The good, bad and ugly: wholesale registration processes
Our belief is that it is better to “own” as many of your retailer relationships as you can. When a brand owns a customer, we are referring to the fact that they have a direct relationship with the retailer. In the event that they need to get in touch with the retailer, they can do so directly, either through email or phone. They don’t need to go through a third party (like a marketplace or distributor) in order to communicate with them.
Additionally, when a brand owns the retailer, they will have all of the customer’s previous order history readily available so they can tailor messaging and offers in a more personalized fashion. They will also have a firm understanding of where their brand's products are being sold. While this may seem elementary, you don’t have this type of visibility if you are selling on a marketplace (like Faire) or through a distributor. Simply put, owning the customer means that the brand has more direct control over the relationship.
The first step towards owning the retailer from day 1 starts on a brand's website. However, few brands that sell wholesale are taking the necessary steps towards owning the retailer from the outset. They are oftentimes pushing an interested retailer to a third party marketplace instead of taking control of the relationship from the formation of the relationship. And when a brand opts to send traffic to a marketplace, they are immediately ceding control of the relationship and giving up valuable profit margin.
So what does a good wholesale signup experience look like? And what makes a wholesale sign-up experience clunky? We’ve been on thousands of websites and have talked to hundreds of brands at this point and studied these exact questions. As such, we have developed thoughts of what we like and don’t like on brands' wholesale registration experiences that we’re eager to share.
While you may not be giving much thought to the process around a retailer registering to carrying your product, the implications of where you send an approved retailer (as in to a third party marketplace or keeping them on your site to shop), has a significant downstream impact on your ability to develop relationships with your retailers, while growing profitably.
We’ll go through a few examples of experiences that need improvements, are satisfactory and finish up with examples of brands that we think are doing the wholesale sign-up experience right! Along the way we’ll point out what we like about the good experiences and what can be improved about the poor ones. Use this guide as a way to optimize or build your ideal wholesale registration process.
The “Needs Improvement” Category
While we picked a few brands here for the needs improvement category, we’ve come across hundreds of brands that are having retailers sign-up for wholesale accounts this way. We are not trying to call out these specific brands in particular, they are just the examples that we’ve picked to represent the hundreds of other sites that we’ve seen like this.
What are we critical about in these experiences?
If a retailer lands on this page, they obviously took the time to find your brand and come to your site (perhaps you even paid for them to come to your site via advertising). Knowing this, they are likely interested in carrying your product (which is great)! So why are you sending them away from your site to shop on a 3rd party marketplace? Take ownership of the relationship right away!
If a retailer doesn’t want to shop from a marketplace like Faire they may opt not to carry your product and leave your site without purchasing anything from you - from Faire or through any other medium…that’s a loss for your brand!
How would an interested retailer get in touch with you directly if they had a particular question about wholesale? If you are only linking out to a site like Faire and not giving a retailer an opportunity to get in touch with you (about wholesale in particular), you are losing a valuable touchpoint and an opportunity to own the relationship from day 1.
By not having an “owned” way for a retailer to order from you, you are immediately giving up your opportunity to develop a personalized relationship with the retailer and paying the “toll” of a marketplace (which includes a hefty commission fee).
How to improve this type of wholesale registration experience:
Provide a way for retailers to get in touch with you directly (an email address would work, but you can also have the retailer fill out a form if you want to try to collect some information from them). It’s best to provide your contact information above the links to Faire.
Provide details on the page around some of the key details of your retail program - like minimums, product details and payment terms. The more information that you provide on this page, the less inbound questions you will have coming your way around these basic questions.
Include some retailer testimonials on your wholesale site program - convince a retailer that the product will be a big hit for them, the same way you should have customer reviews on your “DTC” site.
“Satisfactory” Wholesale Intake Options
Below are a few examples that we think “get the job done.” They give a retailer the option to either order from a third party marketplace, or directly from the brand. There are a few areas that we will highlight on where they can improve, but overall, they are at least making an effort to try to “own” the retailer.
What do we like about these experiences?
You are giving the retailer who may want to order directly from you the chance to get into contact with you, either through an email or by filling out a form.
You provide the retailer with the option to order from a marketplace or order from you directly, you don’t just assume that every retailer wants to order from Faire. Maybe the retailer doesn’t want to purchase from a marketplace and perhaps they want to develop a relationship with the brand directly. If that’s the case, you are giving them the opportunity to do just that. This option at least provides the flexibility that a retailer may or may not want.
Spongelle (the second example shown above) does a fantastic job showcasing a customer testimonial on their wholesale page - giving potential retailers confidence that the product will do well in their store.
What could be improved in these experiences?
We’d suggest making your owned wholesale experience the priority over pushing a potential retailer to a “rented” channel, so position the owned experience over the rented experience on the page.
Explain a bit more about how the wholesale process works. For example, if a retailer submits an interest form, how long will it be until they hear back from you? Communicate and set expectations with the retailer.
Examples of brands doing wholesale right
We’ve come to our last section - brands that we think are doing the wholesale registration process right. These brands are taking the effort to try to own their relationships from the outset by favoring their owned channels instead of pushing retailers to a rented channel. We’d recommend modeling your wholesale signup experiences after these examples. If your wholesale sign-up process doesn’t look like this today, don’t worry, as it only takes a few adjustments to make your wholesale sign-up process that much better!
What do we like about these experiences?
In each of these examples, the brand is showcasing how to do business with them directly front and center vs. favoring a marketplace. While the brands do give retailers the option to order from a marketplace, those options aren’t as prominent as how a brand can order directly from the brand.
The directions as to what a brand needs to be doing to get in touch and or become a retailer is clearly laid out so a retailer has all of the information that they need to place an order.
The retail intake forms are relatively short and don’t take too much time for a retailer to fill out, reducing the friction for the retailer to provide the brand with the correct information.
Takeaways
To be clear, we don’t view marketplaces as bad. We think that they are a valuable discovery tool for a brand. But at the same time, a brand needs to know when to become less reliant on marketplaces and more reliant on owning their retailers. Creating a wholesale experience that favors owning your relationships from day 1 will only set your brand up for success, as you will be able to develop relationships more easily and won’t be restricted with how you can interact with your retailers. Additionally, you won’t need to play by a marketplaces rules, which includes high commission fees which eat at your margin.
Taking a few minutes to set up your wholesale intake process the right way will go a long way in helping you to build a lasting, profitable wholesale business. If you are interested in learning more about how Vanik can help you build, grow and own your retail relationships, set-up time to chat with our team here.
