Selling to retailers: how buyers decide, the margin math and where to find stores

This guide is for brands and manufacturers that want their products on store shelves, and for anyone selling wholesale to shops: consumer goods makers, food and beverage producers, gift and home brands, and the reps and distributors who sell for them. It also helps companies that sell services to retailers understand who decides. It covers how many retailers there are, how buyers decide, the margin math, what stores require, the pricing law, where to find stores, and a worked example.

How many retailers there are

County Business Patterns counted 1,043,373 retail establishments with paid employees in 2023, employing 16.0 million people with an annual payroll of $605.7 billion. Nonemployer Statistics adds 2.08 million retail businesses with no employees, many of them online sellers.

The count of stores hides how concentrated retail is. Census Statistics of US Businesses for 2022 shows 645,404 retail companies. Of those, 585,925 (91%) have fewer than 20 employees. At the other end, 530 companies with 5,000 or more employees run 263,907 establishments, a quarter of all retail locations, and employ 58% of retail workers. So there are two very different markets: a few hundred chains that buy centrally, and hundreds of thousands of independents that buy one store at a time.

Independents and chains buy differently

Most brands start with independents, prove that products sell, then use that sell-through data to win a regional chain.

How a retail buyer decides

At a chain, the buyer (sometimes called a category manager or merchant) owns a category's sales and margin. They're asking four questions:

1. Will it sell? Sales data from other stores, online reviews, and the marketing you'll fund.
2. Will it make margin? Their margin per unit and per foot of shelf, after any allowances.
3. Is it easy to stock? Case packs, lead times, minimum orders, fill rates and packaging that works in their stores.
4. What does it replace? Shelf space is fixed, so every new item pushes another one out.

Chains review categories on a set calendar, often deciding months before products reach the shelf. Ask the buyer when their next review is and what they need before then. Other people matter too: merchandise planners set quantities, replenishment teams reorder, and vendor compliance teams enforce shipping rules, often with chargebacks when you break them. At an independent, the owner usually does all of these jobs.

The margin math

Work backward from the shelf price. Here's an illustrative $28 candle:

Margin and markup are different: buying at $14 and selling at $28 is a 100% markup but a 50% margin. Buyers talk in margin. If your cost doesn't leave room for every party, change the product, the pack or the price before you pitch.

Getting retail-ready

• Barcodes. GS1 US sells a single GTIN for $30 with no renewal fee, or a company prefix for 10 items at $250 plus $50 a year, 100 items at $750 plus $150, or 1,000 items at $2,500 plus $500. GS1 barcodes identify you as the brand owner.
• Supplier registration. Big chains publish their rules. Walmart, for example, requires a GS1 company prefix and a federal taxpayer identification number on supplier applications, requires approved suppliers to carry certain insurance, may require food safety, product safety and other audits, and sets packing and labeling specifications.
• Slotting fees. Grocery chains often charge to place a new item. The most detailed public data is old: the FTC's 2003 study of grocery retailers found an average slotting allowance of $9,182 per item per region and chain, with a median of $6,500. Budget for it and ask early.
• Line sheet and terms. One page with images, item numbers, case packs, wholesale and suggested retail prices, minimums, lead times and payment terms.

The pricing law

This is general information, not legal advice.

• The Robinson-Patman Act. Charging competing stores different prices for the same goods can violate it unless the difference reflects different costs to serve them or meets a competitor's price in good faith. Promotional allowances and services must be offered to competing customers on proportionally equal terms, and the cost defense doesn't apply to them. In practice: publish a price list with volume tiers and offer every promotion to every competing account.
• CAN-SPAM applies to business email: honest subject lines, your postal address and an opt-out on every commercial email to a store.

Where to find retailers

Texas shows what permit data can do. Its open dataset of active sales tax permit holders lists 339,320 outlets with retail industry codes, and 63,536 of them were permitted between 1 January and 24 October 2026. That includes online sellers and pop-ups, but filtered by industry code and address, it's a list of new stores. Finding the owner or buyer for each store is the slow part, and Bebop finds those contacts and researches each account in the list. The guide to building a prospect list covers the general method.

Segment before you reach out

• Store type. Gift, home, grocery, pharmacy, outdoor, pet. Your product sits in a category, and so does every buyer.
• Independent or chain, and for chains, how many stores and where.
• Price level. Check their shelves. A $28 candle won't sell in a store whose average item is $8.
• Location. Tourist towns, affluent suburbs and downtowns carry different mixes.
• Signals. A new store, a second location, a remodel, a new buyer, or a competitor's product leaving the shelf.

Worked example: a candle brand targets independent gift stores

Illustrative example. The brand and store are fictional; the store counts come from County Business Patterns 2023.

The seller: Tidewell (tidewell.example) makes soy candles that retail at $28 and wholesale at $14. The territory: North Carolina and Virginia, which have 1,084 gift, novelty and souvenir stores and 615 other home furnishings stores, of which 1,239 have fewer than 20 employees.

1. Qualify. Check each store's site or social accounts for price level and whether it already carries candles. If an illustrative 40% fit, that's about 496 stores.
2. Set the opening order. Three scents in six-packs is 18 units, or $252 at wholesale. Two packs of each is $504.
3. Do the arithmetic. If an illustrative one in eight of those 496 stores opens an account at $504, that's 62 stores and $31,248 of opening orders. If each also reorders three times in the year at the same size, first-year wholesale revenue is about $125,000.
4. Pick the angle. Harbor and Pine (harbor-and-pine.example), a gift shop in a coastal town, opened a second location in September and posts new arrivals weekly.

Subject: A candle line for your new [town] store

Hi [first name],

Congratulations on opening in [town]. I make soy candles in [your town], and I think they'd fit next to the [product they carry] you posted last week.

They retail at $28 and wholesale at $14, so you keep a 50% margin. Opening orders start at $252, and I'll send a free tester set of three scents.

Shops like [similar store] reorder about every [number] weeks. Can I send the testers to your new location?

[Your name], [Brand]
[Postal address]
Reply "no thanks" and I won't email again.

The email ties a dated event to a specific shelf, states the store's margin up front and makes the first step free.

Checklist before you pitch a retailer

• Your pricing leaves the store and any distributor their margin, and you know your own.
• You have GS1 barcodes, product liability insurance and a one-page line sheet.
• You know the store's category, price level and whether it's independent or a chain.
• For a chain, you know the buyer's name and the next category review date.
• Your price list and promotions are the same for every competing store.

Common mistakes

• Pricing for direct-to-consumer, then discovering the store needs half.
• Pitching a national chain first, before you have sales data from other stores.
• Ignoring vendor compliance. Chargebacks for late or mislabeled shipments can wipe out a first order's margin.
• Giving one store a better deal than its competitor without a cost reason.

Next step: profile your first ten stores with the account research template, starting with category, price level, ownership and one dated reason to write.