Ways to sell

Retail, wholesale, subscription and counter — one catalogue

Retail, trade, subscription and over the counter — different customers, different prices, one catalogue.

Most merchants do not sell one way. There is the shop, and then there is the trade customer who buys forty at a time, the standing monthly order, the market stall at the weekend, and the affiliate who sends traffic. Each of those has different pricing, different terms and a different buying rhythm.

The usual answer is a separate system for each, and the usual result is several stock figures that disagree. Everything on this page runs against the same catalogue and decrements the same number.

Wholesale and trade

Trade pricing is not a percentage off retail. It is negotiated, it varies by customer, and it often varies by product for the same customer. So it is expressed as prices — tier, account-specific, and quantity breaks — rather than as discounts, which means a retail promotion cannot accidentally stack on top of a trade rate.

Trade accounts start as applications rather than open signups, carry payment terms and a credit limit, and can request a quote that becomes an order without anyone rekeying the lines.

Subscriptions

A recurring order is a different shape from a one-off: it has a cadence, it skips, it pauses, it gets gifted, and the customer expects to manage all of that themselves rather than emailing you. It also consumes stock on a schedule, which is a forecasting problem the moment you have more than a handful.

Point of sale

A counter, a market stall or a trade desk sells from the same stock as the website. If it does not, you are running two businesses that happen to share a name. Sales at the till decrement the figure every channel reads, immediately.

Affiliates and memberships

Both are ways of paying for demand rather than buying it. Affiliates earn commission on orders they can be shown to have caused; memberships charge for access, better pricing or free delivery. Both need attribution you can defend when someone disputes a payout, which is more of the work than the payment itself.

The point of them sharing a catalogue

A wholesale order of forty decrements the same figure as a website order for one and a sale at the till. There is no reconciliation step at the end of the day, because there is nothing separate to reconcile. Two systems means two truths, and two truths means overselling on whichever one finds out last.

One catalogue, every channel

Connect a channel and see your own stock reconcile. No card required.