When weighing your options for managing online wholesale, sometimes the right answer is “all of the above.” We’ve talked extensively about why a wholesale marketplace might not be right for you – today we want to talk about how you can use a wholesale marketplace to support your direct wholesale business.

Different channels for different customers

Some businesses are exclusively wholesale or DTC, but more often than not you sell across a variety of channels to a variety of customers:

• Ecommerce site, like Shopify, Squarespace, BigCommerce, for direct to consumer sales.
• Brick and mortar presence, using Square, Clover, or some other POS technology to handle in-person sales. 
• EDI for selling wholesale to distributors and large chain stores.
• Wholesale marketplace to capture a grab bag of walk-up b2b customers.

Inevitably there are still going to be those accounts that don’t fit into any of the above buckets, and paradoxically these can often be your most loyal and profitable customers.

Why add yet another system to the mix?

There are many very good reasons to recoil from the idea of adding new software to your business operations.  

The cost!

Candid charges a fixed monthly cost, not a commission. The 15-20% you pay with a marketplace may well be worth it if it’s passively bringing in new business. But for your direct wholesale customers, Candid quickly pays for itself (and then some).

The time!

There’s no escaping setup and onboarding time with new software, but with Candid that timeline is days, not weeks. By streamlining common B2B selling workflows in ways that no other app can, Candid again pays for itself quickly – this time in terms of time saved.

• Per-customer pricing
• Batch invoicing
• Rep management
• Automatic reorders
• The list goes on.

The customers!

Candid makes onboarding simple for your customers, whether they’re first time buyers or already in your CRM. There are no discount codes to be entered, and you can set product and price visibility exactly how you want.

More importantly, you’re not renting these relationships from Candid – they’re yours. If you ever want to export your customer list for use in an external CRM, marketing platform, or even another wholesale app, no problem. They’re your customers, and we never want to in the way of you doing business with them. 

How to add Candid

Candid integrates directly with a number of ecommerce platforms, but if you have a different mix of products currently on Faire you can easily import your products from Faire (or any other marketplace) into Candid.

You can also import your existing customers and assign them to the correct catalog, currency, pricing, invoicing & fulfillment rules before they even log in for the first time.

We strive to make it as easy as possible to start selling in Candid, and offer real human customer support at all plan levels to make sure your wholesale portal is set up correctly and on your timeline.