Offering more than one discount level to wholesale buyers - rather than one flat "trade price" - is one of the simplest ways to make bigger orders more attractive without discounting everything across the board. Here are five things worth getting right.
1. Keep it to two or three tiers, not five
It's tempting to build a discount for every possible order size, but most buyers find a long list of thresholds confusing rather than motivating. Two or three clear tiers - for example, a standard trade price, and a better rate above a stated order value - covers almost every real situation and is far easier for a buyer to act on quickly.
2. Always show the original price alongside the discount
A wholesale price shown on its own tells a buyer nothing about the deal they're getting. Showing the recommended retail price crossed out next to your trade price does the persuading for you - the discount is visible at a glance, without needing a cover letter explaining it.
3. Base your tiers on something the buyer can actually hit
A volume discount that only kicks in at an unrealistic order size isn't really an incentive - it's decoration. Look at what your typical wholesale order actually looks like, and set your higher tier just above that, so a buyer has a genuine reason to add a few more units to their cart.
4. Send each tier as its own clean document
Buyers on your top tier shouldn't have to mentally do percentage maths on a document meant for a different tier. Producing a separate price list per discount level - even if the products are identical - reads as more professional and avoids any ambiguity about which price actually applies.
5. Update all your tiers when you update your prices
This sounds obvious, but it's the single most common mistake: retail prices change, and someone forgets that three different wholesale price lists exist and need updating too. If your price lists are generated from the same product data every time - rather than edited by hand - this problem mostly disappears on its own, since every version is rebuilt from current prices automatically.
If you already manage your products in Shopify, CatalogPress handles points 2 through 5 automatically: type in your discount percentages once, and it builds a separate, correctly priced PDF for each tier straight from your current product data - so there's no version of your price list quietly going out of date.