Trade-only products
Lines an approved wholesale account can see and buy that never appear on your retail shop.
Most merchants with a trade side have lines that should never be visible to the public: bulk formats, contract lines, products a brand allows you to sell wholesale but not retail.
How it works
- Visibility is a property of the product against the account type, so a trade-only line is absent from the retail storefront rather than hidden by a theme.
- Company catalogues restrict a given account to the products you actually supply them, which matters when different customers have different agreements.
- Trade pricing applies on top, so the same product can be a different price to two approved accounts.
Absent, not hidden
The distinction is worth being precise about. A product hidden with CSS or excluded from a menu is still published, still in the sitemap, and still reachable by anyone with the URL. A trade-only product is not rendered into the retail storefront at all.
If a brand agreement is the reason a line is trade-only, that difference is the whole point.
What it does not do
It does not stop an approved trade customer sharing a price with someone. Restricting who can see a line is access control, not confidentiality.
Stop reconciling stock by hand
One catalogue, six channels, one stock figure that stays right.