Marketplaces
Selling on Faire: the wholesale guide for home brands
Faire is not a marketplace in the retail sense — it is wholesale distribution with software attached: independent retailers buying your line at wholesale, 15% commission on marketplace-found customers, and 0% through Faire Direct. What the model rewards, and how home brands run it.
Every other platform in this series sells your products to consumers; Faire sells your brand to shops. The buyers are independent retailers — boutiques, gift stores, design shops — ordering your line at wholesale to resell on their own floors. That single difference rewires everything: order values run in the hundreds, buyers reorder on cycles, the relationship compounds, and your listing is not a product page but a line sheet. For a home brand, Faire is less a new marketplace than a wholesale distribution arm with software where the sales reps used to be.
The economics are built around customer acquisition: joining is free, and Faire charges brands 15% commission on marketplace orders plus a one-time $10 fee on each new retailer's first order — while orders arriving through your own Faire Direct link carry 0% commission, because you brought the customer. Payment processing applies either way, and faster payout options price slightly higher. Verify current terms on Faire's own pages; the shape has been stable but details move. Platform snapshot on our Faire page.
Key takeaways
- —Faire is wholesale, not retail: buyers are shops purchasing to resell, and everything from pricing to content must be built for the trade, not the consumer
- —The commission is an acquisition fee: 15% applies to retailers Faire finds for you; Faire Direct orders from relationships you bring run commission-free
- —Wholesale pricing discipline is the entry requirement: a real wholesale/MSRP structure with margin room for the retailer — not a discount off your retail whim
- —The line is the product: coherent collections, dependable restocks and case-pack logic sell to shops the way single hero SKUs sell to consumers
- —Retailer relationships compound: reorders are the business model, which makes fulfilment reliability and stock honesty the true growth levers
- —Net-terms risk sits with Faire, not you — one of the model's quiet advantages over running wholesale on spreadsheets and trust
How the model actually works
Retailers browse Faire the way consumers browse a marketplace, but they buy like the trade: opening orders to test your line, minimums you set, net-60 style payment terms that Faire underwrites, and free returns on first orders — a risk Faire absorbs to make trying new brands cheap for shops. For the brand, this means the platform is doing three jobs your wholesale operation would otherwise staff: rep-style discovery (retailers finding your line), credit control (Faire pays you even on terms orders), and order administration. The 15% commission on found customers is the price of the first job; the other two come with the platform. Faire Direct — your commission-free link — is how existing wholesale relationships move onto the rails without paying the acquisition fee for customers you already owned.
Wholesale pricing: the discipline that gates entry
Faire forces the pricing conversation consumer marketplaces let brands defer: a true wholesale price roughly half of MSRP, leaving the retailer real margin, while still covering your costs and Faire's commission on marketplace orders. Brands that arrive with only a retail price and improvise wholesale as a discount get the arithmetic wrong in one of two directions — margins that cannot absorb 15%, or wholesale prices so defensive no shop can make money stocking them. The multi-channel pricing discipline applies with a wholesale twist: your Faire MSRP should agree with your visible retail everywhere, because retailers check, and a brand undercutting its own stockists on Amazon is a brand shops quietly stop reordering.
Merchandising for shops, not shoppers
- —Present collections, not orphan SKUs: shops buy stories they can merchandise on a table — coherent lines outsell scattered bestsellers
- —Imagery does double duty: consumer-grade product shots plus in-situ retail context that helps a buyer imagine the shelf
- —Case packs and minimums set thoughtfully: low enough to make first orders easy, structured enough to keep unit economics sane
- —Lead times and restock reliability stated honestly — a shop that sells through and cannot restock replaces you, not the category
- —Fill product data completely: materials, dimensions, care, country of origin — trade buyers read specifications like catalog auditors
Running Faire inside a home brand's channel mix
Faire's slot in the portfolio is distribution depth: hundreds of independent shops putting your line in front of buyers no marketplace search reaches, at wholesale economics that survive because the reorder cycle amortises acquisition. It coexists cleanly with retail channels when pricing discipline holds — and it collides with them when it does not. The operational load is real but different from retail marketplaces: fewer, larger orders; B2B invoicing rhythms; wholesale catalog upkeep; and a customer-service surface where the customer is a business with an opening date. For brands already running Wayfair's wholesale model, the mental model transfers — except on Faire you keep the retailer relationship, and nurturing it is the growth engine. Treat top stockists like accounts, not orders: restock nudges, new-collection previews, honest stock warnings. The reorder rate is the metric the whole channel lives on.
Come to Faire with real wholesale pricing and a coherent line, use the marketplace to find shops and Faire Direct to keep the ones you find yourself, and run reorders like the business model they are — Faire pays brands that behave like wholesale operations, not like retailers on a new shelf.
Frequently asked questions
Joining is free. At the time of writing, Faire charges 15% commission on orders from retailers the marketplace brings you, plus a one-time $10 fee on each new retailer's first order; orders through your own Faire Direct link are commission-free. Payment processing applies, and faster payouts cost slightly more. Verify current terms with Faire directly.
Your personal link that brings existing or self-acquired wholesale customers onto Faire's rails at 0% commission — you pay processing but not the acquisition fee, because Faire did not find the customer. It is how established wholesale relationships get Faire's ordering, terms and administration without the marketplace's cut.
If you have a genuine wholesale proposition — real wholesale/MSRP pricing, a coherent line, dependable restocks — Faire adds distribution depth that consumer marketplaces cannot: shops that reorder on cycles and put your brand in physical retail. If wholesale margin does not exist in your cost structure yet, fix that first; the 15% commission is unforgiving of improvised pricing.
The buyer. Amazon and Wayfair end with a consumer; Faire's buyers are retailers purchasing wholesale to resell. Orders are larger and recur, content is trade-facing, and the growth lever is reorder relationships rather than search ranking. It slots into a channel mix as the wholesale arm, alongside — not instead of — retail marketplaces.