Wholesale Handler
Commission is charged on the twelfth reorder as well as the first
Brands based in North America pay 15% commission on Faire marketplace orders, plus a one-off new-customer fee on the first order from a retailer who discovered them there. Payment processing is charged separately on every order, between 1.9% and 3.5% plus a flat amount per transaction, depending on how quickly the brand takes its payout.
The rate does not decay. A cafe that found your granola on Faire two years ago and has reordered every month since is charged at the same 15% on this month's order as on its first. The new-customer fee pays for the introduction. The standing 15% is charged for as long as that retailer keeps ordering through the marketplace.
A stockist who found you on Faire cannot be moved off it
Faire's brand terms carry a No Circumvention clause. Once a retailer has ordered through your shop page, you agree to fulfil all of that retailer's orders through Faire, and not to influence retailers to transact offline. The retailer terms mirror it from the other side: retailers agree to place all orders through Faire for any brand they were first introduced to there. Faire reserves the right to deactivate or terminate a brand account for breaching it.
The obligation attaches to the introduction, not to your brand as a whole. A shop you signed up at a farmers market, a deli that emailed after tasting the product, an account you have supplied for six years - none of those were introduced through Faire, and none of them are covered by the clause.
Talking to a Faire stockist outside the platform is not the prohibited act. Moving their orders off it is.
Faire Direct waives commission without taking the account off Faire
Faire Direct is the carve-out for relationships you brought yourself. A retailer who signs up or places a first order through your Direct link, widget or invoicing tool is tagged as Direct, and you pay no commission on that order or on any order they place afterwards. A customer who came in through the marketplace instead has to be reclassified by a commission change request with documentation, and Faire audits those.
What it does not remove is the platform. Direct orders still carry the payment processing fee, still run through Faire's checkout on Faire's trading terms, and still leave the account, its order history and its contact details on someone else's system. Zero commission is a price, not ownership.
Commission scales with the account, a subscription does not
Food is where this costs most, because food reorders. A bakery account buying twice a week, a coffee account buying every fortnight, a preserves account restocking monthly - each one crosses into four figures of annual commission on its own. A single cafe taking a few hundred dollars of product a week generates more commission in a year than a year of a flat subscription costs, and the subscription covers every other account on the book at the same time. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software compares the pricing models the trade runs on.
The commission buys discovery, credit and returns risk
Discovery is the part a flat-fee order desk cannot replace. Faire passed 800,000 retailer stores in late 2025, and those buyers browse it looking for exactly what a small food producer makes. Nothing you run yourself puts your catalogue in front of a shop in Ohio that has not heard of you.
It also carries the money and the risk. A qualifying retailer buys on interest-free net 60 terms, gets free returns on a first order with a new brand, and the brand is paid on its own chosen payout schedule rather than waiting on the shop. Somebody has to absorb the risk in a first order from a stranger, and on Faire it is not the producer.
Deciding where an account belongs
The test is where the introduction happened, because that is the test Faire's own terms use.
- Found on Faire. It stays on Faire. Commission is the price of the introduction and of the agreement you signed.
- Found by you, ordering through Faire because you sent them there. Faire Direct at 0%, or your own order desk. Pick whichever the shop finds easier to order from.
- Found by you, not on Faire. Your own desk from the first order.
The ratio moves over time as self-found accounts accumulate, which is the half of the book worth working on. How to approach shops and restaurants to stock your product covers finding them without a marketplace.
Running the repeat orders on your own desk
Every customer is assigned exactly one price list, and a list is defined as a percentage of the default one, so a wholesale tier and a distributor tier stay in step when a base price moves. Each delivery day carries its own cutoff, and minimum spend, delivery charge and booking horizon sit on the order profile a customer inherits.
Standing orders place themselves at the cutoff for accounts that take the same thing every week. A line that has gone unavailable is dropped rather than quietly ordered, a delivery that falls below the minimum stops rather than places, and both parties are told what went through and what did not.
Orders for one date collapse into a single make-list with a printable production sheet, then packing slips per order. Processed orders collate into one draft invoice per customer, and finalising emails the PDF. An existing customer book and product catalogue both import from a spreadsheet, so moving a book of accounts across is not a typing job. How to manage wholesale preserve orders walks the same cycle through one producer's week.
Wholesale Handler does not find customers or move money
- No discovery. It runs the accounts you already have. Merchants can publish a public storefront page that appears in the site directory, but the page carries no enquiry form yet, so a buyer who finds you there has to reach you another way.
- No payments and no credit. Invoices are issued as PDFs by email and the customer pays you directly. Nothing is charged to a card, nobody fronts the money, and an account that does not pay is your problem.
- No automatic chasing. Outstanding money is banded by due date on the dashboard, but no reminder ladder sends yet.
- Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule. Processed orders collate into a draft per customer, and you finalise and send it.
