Faire vs Shopify B2B: What the Wholesale Channel Costs

The Quick Verdict

Here is the answer by situation; everything after it is the arithmetic and the contract underneath.

If one row describes you, that is usually the whole answer. Two scoping notes before the detail. Every Faire figure here is a United States dollar rate read on Faire's own brand pricing pages on 13 August 2026, and unless a sentence says otherwise it comes from the table for brands based in North America — Faire publishes a different one for brands based elsewhere, and mixing the two is the most common error in wholesale guides. The Shopify side is the native B2B feature set, not an app.

What Faire Charges, and Who It Charges It For

Most write-ups of Faire quote a single percentage and move on, which makes the channel look like a flat tax on wholesale revenue. It is not. The rate is a function of provenance: Faire charges for the buyers it introduces and charges nothing on the buyers you introduce. Once you see the pricing that way, the question stops being "can I afford 15%" and becomes "what share of my wholesale accounts does someone else have to find for me".

Three Lanes, Set by Who Found the Retailer

The three lanes below are the whole commission model for a brand based in North America. Note what the middle column does not do: it does not change with order value, product category or volume. Faire's published brand pricing states that the standard marketplace commission is 15%, that a retailer who first discovers you on the marketplace also carries a one-time $10 new-customer fee on that first order only, and that Faire Direct orders from customers you bring carry 0% commission — brands based in North America, as of August 2026.

Faire brand pricing (North America), read 13 August 2026. Payment processing is charged separately by payout speed — see below.

Put two brands side by side to see what that does. A brand whose Faire volume is mostly reorders from a stable set of stockists pays the flat commission and nothing else. A brand adding new stockists every month pays the one-off fee repeatedly — once per retailer, not once per order — and its effective rate sits higher for as long as that growth continues. Same revenue, different bill, and nothing in the fee schedule explains the gap.

If Your Brand Isn't Based in North America

The lane structure is the same but the entry price is not. Faire's pricing page for brands outside North America states that a one-time 10% referral fee is charged on top of the standard 15% commission when a customer first discovers the brand on the marketplace — a 25% first order for brands based outside North America, as of August 2026. The same page sets the boundary between a first order and a reorder precisely: an order counts as a reorder once it is placed at least 24 hours after the first one.

This is also why so much of the wholesale advice you will read quotes 25% as if it were the universal Faire rate. It was the North American rate too, until Faire lowered the opening-order commission and added the $10 new-customer fee, effective 5 July 2023. Faire stated at the time that the change applied to brands based in the United States and Canada and did not apply to brands based in other locations. Three years on, the older figure is still correct for one group of brands and wrong for the other — which is exactly the kind of detail a generic guide flattens.

What Getting Paid Sooner Costs

This is the layer most margin calculations miss. The commission buys you the buyer; the payout rate buys you the timing, and it is a decision you make in your own settings rather than one the retailer makes for you.

Source: Faire brand pricing, North America, read 13 August 2026. Brands based outside North America have a different table: Faire publishes two payout speeds on its pricing page for brands outside North America — ACH Next Day, where a 3% payout fee is applied to both the order and shipping costs, and ACH Net 30, which currently carries no fee (read 15 August 2026).

The spread between fastest and slowest is 1.6 percentage points, which sounds small until you set it against a wholesale margin. On a thin wholesale line, choosing next-day payouts out of habit can cost more than the difference between two freight carriers. If your cash cycle can carry it, the 60-day setting is the cheapest money on the page.

What a $500 First Order Actually Leaves You

Take one $500 wholesale order, a brand based in North America, and the 60-day payout speed. Faire publishes the commission, the new-customer fee and the payout rate as three separate charges, and for North American brands it states that both the commission and the payment processing fee are calculated on your order subtotal — the cumulative wholesale cost of the items in your order, which Faire says excludes retailer-paid shipping, taxes and duties — so the $500 here is that subtotal. The commission is $75.00, the one-time fee is $10.00, and payout processing at 1.9% plus $0.30 adds $9.80. That is $94.80 in charges on a $500 order, 18.96%, leaving $405.20.

Now run the same order twice more. When that retailer reorders, the one-off fee is gone and the charge is $84.80, or 16.96%. When the order comes from a retailer you brought to Faire yourself, the commission is zero and only the payout processing remains: $9.80, or 1.96%. A month made of those three orders — $1500 of wholesale — costs $189.40, a blended 12.63%.

The gap between the bars is the entire argument of this article, and it is not a discount you can negotiate — it is a description of who did the work of finding the buyer. Which means the lever that moves your effective rate is not the fee schedule but your acquisition mix: how many of next year's retailers you expect to find yourself. Whether 18.96% is survivable at all is a different question, and it belongs to your price list rather than to the channel — our guide to setting wholesale prices that hold margin works that side of the equation.

Arithmetic answers what an order leaves you; it does not answer whether a year on the channel felt worth it. The six-minute review below is one brand's account of exactly that, split into what worked and what did not after a year and a half selling there. Treat it as one seller's experience — it is not a source, it was recorded in 2023, and the rates it mentions are older than the ones above.

Net Terms: Who Waits, and What the Asterisk Says

Two clocks run on every Faire order and they are easy to confuse. The first is the retailer's: Faire tells buyers who qualify that they can order now and pay later. The second is yours, and you set it in the payout speed above. The two are independent — a retailer on 60-day terms does not mean you wait 60 days, and your next-day payout does not shorten their terms.

What matters for planning is that the buyer's side is conditional. Faire assigns 60-day payment terms and a spending limit to eligible retailers at sign-up, and states that a retailer who does not qualify pays when the brand ships the order. So the "wholesale on net-60" framing you see in marketplace comparisons describes what some of your buyers get, not a term the channel guarantees to all of them.

What the Connector Does to Your Catalog

The most expensive misconfiguration in this whole integration lives in this section, and it is easy to walk into: the app's headline promise is exactly the thing a half-configured version fails to deliver. Start with what actually moves where.

Faire lists Shopify among the direct integrations built specifically for its platform, and the Shopify side of it is the Faire: Sell Wholesale channel app, whose listing says it is free to install and that additional charges may apply — the charges being the per-order fees above rather than a subscription. It held a 4.6-star rating from 415 reviews when we checked on 15 August 2026.

Five Directions, and Which Way Each One Runs

Faire documents five sync directions for the official Shopify integration, three of which Faire labels Shopify → Faire and two of which it labels Faire → Shopify, as documented in August 2026. Reading them as a set is more useful than reading them as a feature list, because together they say something simple: Shopify is meant to be the system of record, and Faire is meant to be a window onto it.

Faire's documentation for the Shopify integration, read 13 August 2026.

The Two Switches That Stop You Selling the Same Unit Twice

Here is the trap in one line. Turning on inventory sync makes Faire show the right numbers. It does not, on its own, make Shopify subtract a unit when a Faire buyer takes it — which is a different thing from what most merchants assume they have switched on.

There is a second question underneath this one that the Faire integration does not settle: which of your locations the available number is drawn from. Once stock lives in more than one place, "how much do we have" stops being a single figure, and the answer belongs to how you have set Shopify up rather than to any channel — our guide to running inventory across multiple locations covers that side properly.

Why “Find Them on Faire, Then Take Them Private” Doesn't Work

The strategy half the wholesale internet recommends goes like this: use the marketplace as a discovery engine, meet your stockists there, then move the relationship onto your own channel and stop paying commission. It is a tidy plan, and for retailers Faire introduced to you, it is a plan you have contractually agreed not to execute.

Faire's own pricing already draws the same line commercially. Orders from retailers you bring to the platform yourself carry 0% commission through Faire Direct, which is the company telling you plainly that it charges for introductions and not for transactions. That option is worth understanding before you use it: read the clause above against how Faire Direct routes your buyers before you send your own accounts there. If you want an account to be unconditionally yours, the safe order of operations is to set it up on your own channel first, and to treat Faire Direct as a convenience for accounts you are content to run on someone else's rails.

Underneath all of this sits a trade that is not unique to wholesale at all: when you pay a platform for access to its audience, you accept the platform's rules about what happens to that audience afterwards. Marketplaces on the consumer side make the same bargain in the same shape, and we have written up the full version of that argument — platform risk, customer data, what happens when the rules change — in our comparison of selling on a marketplace against running your own store.

One boundary on the customer data that comes with a Faire order, because it decides whether the contact is ever yours: Faire states that when orders sync to Shopify, a retailer's email appears only if that retailer opted into sharing it, and that Faire supplies an anonymized address in that field when they did not.

What Shopify B2B Gives You Instead

Once the marketplace side is priced, the comparison gets simpler than it looks. Faire sells reach and takes a percentage. Shopify's B2B features sell you the machinery for taking wholesale orders and take nothing per order — but the machinery is empty until you fill it, and filling it is the work the commission was paying for.

What Your Plan Includes, and What It Caps

B2B on Shopify is included on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans rather than sold as an add-on — the practical question is not whether you have it but where your plan stops. On the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans you can assign up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets, with unlimited catalogs on Plus, and that single number shapes more wholesale setups than anything else on the list.

Shopify Help Center — B2B features by plan and B2B considerations, read 13 August 2026.

If a catalog per key account is how you price wholesale, three is a low ceiling and the upgrade question is really a pricing-model question. The full setup — companies, locations, catalogs, payment terms and how they fit together — is its own subject, and our guide to wholesale on Shopify walks the configuration end to end rather than repeating it here.

What It Costs You That Faire Doesn't

An honest comparison has to name what the free-of-commission option actually charges you. The first item is a feature boundary that surprises merchants who assume B2B inherits everything the retail side has.

The second item is larger and never appears on an invoice: nobody arrives at a B2B storefront by accident. Every retailer on it is one you found — at a trade show, through a rep, from a cold email, from a DTC customer who happens to own a shop. Those costs are real, they are simply yours, and they are the reason the honest version of this comparison is not "15% against nothing" but "15% against whatever finding that retailer costs you". Shopify's wider trade-offs — the app dependencies, the customisation ceiling, the parts of the stack you end up renting — are catalogued in our piece on where the platform actually hurts.

The Two Channels on the Six Things That Decide

Faire brand pricing and account documentation, and Shopify's B2B documentation, all read 13 August 2026. Faire figures are the North American table.

Read down the second column and the pattern is consistent: Faire supplies the demand and sets the terms on which you meet it. Read down the third and the pattern is the mirror image: you supply the demand and keep the terms. Neither column is the cheap one in general — the first is cheap when you cannot find retailers and expensive when you can, and the second is the reverse. Which is why the next section asks for your numbers rather than offering a verdict.

What the Channel Costs on Your Own Volume

The arithmetic so far has used one order at a time. Your actual bill is a month of them in some mix, and the mix is what moves the number. Set your own volumes below — the tool opens on the same three-order month from the worked example, so you can see it reproduce $189.40 before you change anything.

Two things are worth watching as you move the sliders. Raising the order value barely moves the effective rate, because almost everything scales with it. Moving orders between the lanes moves it a lot — which is the same finding as the chart above, expressed in your own numbers. The channel gets cheaper as your own acquisition gets better, and that is a lever you control rather than one you negotiate. One note on reading the panel: it lists payout processing once as its own line across every order rather than folding it into each lane, so the lane figures are commission only and the total is the same as the worked example.

Which Route Is Yours

You now have your own number. What a number cannot settle is the combination underneath it: a brand paying 18.96% on introductions it desperately needs is in a completely different position from one paying the same rate on retailers it already knew. The table at the top of this page answers by profile; the five questions below answer by combination.

What You Keep If You Close the Faire Shop

Exit terms are the least-read part of any channel decision and the most useful one to know in advance. Faire separates two different actions here. Deactivation is the reversible one: it hides your shop from retailers while your information remains saved in Faire's system, which is what makes reactivating possible later. Deletion is the other one, and it is not self-service.

Plan the exit with that shape in mind rather than as a clean break. The commercial relationships are the part that does not travel: the retailers Faire introduced ordered under terms that commit their orders to the platform, and closing your shop does not convert them into accounts on your own channel. What you keep, in practice, is what you built in parallel — the accounts you brought in yourself, in a system you control, with the order history already in your admin.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the fee schedule and one question decides this: how many of your wholesale accounts does someone else have to find for you? A brand with no list is buying something real, and 18.96% on a first order is a fair price for a stockist it could not have reached. A brand with a full inbox is paying a finder's fee for finding nobody. Most brands sit between the two, which is why the useful shape is both channels with a clear line drawn between them.

Frequently Asked Questions