How to Set Different Rates for Different Wholesale Customers

A wholesale business rarely sells everything at one price. The customer buying 500 units a month should pay differently from the one buying 20 — and both differ again from a walk-in retail sale. Here's how to set that up properly.

The problem with one price list

Most billing mistakes in wholesale aren't fraud, they're forgetting. A rate was agreed with a customer six months ago, the person billing today isn't the one who agreed it, and the bill goes out at the wrong price. The fix isn't a better memory — it's making the rate a property of the customer, not something staff have to recall.

Customer-wise rate cards

Set a rate per product per customer, and the correct one applies automatically the moment that customer is selected for a bill. This does three things at once:

• Removes the chance of a staff member billing at the wrong rate from memory.
• Makes it obvious, from the customer's own ledger, exactly what rate they're entitled to.
• Lets you change one customer's terms without touching anyone else's.

Retail and wholesale on the same product

The same product usually needs two base prices — what a walk-in retail customer pays, and the wholesale starting point before customer-specific negotiation. Keeping both on one product record, rather than maintaining two separate catalogues, is what stops the two price lists drifting out of sync with each other over time.

What to review periodically

• Stale rates. A rate agreed a year ago at a different input cost might no longer make sense — review rate cards on a schedule, not only when a customer complains.
• Volume that's changed. A customer who used to order in bulk and now orders occasionally may no longer merit their original rate.
• New customers copied from old ones. Copying a rate card as a starting point is fine; forgetting to adjust it for a genuinely different customer isn't.

The actual test

Could a new staff member, on their first day, bill your ten biggest wholesale customers correctly without asking anyone what rate to use? If not, the rates are living in someone's head, not in the system — and that's the gap worth closing first.

See how BillBaazar handles wholesale rate cards, or talk to us about your setup.