Selling Wholesale Through Faire, Ankorstore and Orderchamp: A Brand's Guide to Wholesale Marketplaces
Wholesale used to mean trade shows, sales reps and a lot of cold calling into shops that never called back. The wholesale marketplaces replaced most of that with a listing and a commission, which is genuinely useful and also quietly changes your margin structure. A brand that has priced for D2C and for Amazon often discovers that wholesale, with its halved price and a commission on top, is the channel where the landed cost work it never finished finally catches up with it.
The short answer: Faire, Ankorstore and Orderchamp connect independent brands with independent retailers. Faire charges 15% on orders from retailers it introduces and 0% on retailers you bring yourself, and the others use different models for the same job.
Key takeaways
- These platforms sell you discovery. You pay for the introduction, not for the relationship afterwards.
- Faire Direct drops commission to 0% on retailers you invite, which changes the economics of your own outreach.
- Ankorstore restructured away from commission toward a payment fee plus an optional per-customer acquisition charge.
- Net 60 terms and payment protection are standard, so the platform carries the credit risk rather than you.
- Wholesale prices at roughly half your retail price before commission, which is why landed cost accuracy matters more here than on any other channel.
How wholesale marketplaces work
All three run the same basic model. You list your wholesale catalogue with minimums and case packs, verified retailers browse and order, the platform handles checkout, payment and credit terms, and you ship. The retailer typically gets net 60 payment terms and free returns on a first order. You get paid regardless of whether the retailer pays on time, because the platform carries that risk.
What you are buying is discovery. A boutique in Antwerp that would never have found you is browsing a curated marketplace with thousands of brands on it, and the commission is the introduction fee. That framing is worth holding onto, because it explains why every platform charges most on a first order and less or nothing afterwards.
Scale differs by geography. Faire is the largest, with over 100,000 brands across roughly 35 countries and a strong US boutique base. Ankorstore is the European specialist, connecting around 30,000 brands with more than 300,000 verified retailers across 25 European countries. Orderchamp is smaller and European, with roughly 6,000 brands and 200,000 retailers, skewing toward home, children's, health and fashion.
What each platform charges
Rates below were checked in August 2026. All three have restructured pricing in the last two years, so confirm on the platform's own help centre before you model anything.
Two things in that table deserve emphasis. Faire's structure is the clearest: Craftybase's fee breakdown sets out 15% on the product subtotal excluding shipping for marketplace orders, with Faire Direct at 0%, and rates verified against Faire's own help centre in July 2026 match that. Ankorstore's move away from commission to a payment fee is the bigger structural difference, and it changes which platform is cheaper depending on how much of your volume comes from retailers the platform actually introduced.
Orderchamp is where published information conflicts, with one current comparison describing a 25% first-order and 10% reorder ladder and another describing a monthly subscription from €79 with volume-tiered commission. Both may be accurate for different plans or periods. Ask them directly rather than planning off a third-party figure.
The Faire Direct point, which is the whole game
The single most useful feature across these platforms is the ability to bring your own retailers onto them at zero commission. Faire calls it Faire Direct. Orderchamp and Creoate have equivalents.
The implication is that these platforms can be two different businesses depending on how you use them. Used passively, you pay 15% forever on every retailer the marketplace sends you, and your acquisition cost is a permanent tax on that relationship. Used deliberately, you get the ordering system, the credit terms, the payment protection and the reorder mechanics for free on every stockist you found yourself, and you pay commission only on genuinely incremental discovery.
That points at a strategy worth stating plainly: do your own outreach to the shops you actually want, bring them through your direct link, and let the marketplace handle the retailers you would never have reached. As SaleHoo puts it in its cross-platform comparison, platforms that let you convert marketplace buyers into direct zero-commission relationships are structurally better long-term homes than ones that do not. The commission is the fee you can see.
The margin math nobody does up front
Wholesale pricing follows keystone convention: your wholesale price is roughly half the recommended retail price, so the retailer can double it and still be competitive. That halving happens before any platform takes anything.
Work an example. A product with a €40 retail price wholesales at around €20. A 15% marketplace commission takes €3, leaving €17 before payment processing. If your landed cost is €9, you are at roughly €8 contribution per unit before shipping the order, packing it, or absorbing a first-order return. The same product sold D2C at €40 carries a completely different contribution, which is why brands that treat wholesale as incremental volume sometimes find it is incremental revenue and flat profit.
Three things make or break that arithmetic. Landed cost accuracy comes first, because the margin is thin enough that a duty line you never counted changes the answer, and duty is no longer negligible after the 2026 customs changes covered in our guide to import duty and landed cost. Minimum order values come second: a €150 minimum on a low-priced product means order-level shipping and handling eat the contribution, so minimums exist to protect you rather than to inconvenience the buyer. Case-pack discipline is third, since picking singles for wholesale orders is where warehouse costs quietly appear.
Running wholesale alongside Amazon and D2C
This is where wholesale gets interesting for a brand already selling on other channels, and where it goes wrong most often.
The obvious risk is price conflict. A stockist who pays €20 and prices at €40 will notice quickly if your own store runs a 25% promotion, or if your Amazon listing sits at €32. Retailers stop reordering from brands whose own channels undercut them, and they rarely announce why. Pricing discipline across channels is therefore a wholesale retention issue as much as a brand issue, which is the argument in our guide to MAP pricing, with the caveat that formal MAP enforcement works differently in Europe than in the US.
The less obvious risk runs the other way. Wholesale stock can reappear on marketplaces. A retailer who overbought clears the surplus on a marketplace, and your carefully controlled Amazon listing acquires a third-party seller at a price nobody approved. Terms of sale help, and so does noticing early.
Used well, wholesale complements rather than competes. It puts physical product in front of shoppers who will never search for you, it produces a customer base that reorders on a predictable rhythm, and it diversifies away from platforms that can change their fee structures without asking. Which channels deserve your attention in what order is the question we cover in choosing the right channel strategy.
What it takes to run wholesale properly
Four things, none of which the platform does for you.
A wholesale-ready catalogue, with case packs, minimums, clear lead times and imagery that works at thumbnail size in a browse feed. Retailers shop these platforms the way consumers shop Amazon.
Stock you can actually commit. A retailer who orders and waits three weeks does not reorder, and availability is the most common reason a promising wholesale relationship stops after one order.
Outreach of your own. The brands doing well on these platforms treat the marketplace as one acquisition channel rather than the whole strategy, then route the relationships they generate through the zero-commission door.
Cross-border capability if you are selling into Europe from outside it, or out of one European country into others. A wholesale order into another EU market is still an import, still carries VAT obligations, and still needs someone accountable as importer of record. Selling B2B does not remove those questions, and for brands operating through an operator rather than a local entity, the mechanics are set out in our piece on retail and merchant of record in Europe.
eBrands runs Faire, Ankorstore and Orderchamp as managed channels alongside marketplaces and D2C, with the same entities handling the tax and import side of a wholesale order as a consumer one. If wholesale is a channel you have been meaning to open and the margin question is what has stopped you, that calculation is worth doing properly with your real landed costs rather than a keystone assumption.
Frequently asked questions
How much commission does Faire charge?
15% on the product subtotal for orders from retailers Faire introduced, excluding shipping, plus payment processing and a small additional fee on a first order. Retailers you bring in through Faire Direct are 0% commission.
What is Faire Direct?
A link that lets you invite your own wholesale customers to order through Faire's system without paying introduction commission. You get the ordering, payment terms and reorder mechanics at 0%, paying only payment processing.
Is Ankorstore or Faire better for European retailers?
Ankorstore has the deeper European retailer base, covering around 25 countries with more than 300,000 verified retailers, while Faire has the larger overall network with particular strength in US boutiques. Many brands list on both.
Do wholesale marketplaces pay me if the retailer does not?
Generally yes. These platforms extend payment terms to retailers and carry the credit risk themselves, which is one of the more valuable parts of the model for a small brand.
Can I sell wholesale and on Amazon at the same time?
Yes, and most brands should. The discipline it requires is pricing consistency, since stockists stop reordering when a brand's own channels undercut them, and watching for wholesale stock reappearing on marketplaces through resellers.
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