Wholesale price tiers for US distributors: structure beats negotiation

American wholesale has a long tradition of column pricing — list, dealer, distributor — and an equally long tradition of every rep cutting their own deals on top. The first is structure. The second is margin leak.

The US pricing reality

US B2B prices are quoted before sales tax, in dollars, and often against customers who hold resale certificates and buy in volume. Your competitors publish dealer programs with clear columns. If your own pricing lives in a rep’s head or a shared spreadsheet, you are negotiating every order from scratch — and usually downward.

Tiers are the American column list, done properly

Named tiers — List, Dealer, Distributor, or whatever your market calls them — with a formula behind each one: cost times a markup, or list minus a discount, with rounding that lands on clean, sellable endings. Every SKU gets a price in every column automatically, including the new products that spreadsheets always miss. Assign each account to a tier and the negotiation happens once, at account setup, not on every purchase order.

Flexibility without chaos

A tier system doesn’t forbid special deals — it makes them visible. A negotiated price is an exception you can see and review, not a number lost in an email thread. And a margin check catches anything priced below cost before it ships — see catching below-cost pricing.

B2B Price Tiers gives you unlimited named tiers, a formula engine, CSV import/export and two-way Linnworks sync — and it feeds Trade Order POS, which can now be set to run entirely in dollars with a US-style Tax line via its Locale setting. Find out more →

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.