays the same, which means a wholesaler's retail customer can scan it and, yes, can also look it up on Amazon. That is not a problem to hide from. It is a reason to have your pricing policy written down before the first order.

Pricing policy, or how this channel goes wrong

Here is the predictable failure. You sell four hundred units to a wholesaler at eight fifty. The wholesaler sells two hundred of them to a retailer who does not move them. That retailer lists the surplus on Amazon at nineteen dollars, takes your Buy Box, and now your own product is your cheapest competitor.

The defences are ordinary trade practice and you set them up before the first invoice. A written minimum advertised price that covers online listings. A reseller agreement that names authorised channels and says marketplaces are not one of them unless you approve. Lot coding so you can trace a diverted case back to the account that sold it. And the discipline to cut off an account that breaks the policy, which is the only part that actually works.

map policy amazon sellers covers how to write the policy so it holds, and stop wholesale customers selling on amazon covers what to do once a case has already leaked.

Terms, and the cash gap nobody warns you about

Amazon pays you every two weeks. Wholesalers pay on net thirty or net sixty, and they count from the invoice date, not from when the pallet landed.

So a brand that has always funded inventory from Amazon payouts suddenly needs to fund a production run, ship it, and wait two months for the money. On a four-hundred-unit order at eight fifty, that is thirty-four hundred dollars of cash sitting in someone else's warehouse for eight weeks, on top of the twenty-four hundred you spent making it.

Three things keep this manageable. Start with net thirty and earn the longer terms. Ask for a deposit or prepayment on a first order from an account you do not know, which is normal and rarely refused. And run a credit check through the usual trade references before you extend terms to anyone, because an unpaid wholesale invoice is a much worse outcome than a slow one. amazon payout vs net 30 works through the cash-flow timing in detail.

How to find wholesalers who would actually carry your product

The useful search is not for wholesalers in general. It is for the specific wholesalers already supplying the retailers that stock products like yours, because those are the only ones whose customer base wants what you make.

Work backwards from the shelf. Find five stores that would plausibly carry your product, look at three or four brands sitting next to where yours would go, and find out who distributes them. Trade shows in your category list exhibiting distributors by name. Category-specific wholesalers are usually easier to reach than the giant general ones, and far more likely to give a new brand a first order.

If you want that mapping done from the product rather than by hand, paste your Amazon listing into WholesalePilot and the preview shows which distributors and retailers plausibly stock products in your category, which is enough to tell whether the channel is real for you before you order case packs.

Questions Amazon sellers ask about selling to wholesalers

Will a wholesaler expect exclusivity? Sometimes, usually by region or by channel. Regional exclusivity for a defined term against a volume commitment is reasonable. Open-ended national exclusivity from an untested account is not.

Do they want my Amazon numbers? Yes, and it helps you. Unit velocity, review count and category rank are exactly the proof a buyer normally has to guess at. Bring the business report.

What size first order should I expect? Smaller than you hope. A first order is a test, often one or two cases per item. Treat it as the audition it is and ship it perfectly.

Can I sell to wholesalers and keep selling on Amazon? Yes, and most brands should. The channels only conflict if your pricing policy is missing. Running both at once is normal; the pricing policy is what keeps them from colliding.