Wholesale Handler
Decide what goes on the trade list
Not everything you make has to be on it. Splitting the range is what keeps the two sides of the business from fighting: some lines go to the trade, some stay yours alone, and neither is competing with the other for the same shelf.
The rule that matters most is that your own prices cannot undercut the shop stocking you. A customer who finds your product cheaper on your website than on the shelf they are standing in front of has just cost that shop a sale, and the shop notices.
Wholesale Handler keeps the two apart by assignment. Products opt in to a public storefront one at a time, and the storefront publishes whichever price list you point it at while each trade customer keeps their own. The public sees one set of numbers and your accounts see theirs.
Work the price up from cost, then check it against the shelf
The usual advice is to halve your retail price, and it only holds if the retail price was built on real costs in the first place. Start from what a unit costs to make - materials, labour, overhead, your own time - and add the margin you need. Small food producers are generally told to hold 20 to 35 percent after costs.
Then check that number against what the shop needs, which is roughly half the shelf price. If your cost-built price will not fit under that, the answer is information about the business at this scale rather than a reason to go lower. Underpricing to win the first account is the single most common mistake, and a buyer who started on a discount rarely accepts an increase later.
Each customer in Wholesale Handler sits on a price list, so the trade price is set once and applies to every order that account places, without a separate catalogue or a quote each time.
Set the minimum before the first order, not after
A minimum is what makes a small account worth serving. Under it, the picking, the packing, the delivery and the invoice cost more than the order earns, and a producer who agrees to "just a couple of boxes" for the first account is stuck with it.
Minimum spend in Wholesale Handler is a cash figure on the order profile rather than on the customer. A delivery charge sits beside it, along with a spend that waives the charge, which is the usual way of nudging a small order up rather than refusing it.
Publish the days and the cutoff
Selling wholesale is a commitment to a schedule. A shop wants to know which days you deliver, what time the order has to be in, and what happens when they miss it, and those three answers are what a chef is actually assessing at the pitch.
Each order profile carries its accepted delivery days and a cutoff for each of those days, so a Friday delivery can close on Wednesday evening while a Tuesday one stays open until Monday. Accounts that share a shape share a profile, so the answer stays the same across everyone on it.
Getting paid runs backwards from retail
This is the change worth understanding before the first order rather than after the third. Retail pays you as the goods leave. Wholesale means funding the production, then the delivery, then waiting, and each new order on terms makes the gap wider - profitable per order and short of cash all the same.
Net 30 is normal for established trade accounts, but a first independent shop usually neither expects nor asks for terms, and the alternatives cost less than credit does: free delivery, a volume discount, or a bit extra in the box. Keep an eye on concentration too, since a single account past about a third of your revenue makes their decisions yours.
Wholesale Handler does not touch the money. It collates processed orders into one draft invoice per customer, prints your terms and bank details in a block you set once, and records what has been paid when you say so. There is no due date field and no payment processing, so the terms are stated on the invoice rather than enforced by it.
Decide how the orders will arrive
The last decision is whether your customers order for themselves. A shop that will sign in gets a portal with their own prices, their order history and a repeat of their last order. A shop that will always phone or message is a managed customer, which is a record you hold rather than an account they use, and you place their orders and send their invoices yourself.
Both sit in the same customer list and both produce the same paperwork, so this is not a decision that has to be made for everybody at once, and a managed customer can be invited to sign in later without losing any of their history.
