A wholesale inquiry is a store, distributor or business buyer emailing to ask whether they can buy your product in quantity, below the Amazon retail price, to resell or use themselves. The right move is to reply within a day, verify who they are, and ask one qualifying question before you quote anything.
Most Amazon sellers get their first one by accident. It lands in Buyer-Seller Messaging, or through the contact form on the brand site you set up for Brand Registry, or as a reply to a review request. It reads something like "We run three gift shops in Colorado and would love to carry your candles, do you offer wholesale pricing?" and you have no idea what to say, because for three years every unit you have sold went through a Prime box.
This article is about what to do in that moment. The reply itself, word for word, is in how to answer wholesale inquiries as an Amazon seller. Here the question is what the inquiry means, whether it is real, and whether you want it.
Where wholesale inquiries reach an Amazon seller
They arrive through channels you probably do not check with any discipline:
- Buyer-Seller Messaging. A store owner buys one unit on Amazon, likes it, and messages you through the order. Amazon flags anything that looks like off-platform contact, so these messages are often vague on purpose.
- The brand website. If you built a site to qualify for Brand Registry, its contact form is where buyers who found you on Amazon go to talk business. Check it weekly.
- The email on your packaging or insert card. Retail buyers read inserts. Corporate buyers do too.
- Amazon Business. A business customer may use Request for Quote on your listing, or simply place a multi-unit order and then email asking about a better price for the next one.
- Social media DMs. Boutique owners live on Instagram. A message there is a real inquiry, not spam.
Set up one inbox that all of these forward to. An inquiry that sits unanswered for two weeks is dead; the store already found another supplier.
Is this inquiry real?
Amazon sellers are targeted by a specific kind of fake inquiry, so a filter is worth having. Real buyers almost always share a few traits: they name their store or company, the email domain matches a real website, and they ask about pricing, minimums and lead times in roughly that order. They do not ask you to ship to a freight forwarder before payment clears.
Warning signs, in rough order of how often they show up:
- A request for a pro forma invoice with unusual shipping arrangements, often overseas, paid by wire "after delivery".
- An email address at a consumer provider with no store name, no website and no address.
- A buyer who wants your cost price, your supplier's name, or your case-pack dimensions before asking anything about the product itself.
- Someone whose website is a storefront that sells hundreds of unrelated brands at Amazon prices. That is not a retailer. That is a reseller who wants to list on your ASIN.
The last one matters more to you than to any other kind of business, and it deserves its own section.
The reseller problem only Amazon sellers have
A gift shop buying twelve candles a month is a customer. A "distributor" who buys 500 units and lists them on your own detail page, undercuts you by a dollar, takes the Buy Box and then runs out of stock is a competitor you funded.
So the first thing to establish is not price. It is where the product will be sold. If the answer is "online marketplaces" or the buyer dodges the question, decline politely or set terms that make it unattractive. Brand Registry gives you tools to report unauthorized sellers, but only if you have a written authorized-reseller policy, and it is far easier to never sell to them than to fight them afterwards.
A real retailer, by contrast, has shelves. They may also sell online through their own site, and that is fine. What you are avoiding is your own inventory reappearing on your own listing.
The one question to ask before quoting
Before a price, ask this: "Where will you be selling it, and roughly how many units do you expect to move a month?"
It does three jobs. It exposes marketplace resellers. It tells you whether the buyer is a single boutique (twelve units), a regional chain (a few hundred) or a distributor (thousands and a very different price). And it signals that you have a process, which buyers read as a sign you will be reliable to work with.
You can and should ask it before you have a wholesale price at all. Most first-time inquiries take a week to turn into an order anyway.
Should an Amazon seller say yes at all?
Run the arithmetic on one unit before you answer. Take a product that sells for $24 on Amazon. The referral fee takes about $3.60. The FBA fee on a small item is around $4.50. If your ads run at a typical spend for the category, another $3 or so of that sale went to Sponsored Products. Landed cost from your supplier is $6. You keep roughly $7 per unit and you did all the work of getting it there.
Now the same unit at wholesale. The store pays $12, half of retail, which is the number most buyers expect. You ship a case of twelve on your own account or via Multi-Channel Fulfillment. No referral fee, no ad spend, no returns processing. You keep about $5 after the freight. Less per unit than a good Amazon sale, but with no ranking risk, no review dependency and a buyer who reorders on a schedule.
That is the trade. Wholesale margin is thinner per unit and far cheaper to earn. If your Amazon margin is already thin because of ad spend, wholesale often wins outright. The full side-by-side is in Amazon FBA vs wholesale to retailers.
The other reason to say yes is protection. A brand with sixty stockists is worth more to an aggregator, harder to knock off, and survives a listing suppression without the founder losing sleep.
What the buyer will expect that you may not have
A store that emails you is assuming a few things exist. It helps to know them before you reply so you are not caught off guard:
- A wholesale price sheet. One page: product, wholesale price, suggested retail, case size, UPC. Your Amazon listing already has the UPC and the retail price; the wholesale line is the only new number.
- A minimum order. Set it to one case per SKU for a first order. Nobody respects a brand with no minimum, and nobody places a first order of 500 units from a brand they found last week.
- Terms. New accounts pay up front by card or bank transfer. Net terms come later, for buyers who have reordered. This will feel strange when Amazon has been paying you every two weeks, but it is normal, and a new store asking for net 60 on the first order is a reason to say no.
- Shipping. Buyers assume you ship in cases with a packing slip. If all your stock is in FBA, Multi-Channel Fulfillment will send a case to a business address, though the box will say Amazon on it, which some stores dislike. Keeping a small stock of case-packed inventory at home or with a 3PL is the fix.
- A price that does not undercut them. A store selling your product at $24 cannot compete with your Amazon listing at $19.99 during a Lightning Deal. They will ask. Have an answer. Your Amazon Business pricing and any quantity discounts you run on Amazon need to sit above what the store pays, too.
Fulfilling the first order
The first order from a new stockist is small, and you should treat it as a test both ways. Confirm the order in writing with the quantity, price, ship date and payment terms. Ship it when you said you would. Include a packing slip, not an Amazon gift receipt.
If you are pulling from FBA, create a Multi-Channel Fulfillment order with plain packaging where available, or place a removal order for a few cases and ship them yourself. A removal takes a couple of weeks, so start it before you need the stock, not after the store has paid.
Then, and this is the part sellers skip, follow up three weeks later and ask how it is selling. That question is what turns a one-off order into the reorder cycle described in Amazon seller wholesale customers.
Turning one inquiry into a channel
One inquiry is luck. Ten is a channel. The store that emailed you is a sample of a much larger group: every shop, chain and distributor that carries products like yours and has never heard of you. If a Colorado gift shop wanted your candles, there are gift shops in forty-nine other states with the same buyer profile, and none of them will email you first.
Write down what the inquiring store looks like: category, size, region, what else they stock. Then go find the rest deliberately instead of waiting. Pasting your listing into WholesalePilot shows who would stock the product, which is a faster way to see that pattern than waiting for the next email to land.
The inquiry in your inbox is not an interruption to your Amazon business. It is the first evidence that the business is bigger than Amazon. Answer it well.