Wholesale business examples: What a thousand real stores sell

Food and drink is the biggest category in online wholesale. I classified 1,000 live wholesale stores by what they sell, and 17.7% of them sell food or drink. The 20 wholesale business examples below all come from real stores.

Wholesale is a big part of ecommerce that most shoppers never see. A trade store hides its prices, turns retail traffic away and often puts the whole catalog behind a login. Plenty of them don't even link to the trade area from the home page.

That makes it hard to say which industries sell this way. The guides that rank for wholesale products to sell are written by people who don't run wholesale stores, and most of them open with clothing.

Our WooCommerce Wholesale Pro plugin powers the trade area for thousands of live stores. So I took 1,000 of them and went through what each one sells.

Wholesale business examples ranked by number of stores

Food and drink came out on top by a distance. Behind it come 19 other categories, from candle makers to fastener distributors:

Here are all 20 wholesale business examples, ranked by the share of the 1,000 stores selling in each:

#	Industry	Stores	Share
1	Food and drink	178	17.7%
2	Homeware, gifts and stationery	102	10.2%
3	Health, beauty and personal care	95	9.5%
4	Apparel, footwear, jewelry and accessories	75	7.5%
5	Industrial, electrical and engineering supplies	69	6.9%
6	Automotive, marine and vehicle parts	62	6.2%
7	Building, construction and landscaping supplies	60	6.0%
8	Sports and outdoor equipment	53	5.3%
9	Garden, plants and agriculture	48	4.8%
10	Tobacco, vape and cannabis	44	4.4%
11	Print, signage and promotional	37	3.7%
12	Pet and animal products	32	3.2%
13	Medical, dental and clinical supplies	31	3.1%
14	Cleaning, janitorial and packaging	25	2.5%
15=	Crafts and hobby supplies	20	2.0%
15=	Other	20	2.0%
17	Electronics, IT and audio-visual	18	1.8%
18	Hospitality and catering equipment	15	1.5%
19	Toys, collectibles and trading cards	13	1.3%
20	Amusement and leisure equipment	6	0.6%

The top three categories hold 37.4% of the stores between them, and the bottom ten hold about a fifth.

The 12 biggest types of wholesale businesses

The following wholesale business examples cover 85% of the stores in the count.

Food and drink (17.7%)

Coffee roasters are the single most common kind of business I found. The rest of the category covers butchers and meat curers, cheesemongers, bakeries selling traybakes to cafés and confectionery importers, along with tea blenders, breweries, distilleries, wineries, seafood wholesalers and fruit and vegetable suppliers.

A café buys the same beans every week, so one approved trade account can turn into dozens of orders a year. Roasting also starts small enough that a new roaster can supply a dozen local cafés long before a supermarket will stock its coffee.

Most of the food category works like that, because the buyer is restocking rather than shopping. The same tray of pastries or case of tonic water goes out week after week.

Nearly all of these stores sell by the case. For example, our WooCommerce Quantity Manager plugin (available as part of our wholesale bundle) puts a step of 12 or 24 on a product, so a café has to order whole cases instead of odd numbers. You can also set a minimum order value on the trade roles alone, so a retail customer can still buy a single bag of coffee.

Homeware, gifts and stationery (10.2%)

Candles and home fragrance make up a large part of this group, along with framed wall art, wallpaper and fabric, rugs, greeting cards, regional souvenirs, furniture and printed tableware.

This trade ran on trade accounts long before any of it came online. A gift shop buys from dozens of small makers, usually meeting them at a trade show. Those orders have moved onto the web without changing much else about how the trade works.

The timing is awkward, because Christmas ranges get ordered in spring. An account has to stay open all year even when the orders only come twice.

Most of these makers sell to the public as well. They need both sides of the store running at once. WooCommerce Wholesale Pro does that, so a gift shop owner logs in and sees trade prices on the same products the public browses at retail.

Health, beauty and personal care (9.5%)

Salon haircare, barber supplies, skincare, nail systems, perfume and supplements fill this category.

Most of this category is professional-only lines that brands won't sell to the public at any price. A salon buys color, developer and treatment products on a trade account, so every store here has to approve its buyers before they can order anything.

These stores also run the most complicated product options I saw anywhere in the count. Hair extensions get sold by length, by color and by base type.

WooCommerce Bulk Variations (also included in our wholesale bundle) turns all three attributes into a grid on the product page, so a salon can put a quantity against every length and shade in one pass instead of working through a dropdown for each one.

Apparel, footwear, jewelry and accessories (7.5%)

Apparel comes fourth, behind three wholesale business examples that rarely appear in a guide to the trade. The stores split into blank garment suppliers selling to decorators, hosiery and sock knitters and jewelry brands with a trade counter, with workwear, babywear, eyewear and handbag suppliers making up the rest.

The buyer is usually another business that decorates the garment. A printer orders blanks, puts a logo on them and sells them on.

Sizes multiply fast once you add colors to that. For example, one workwear supplier we work with sells a single garment in 737 variations. The WooCommerce Bulk Variations plugin handles it by putting sizes across and colors down, so the whole range fits on one screen.

WooCommerce Discount Manager (also in our wholesale bundle) displays the available quantity discounts on the product page, where a buyer can see what another dozen units would save them.

When you use the Bulk Variations and Discount Manager plugins together, the volume discounts are shown live as the trade buyer increases the quantity selected. This is ideal for encouraging them to place bulk orders of clothing.

Industrial, electrical and engineering supplies (6.9%)

Fasteners and abrasives, cable, lighting, hydraulic and pneumatic seals, weighing equipment and personal protective equipment make up one of the largest groups in the count.

This trade was doing B2B long before any of it came online. The buyer is usually an engineer, a maintenance manager or a reseller who already knows the part number. They're ordering against a specification rather than browsing for something they like.

Photographs are close to useless here, because two seals from the same range look identical in a picture. A buyer finds the right part by the SKU, the size, the material and the stock level, laid out where they can scan all of it at once.

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin in our wholesale bundle produces that layout: A searchable table with those details as columns and a quantity box on every row.

Automotive, marine and vehicle parts (6.2%)

The automotive stores sell truck and commercial vehicle parts, alloy wheels, seat covers, batteries, caravan and motorhome fittings, marine equipment and car detailing chemicals.

Garages and bodyshops fit automotive parts for a living. They reorder the same lines week after week at trade prices, which a login shows to approved buyers and keeps away from retail customers.

Almost every product varies by year, make and model, so buyers need to filter by those three. WooCommerce Product Table's linked filters work as a make, model and year selector, built out of the categories and attributes already in WooCommerce.

Building, construction and landscaping supplies (6.0%)

This group sells PVC and sheet materials, roofing metal, underfloor heating, tiles and sanitaryware, flooring, soundproofing and ground screws.

Builders merchants have run trade accounts for decades. A site manager wants their own price list, their own account and a delivery date. A WooCommerce store with a trade role hands over all three without anyone picking up the phone.

These buyers choose on dimensions and specification rather than on a photograph, so a product table suits them: Small thumbnails or none at all, size and material in their own columns, and a quantity field in every row.

Sports and outdoor equipment (5.3%)

Bicycle and e-bike distributors, fishing tackle wholesalers, hunting and shooting suppliers and teamwear brands make up this group.

Specialist retailers probably survive here better than in most categories. A bike shop or a tackle shop still sells on advice rather than price, so the distributor tier behind those shops is still in business and still needs somewhere to take orders.

A club's team kit order covers a dozen sizes in one go, which Bulk Variations handles on a single product page. Discount Manager's tier table goes above the grid, so the person ordering can see what the next bracket is worth before they finish.

Garden, plants and agriculture (4.8%)

Hedging and tree nurseries, heirloom seed merchants, hydroponics suppliers, garden furniture makers, fencing suppliers and agricultural machinery dealers make up this category.

Plants are seasonal and perishable, so a nursery sells to garden centres and landscapers in waves. What's available changes every week, which rules out any catalog that takes a day to update.

For example, one flower wholesaler we work with publishes the 200 stems available that week out of a 2,000-product catalog, as a product table buyers can filter and search.

Tobacco, vape and cannabis (4.4%)

E-liquid manufacturers, CBD brands, cannabis seed banks, cigar importers and herbal suppliers fill this category.

Regulation pushes the whole trade through licensed retailers, and age checks make a public shop awkward on top of that. Most of these stores sell to trade only.

Wholesale Pro handles that by hiding prices until a buyer logs in. The catalog stays open to search engines and AI bots, so the products can still be found, while the prices stay private. Quantity Manager caps how much a single order can hold wherever the law sets a limit.

Print, signage and promotional (3.7%)

Trade-only printers, DTF transfer suppliers, sign and display manufacturers, vehicle decal makers, label printers and promotional merchandise suppliers sell in this category.

Trade printing is white label. An agency orders a run, puts its own name on the invoice and never tells the client who printed it, so the supplier builds its site for other printers rather than for the public.

Printers also set a minimum run on every product, because a short run costs nearly as much to set up as a long one. The WooCommerce Quantity Manager from our wholesale bundle enforces that minimum, and Discount Manager drops the unit price as the run gets longer.

Pet and animal products (3.2%)

Dog food and treat makers, pet pharmacies, equestrian suppliers, tropical fish and marine livestock traders and dog training equipment brands fill the pet category.

Pet food is a consumable like the food category above it, so an independent pet shop or a groomer reorders the same lines every few weeks. The brand's income depends on holding onto those accounts rather than winning new ones.

Accessing the wholesale area

When you set up a wholesale store, you have to decide how buyers reach the trade side of it. 45% of the stores I read put a visible link to a wholesale or trade area on the home page.

The rest of these wholesale business examples keep it off the home page entirely. Some of those stores send the login details to their distributors instead of advertising a trade account application on the site.

Where these stores are registered

These stores use 69 different domain endings. Just under half are on a .com, which tells you nothing about where the store is, and almost every American store falls in that group.

• .co.uk leads the country domains at 13.8%.
• .nl comes next at 5.6%, then .com.au at 5.2%.
• The other 65 endings cover 29% between them.

Most of these stores trade in one country. Multinational wholesale stores are less common, presumably due to shipping costs and custom duties.

The five plugins behind these stores

Every store in these wholesale business examples runs WooCommerce with a wholesale plugin on top. The easiest way to get a fully featured wholesale store is to buy our 5-plugin wholesale bundle. This provides a complete suite of wholesale plugins which you can mix and match to get the exact features you need. This provides a complete wholesale suite which you can mix and match to get the exact features you need:

• WooCommerce Wholesale Pro adds the wholesale roles, the trade prices, a registration form with approval, and payment, shipping and tax settings for each role.
• WooCommerce Product Table turns the store into a one-page order form where buyers search by SKU and add many lines to the cart at once.
• WooCommerce Bulk Variations shows every size and color of one product as a grid with a quantity box in each cell.
• WooCommerce Discount Manager adds quantity tiers on top of the trade price, with a table on the product page.
• WooCommerce Quantity Manager sets minimums, maximums and case-size steps, for the wholesale roles or for everyone.

Picking a wholesale business idea

More than a third of the WooCommerce wholesale stores that we analyzed were from the food and drink, homeware, and health and beauty sectors. The other two thirds spread across 17 categories, from fasteners to trading cards.

If you're deciding which wholesale products to sell, use the above for inspiration. Pick the wholesale business example closest to what you sell, then set up the B2B side of the store to start selling to the trade.