Are you ready to scale your business through wholesaling and are wondering if Faire marketplace is right for you?
With over 700,000 retailers and 100,000 wholesalers, Faire marketplace could be a great place to wholesale your products.
But the platform does have its pros and cons.
Pros of wholesaling on Faire Marketplace
Faire incentivizes their retailers
So, the thing that Faire marketplace does really well is they offer incentives to retailers so that they will shop on their platform.
Faire’s buyer protection program
One of those is they offer buyer protection.
So, for example, they purchase on the platform and the wholesale brand does not fulfill the order, the retailer does not have to pay.
Faire marketplace does a lot of vetting on the retailer and the wholesale brand just to be able to buy and to sell on the platform.
So, the likelihood of that happening, not likely, but Faire will take the hit and protects both the seller and the buyer in that situation.
Faire offers payment terms
Faire offers thirty- or sixty-day terms for the retailer depending on the length of time the retailer’s been on the platform.
And those terms will also be very helpful for the amount that the retailer can purchase on the platform.
Faire offers shipping discounts
There is a program called, Faire insider program. It’s a subscription, for $19.99 a month, for the retailer, and they will get access to a certain number of brands on Faire’s platform that they can get free shipping with.
So, that’s a huge incentive for retailers to shop on Faire marketplace.
Because if fare if retailers are shopping directly with a retailer, a lot of retailers, a lot of smaller brands like us, we don’t offer terms, and we don’t offer free shipping.
And that’s okay, but that’s why a lot of retailers will shop directly on Faire.
Now once those retailers get to know us as small businesses, they do want to shop directly with us to support us because they understand how Faire works, and there are other ways that we can incentivize them to shop directly with us.
So, those are some of the pros, and they also offer incentives to buyers.
Faire offers buyer protection as well
They offer buyer protection and promotion matching.
Twice a year, Faire marketplace offers summer and winter markets, and they will actually match your promotions up to 5%. So, that is actually money back in your pocket that they will help promote your brand at those markets.
So, if you offer a 5% promotion, Faire will match that, and that will be a 10% promotion to a retailer.
And then they will offer brand protection as well.
I actually just had a situation where I had a wholesale order that was damaged in shipping. And so, the retailer filed a claim and asked for me to resend the product. And I reached out to them and asked them to send the product back to me so that I could fix the product.
They never responded to me. I sent them new product. They filed another claim.
Because they never responded to me, I actually I was going to be out several hundred dollars.
So, I filed a claim with Faire marketplace, and they actually denied the second claim for the retailer.
They do offer brand protection for the wholesalers as well, and I find Faire support very, very easy to work with as well.
Cons selling on Faire marketplace
They take a commission of your sales
Here’s a big one.
15% commission on all orders that Faire brings to you.
When fair makes a connection between a brand and a retailer, they take a 15% cut.
Now I actually calculate that as more like a 19% cut because you have to think about an initial order when it’s a first-time order for a retailer, they also take a $10 fee out of that.
And then you have some payout fees depending on how quickly you want your payout.
So, I actually calculate that as about a 19% fee.
Now here’s something I want you to think about.
If you are attending, as a brand and attending a trade show, like Atlanta, Dallas, Vegas, New York now, it is going to cost you anywhere on average from $8 to $15,000 just to prepare and have a professional looking booth at that show if you do a temporary
If you are in a permanent showroom and have a sales rep, they are going to take a 20% cut of any orders.
So a 15-to-19% cut, all of a sudden doesn’t look so bad.
You have to start thinking like a CEO.
And when you start thinking like a CEO, you have to start looking at Faire like you are outsourcing your sales.
So, they are acting like a sales rep for you, and they are bringing together and making connections between you and the retailer just like a sales rep would be.
Faire’s algorithm for visibility
Navigating figures algorithm is going to be challenging.
Even as a retailer, it can be challenging to navigate the algorithm because as a retailer, I get shown the same brands all the time.
So, you have to do some work as a wholesale brand to overcome that algorithm.
That is a natural part of putting in the work as a business owner.
So, if you are going to wholesale on Faire marketplace, you have to know that you cannot put your shop out there and set it and forget it.
You have to put in the work, and I usually recommend to my students that once a week or every other week, you set some time on your calendar, thirty minutes to an hour to put in some work to navigate Faire’s algorithm.
Faire, and this is what a challenging one that people often don’t think about, Faire does not show you retailers’ email addresses.
So, I want you to equate this with social media.
If social media went down tomorrow and you’ve lost all your followers, how would that impact your business?
Faire does not show you retailers’ email addresses.
So, if fair tanked tomorrow, do you have all of your retailer contacts information?
That’s another huge challenge.
You want to make sure that if something happens to Faire tomorrow, you still have a way to reach out to your retailers and sell your products to them.
0% commission with Faire
Faire Direct really makes it easy to embed your, Fair Direct link with potential retailers right on your website, and you can get 0% commission on those orders.
Now the con with that is that there’s no tracking cookie for that.
And what I mean by that is that on the back end, when a retailer clicks on that Faire direct link, and maybe they don’t sign up for fare right then, but then they go back and they sign up for fair later, but they don’t sign up by going back and clicking through your link, that’s not a Faire direct customer for you.
Meaning, Faire doesn’t recognize that they originally clicked on your link. There’s no tracking link through that.
So, you have to be aware of that.
You have to be aware of that because you want to zero out your commission as much as possible.
That’s more money in your pocket.
The other thing is that Faire is still a marketplace. Just like Etsy is, and so they will still show other brands alongside yours.
If you like this product, you might also like this brand.
And so, it’s easy for retailers to go and get off of your product page or get distracted from your products, and that can be very frustrating.
I want this to just be an awareness for you.
I think Faire is a great a great place to sell smarter and not harder.
That’s what I always say about Faire.
I think fair is a great place for retailers and brands to connect.
What you have to do though, is you have to do your due diligence as the CEO of your brand, and you have to know how to navigate the algorithm.
This is not the only place to sell wholesale.
You do not put all of your wholesale eggs in the Faire basket.
It is simply a place to work smarter, not harder.
If you want to learn more about Faire Marketplace then sign up for my limited podcast the Faire Growth Formula Secret Podcast here.
