How do I set a wholesale price on my products?

This tutorial will discuss how to configure Mothership to calculate wholesale prices for your products. You should note that wholesale prices are retailer-specific, meaning that you will need to configure how you want Mothership to calculate the wholesale price with each retailer you work with.

Pricing Calculations

With each retailer you work with, you need to tell Mothership if you want it to calculate the wholesale price or if you want to manually set the prices yourself. You can make this selection in the pricing settings section on the retailer configuration page.

Automatic

Wholesale prices can be calculated automatically when you initially assign a product to a retailer and whenever the retail price of the product in your ecommerce platform changes. Mothership will use the pricing rules discussed below to calculate the wholesale price.

Manual

You can also set the wholesale price yourself by selecting Manual under the wholesale pricing calculation configuration. When you choose this option, Mothership will make an initial wholesale price calculation using the pricing rules discussed below. But from that point forward, the wholesale price of the product will not change unless you manually adjust them or click the recalculate prices button.

Pricing Rules

Wholesale pricing in Mothership is calculated using a tiered set of pricing rules that give you as broad or as fine-grained control over your wholesale pricing as you need. Since the pricing rules are defined per-retailer, you can charge a different wholesale price for the same to each retailer you work with.

The pricing rules are applied from most-specific to most-general using the following order of precedence:

Manually set price
Margin-by-tag
Default margin

A quick note about required minimum margins. Some retailers have the ability to require that each of your wholesale prices reflect a minimum percentage discount off of the retail price. This value, called the required minimum margin, is set as part of the partnership terms you agree to when working with the retailer. If your retailer has a required minimum margin, any of the pricing rules you configure below must adhere to the required minimum margin. We discuss more about required minimum margins below.

Let's go over the 3 different sets of pricing rules. We'll start with the most general and move to the more specific.

Default Margin

The default margin is a percentage discount typically applied to the retail price of the product. For example, if the default margin is 30% and the retail price of the product is $10.00, Mothership will calculate the wholesale price to be $7.00.

This is the most general pricing rule and is applied if there are no other more specific rules applicable to a product. Most of our customers just set a default margin and do not use any of the other pricing rules.

You can set the default margin on the configuration page for each retailer. Click on Retailers in the menu on the left, find your retailer and click the edit button, and then find the pricing settings section.

Margin-by-tag rules

You are not limited to having a single margin for all of your products. Since most ecommerce platforms have the concept of tagging products, Mothership provides a way to associate a particular tag with a given margin.

In the event that product is tagged with more than one margin-tag, Mothership will use an order of precedence when deciding which tag to use. For example, in the image below, if a product is tagged with both TAG_A and TAG_B, Mothership will use the margin associated with TAG_A to calculate the wholesale price.

Margin-by-tag rules can be configured on the retailer configuration page in the Mothership Vendor portal. You will also need to ensure that each of the products assigned to the retailer has at least one of the tags you configure as a margin-tag. In the event that a product does not have a margin-tag, Mothership will revert to your default margin.

Manually set pricing

Lastly, you can manually set the wholesale price of a product variant. However, this option is only available if you have configured Mothership so wholesale prices are manually set by you. This was discussed earlier in the tutorial here.

To manually set a wholesale price, click on the products section on the left to open the product index page. Next find your product and click on its title. On the edit product page, scroll to the variants section at the bottom, and then click edit next to the variant. Next, you should see the Edit Variant page. Scroll to the wholesale pricing section at the bottom and enter you wholesale price. Click the Save Changes button when you're done.

Required Minimum Margins

Some retailers can configure a required minimum margin to be used instead of the default margin. When this value is set, any wholesale price calculated for the retailer must reflect a percentage discount off of the retail price greater than or equal to the required minimum margin.

The required minimum margin provides a way for the retailer to ensure that they earn a minimum profit on each sale. This value cannot be change by you directly. You will need to contact the retailer and negotiate new partnership terms in order to update this setting.