Pricing & margins beyond Amazon
Wholesale pricing for a product that already sells on Amazon works backwards from the shelf price, not forwards from your Amazon price. Decide what the product should cost in a store, give the retailer the margin their format requires, give the distributor theirs if one is in the chain, and check that what is left covers your landed cost and the contribution you need. If it does not, the product is not ready for wholesale at that retail price, and discounting your Amazon price to make the arithmetic work is the wrong fix.
That reversal is the whole discipline. Sellers who start from their Amazon price and apply a discount arrive at a number that is either unsellably high or quietly unprofitable, and they usually do not find out which until a buyer has already said no.
Start from the shelf, not from your listing
Retail pricing is a chain of margins, and each link has a customary size.
A specialty or independent retailer typically works on keystone: they double the price they paid. A product they buy at $12 sits on the shelf at $24. Some categories run higher, gift and home goods particularly, where a multiple above two is normal because the store carries slow inventory and needs the cushion.
A distributor takes a further layer, because they are buying from you and selling to the retailer. If the retailer needs to buy at $12 to sell at $24, and the distributor needs a margin to cover warehousing, sales reps and terms, the distributor buys from you somewhere near $8 to $9.
Larger chains compress the middle differently. A national chain usually buys direct, skipping the distributor, but expects a lower price than an independent would pay and adds allowances, returns provisions and promotional funding on top. The number on the purchase order is not the number you keep.
So the first question is not what the wholesale price should be. It is what the product should cost on a shelf, and which of those three routes you are pricing for.
Building the three tiers
Most brands end up with three prices for the same item, and publishing them cleanly prevents most of the awkward conversations.
Retail price, or MSRP. What the product should sell for in a store. This should sit at or very near your Amazon price, which is the point most sellers get wrong in the other direction.
Wholesale price. What an independent retailer pays, typically half the retail price.
Distributor price. What a distributor pays, typically a further discount below wholesale, in exchange for volume and for carrying the stock.
Work it on a $36 retail ceramic planter. MSRP $36. Wholesale to a retailer $18. Distributor price $13.50 on full cases.
Now check the bottom. Landed cost of goods on a larger production run is $6.20. Shelf-ready inner and master carton add $0.70. Pallet freight is $0.40 a unit. A selling cost of $0.60 covers commission or your own amortised time. A terms allowance of $0.25 covers the value of being paid on Net 30.
At the distributor price: $13.50 minus $8.15 of cost leaves $5.35 a unit. At the retailer price: $18 minus $8.15 leaves $9.85, though direct retail accounts cost more to service per unit, so a higher selling cost is honest there.
Both work. If either had come out below your floor, the answer is a higher retail price, a lower cost of goods or a different channel — never a thinner retail margin, because a retailer who cannot make their number simply does not stock the product.
Why your Amazon price sets the ceiling
This is the constraint that makes Amazon sellers different from brands that never sold direct, and it cuts both ways.
Your Amazon listing is a public price that every buyer will look up before the meeting. If the planter sells at $29 on Amazon and you are asking a store to retail it at $36, the buyer's objection is immediate and correct: their customer will check their phone in the aisle and buy it cheaper from you.
The fix is not to raise your Amazon price after the fact, which costs conversion and rank. The fix is to set the retail price you want in stores first, and to have your Amazon price live at or near it. For most brands this means Amazon should not be the cheapest place to buy the product, which feels counterintuitive after years of optimising for the Buy Box.
The second half of the constraint is the one buyers raise out loud: a store does not want to compete with your listing at all. The answers that work are practical rather than rhetorical. Price parity, so the shelf is never undercut. A different pack configuration for retail — a two-pack or a different colourway — so the items are not identical. A published minimum advertised price policy that also binds the resellers on your listing. None of these require you to leave Amazon, and all of them require you to think about the price before the conversation rather than during it.
The costs that actually follow the unit into wholesale
A useful pricing model separates the costs that travel with a wholesale unit from the ones that do not, because the second list is longer than sellers expect.
Gone entirely: referral fee, fulfilment fee, Amazon storage, per-unit advertising, return processing, removals, and the surcharges described in Amazon seller fees. None of them touch a pallet that goes from your warehouse to a distributor's dock.
New or larger: shelf-ready packaging, since an Amazon poly bag will not sit on a shelf. Case and master carton design. Pallet freight, which is cheap per unit and real. Sales cost, whether a commission, a rep or your own time. A terms allowance, because money on Net 30 is worth less than money now. And a small allowance for damages and short shipments, which is the retail equivalent of returns.
Roughly unchanged: landed cost of goods, though it usually falls slightly, because wholesale orders justify larger production runs. Do not assume a large saving until the factory has quoted it, and do not build the price around a discount that has not been confirmed.
The full side-by-side of the two cost structures is in FBA fees versus wholesale margin, and the sheet that holds both is in the Amazon seller margin calculator.
Case pricing, minimums and the things buyers ask for
A price list is more than a number, and the surrounding terms are where new brands lose money.
Case quantity. Price per case, not per unit, and make the case a sensible retail quantity. Six or twelve is standard for most small goods. A case of forty-eight tells an independent store you are not interested in them.
Opening order minimum. A minimum that covers your cost of servicing the account. Something in the region of $250 to $400 is common for independents, and it filters out orders that cost more to pack than they earn.
Reorder minimum. Lower than the opening order, because the relationship already exists.
Terms. Payment on the order for new accounts, Net 30 once they have a history. Extending terms to a first-time account you cannot check is an avoidable loss.
Volume breaks. A modest step at higher quantities, which gives you something to concede in a negotiation without touching the base price.
Publish all of it on one page alongside the tiers. A buyer who has to ask five questions to work out what an order costs will often not ask.
Deciding which products to put on the list
Not everything in your catalogue belongs in wholesale, and the selection criteria are not the same as the ones that make a product work on Amazon.
The good candidates have a cost of goods low enough to survive the chain of margins, a format that looks like something on a shelf, and demand that does not depend on your advertising. That last one is the real filter: a product that only sells because of a sponsored placement has no organic demand for a store to capture.
The poor candidates are bulky items where freight eats the margin, very low-priced items where nothing survives two layers of retail margin, and products whose entire proposition is a listing page full of comparison charts. If the product needs a thousand words to explain, it will not sell from a shelf.
Before you price anything, find out which kinds of buyers stock your category, because a price list built for independents is a different document from one built for distributors. Paste your listing into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the distributor and retailer types that carry products like yours, which tells you which tier to design first.
Questions sellers ask about wholesale pricing
Should the wholesale price be exactly half of retail? Half is the convention for independent retail and a useful starting point. What matters is that the retailer can make their number and you can make yours, so check both before treating the convention as a rule.
Can you charge different prices to different accounts? Tiering by volume and by account type is normal and expected. Charging two similar accounts different prices for the same quantity is how you lose both when they compare notes.
What if a distributor asks for a deeper discount than your list? Find out what they are offering in return — volume commitment, territory coverage, a category review at one of their chains. A deeper discount for nothing is a price cut dressed as a negotiation.
Does selling wholesale require a different barcode? The retail unit needs a proper barcode on the outside of the packaging where a scanner can reach it, which is often a change from an Amazon configuration where the label sits on a poly bag.
How does wholesale pricing affect your Amazon margin? Not at all directly, but it affects your production runs, which usually lowers your cost of goods across both channels. That is one of the quieter reasons a second channel improves the first.