Wholesale Handler
Square's catalogue holds one price per item
An item or variation in Square carries a single price. There is no second price attached to a customer, so a wholesale rate and a retail rate cannot sit on the same item, and Square staff have confirmed that one item cannot show different prices on two Square Online sites.
Sellers have built four workarounds, each of which breaks somewhere:
- A second location holding a wholesale-priced copy of the whole catalogue. Two catalogues to keep in step, and stock counted in two places.
- A customer group with an automatic percentage discount. This holds only while every wholesale item sits at the same percentage off retail. Produce margins are not uniform, so it stops holding on the first exception.
- Price points as item variations. One variation per customer type on every item, which is slow to set up and confuses reporting.
- Writing the invoice by hand at wholesale totals.
The request has been open on Square's community for years, including direct conversations with Square engineers. How to charge different prices to different wholesale customers covers the shape that does work - a price list per customer rather than a discount per sale.
A trade buyer has nowhere to sign in and order
Square Online has no wholesale portal. The standing feature requests ask for the two halves together: approved customers signing in to a restricted catalogue at their own price, and their orders landing against terms already agreed - the request's own example is a bottle shop ordering on Net 30. Square's reply names Customer Accounts as the nearest thing, states that it is not a wholesale solution, and says it may be expanded later.
The gaps sellers report around it are consistent: house accounts do not work online, customer groups are not really supported on Square Online, there is no tax exemption per house account, and one order cannot carry more than 300 line items.
So the workaround is the one every Square wholesale thread lands on - the buyer browses the site or reads a PDF list, messages the seller, and the seller keys the invoice. Wholesale customer portal covers what a buyer-facing ordering system has to do beyond showing a catalogue.
A recurring invoice repeats a fixed amount
Square's recurring series covers a fixed retainer well. It takes a start date, a frequency down to daily, a repeat count or end date, and it can charge a card or bank account on file automatically.
The constraint is that a series is one template. Editing an active series applies the edit to every future invoice in it, so a single week cannot be varied. A wholesale delivery varies every week - eight cases instead of six, a line dropped because the crop came up short, a weighed item that bills at what it actually weighed - and none of that fits a template that only changes forwards for good. Square also does not retry a declined recurring payment, and a customer whose card changes needs the series edited by hand.
How to automatically invoice wholesale bakery customers covers the alternative: build the invoice from the orders that were actually placed rather than from a repeating amount.
Splitting the job between the two
What Wholesale Handler leaves to Square
Wholesale Handler does not touch customer money. There is no card processing, no bank transfer, no stored card - the merchant gets paid on the rail they already use, and Wholesale Handler records that it happened. A customer can mark that they have sent payment, which is its own status and does not read as money received; only the merchant confirms it as paid. Every invoice carries a due date derived from that customer's own terms, and the terms are effective-dated, so graduating an account from cash on delivery to Net 30 leaves the older invoices under the terms they were issued on.
Two more limits:
- Nothing chases automatically. An overdue invoice is chased by the merchant or not at all. The dashboard ages outstanding money into bands so the late accounts are visible, but no reminder email sends. How to know which wholesale customers haven't paid you covers working that list by hand.
- Invoices are raised, not scheduled. The merchant picks processed orders and they collate into one draft per customer; there is no billing period that raises the draft on its own day.
Square is the better tool wherever the question is getting the money in. It takes the card, it saves the card, it takes a bank transfer at a fraction of what a card costs, and it sends the reminders. Running both is not a failure to consolidate - it is the buyer ordering in one place and paying in the other, with the invoice raised from what they actually ordered instead of typed out again.
