Selling Wholesale Without Running a Second Store

The wholesale problem most stores solve the hard way

Your best customer isn't a shopper — it's another business. They order in bulk, they expect a price that isn't your retail price, and they'd rather be invoiced than pay by card every time. So a lot of merchants end up bolting wholesale onto a retail store the messy way: a second "trade" storefront, a hidden collection with a password, or a spreadsheet of who gets what discount that only one person understands.

All three quietly cost you. A second store doubles the catalog you have to keep in sync. A hidden collection still shows retail math. And the spreadsheet is a margin leak waiting to happen — the wrong number typed once, honoured for a year.

The fix isn't more stores. It's giving each business buyer the right account, the right prices, and the right terms, inside the one store you already run.

A company account is the unit that makes B2B simple

Retail thinks in shoppers. B2B thinks in companies. A company account is one organisation with several people who can order for it — a buyer, an approver, an admin — each with their own login. When any of them checks out, they see the prices you negotiated for that company, not retail.

That single idea removes most of the mess. There's no separate customer list to reconcile, no shared login passed around a purchasing department, and no guessing which discount a given contact was promised. The deal lives on the account, and everyone on the account gets it.

You approve accounts before they go live — new companies start pending — so a business only gets wholesale treatment once you've said yes. Suspend one and it drops back to catalogue prices immediately.

Negotiated prices, without a negotiated-prices spreadsheet

A price list is where a company's real prices live. You assign a list to a company, and its buyers see those prices at checkout automatically. Two things make this cover almost every wholesale deal you'll strike:

Per-product overrides. A list entry sets the exact price a company pays for a product — the number you actually agreed on, not a percentage you hope rounds correctly.

Volume breaks. Add several entries for the same product at different minimum quantities and the buyer automatically gets the deepest break they qualify for. Set 250 from one unit, 230 from six, 210 from twelve, and a buyer ordering fifteen pays 210 without anyone doing math. Order eight and they pay 230. It just resolves.

When a product isn't on a company's list, the buyer can still fall to a wholesale-tier percentage off your catalogue price, and if there's no tier either, they pay the catalogue price. The order of precedence is fixed and predictable — a negotiated list price always wins over a tier discount — so you never have to wonder which rule fired. And every price is computed in whole cents on the server, so what the buyer sees is what you set.

Net terms, with a credit limit that actually holds

The other half of wholesale is when they pay. Businesses expect to buy on account — Net 30, Net 60 — and settle later. BestWebby lets a company order on terms: instead of charging a card, it issues a proper invoice due in the window you chose.

Extending credit is where merchants get nervous, and rightly so. That's why every terms order is checked against a credit limit you set before the invoice is issued. BestWebby adds up everything the company already owes on its open invoices and asks a simple question: would this order push them over the limit?

• If it fits, the invoice goes out and their balance goes up by the order total.
• If it doesn't, the order is blocked — and you're told the outstanding balance, the order amount, the limit, and exactly how far over it went. Collect against the open balance or raise the limit, and it goes through.

Two orders placed at the same second can't both sneak past the limit; they're processed one at a time per company. And the balance is always read from your real invoice records, never from anything the buyer's browser claims. Leave the limit blank and it's unlimited — but for most accounts, a number is the whole point.

Paid invoices free up headroom automatically. Pay down an open balance and the room comes back for the next order — the limit tracks what's actually outstanding, not a running total that never resets.

When you build the order for them

Not every B2B sale starts with the buyer clicking around your store. Often you're on the phone or email, agreeing on a cart together. A draft order is exactly that: you compose the lines — priced for that company automatically — and send a single payment link. The buyer opens it, no login needed, and pays. On a confirmed payment it becomes a real order in your normal pipeline.

The payment runs on your own connected gateway, so the money goes straight to you, and BestWebby confirms the payment actually succeeded and matches the order total before marking anything paid. Links expire on a window you choose, and a paid or cancelled link won't take a second payment. If you already sent a formal quote, accepting it can turn it straight into an order — built from the saved quote, not a number typed back in.

What this is not

It's not a second store to maintain, and it's not a system quietly deciding who gets what. You set the price list. You set the terms. You set the credit limit. You approve the account and the buyers on it. Every change — a new company, an added buyer, a price edited, a terms order issued, a link sent — is recorded, so the whole B2B relationship has a trail you can read back.

The point is to take the bookkeeping off your plate, not the decisions. The deal is still yours to make. BestWebby just makes sure the price that shows up, the invoice that goes out, and the limit that holds are the ones you set — every time, without the spreadsheet.

Where to start

Pick your single biggest wholesale customer. Make them a company account, add their buyer, and build a short price list with one or two volume breaks. Send them a draft-order payment link for their next order and watch it land in your pipeline like any other sale. Once that feels natural, turn on net terms and a credit limit — and retire the spreadsheet for good.