Saying Yes to a Wholesale Order You Can’t Print Alone
Six questions before you quote, the arithmetic that decides whether you can do it, and how to fill it without starving your retail listings.
A shop emails asking for 200 units by the end of the month. Your printers are already full, and the two obvious answers — say no, or say yes and hope — are both bad. Here is what to ask before you quote, how to price it so the order is worth having, and how to fill it without starving the listings that pay your rent.
The wholesale ask · can you, and what if we do
PLA Basic
On your printers
251 h short
Needs 315 machine-hours with 5% reprints; you have 64 spare in 4 weeks — 4.9× what is free. No amount of goodwill changes that number.
Made by us
$4.08 a unit
$816.30 for the run, quantity pricing included. At their $12 that leaves $7.92 a unit — $1,583.70 on the order — with none of your printer-hours.
Price the real fileBefore shipping. Runs above the instant checkout’s 500 are quoted and scheduled — send the quantity and the date.
Six questions before you quote
- How many, and by when? A date changes everything about whether this is possible.
- One design and one colour, or a mix? Mixed colours mean separate setups and more handling.
- What does "done" mean — bagged, labelled, boxed in tens? Packing is real time.
- Who is responsible for the design being right? Get the final file confirmed in writing.
- What happens if they want more later? Agree whether the price holds.
- Payment: deposit up front, balance on shipping. For a first-time buyer this is not negotiable.
Two of those decide whether you can do it at all. Everything else is commercial.
The arithmetic that decides it
Multiply units by print time, then compare with the hours you actually have spare in the window they have given you.
Illustrative. Run yours with the capacity calculator.
| Example | |
|---|---|
| The ask | 200 units, 1.5 h each, four weeks |
| Machine hours needed | 300 h (plus reprints) |
| Your capacity | 3 printers × 14 h × 6 days = 252 h a week |
| Already committed to retail orders | 236 h a week |
| Spare | 16 h a week, so 64 h in four weeks |
| Shortfall | 236 h — the order needs nearly five times the spare time you have |
- The askExample200 units, 1.5 h each, four weeks
- Machine hours neededExample300 h (plus reprints)
- Your capacityExample3 printers × 14 h × 6 days = 252 h a week
- Already committed to retail ordersExample236 h a week
- SpareExample16 h a week, so 64 h in four weeks
- ShortfallExample236 h — the order needs nearly five times the spare time you have
That shop cannot print this order itself, and no amount of goodwill changes the number. It can still take it — by moving retail listings to a partner to free hours, by having the wholesale run made, or by negotiating the date. The capacity calculator does this arithmetic with your figures.
The mistake that sinks small shops
Saying yes to the biggest order you have ever had — and finding out in week three it was the only thing your printers did that month.
InsteadWork the machine-hours first. Price second. Say yes third.
Pricing it
The instinct is to quote retail minus a wholesale discount. Do the opposite: build up from cost, then check the result against what an hour of your machine time earns elsewhere.
- 1
Start with the make cost
Material plus machine time, for one unit, with your real failure rate included. If you are having the run made, that is the quoted per-unit price instead. - 2
Add the work that is not printing
Support removal, inspection, assembly, bagging, boxing, the label, and the hour you will spend on emails. On a 200-unit order, two minutes a unit is nearly seven hours. - 3
Add margin, then sanity-check it per hour
Divide your margin by the machine hours the order will use. If it earns less per hour than your ordinary listings, the discount is too deep — this order is worse than the business it displaces. - 4
Quote a date you can defend
Take your honest lead time and add slack for one bad week. A wholesale buyer forgives a longer quote far more easily than a missed date.
Volume does not have to mean a deep discount. What a buyer is really paying for is certainty: the same part, on a date, in one delivery. A fair price and a real lead time, with a modest discount, is plenty.
Filling it without starving the rest of the shop
Option A: print it, move your retail listings out
Keep the wholesale run in-house, and have a partner make the retail listings for the month. Your buyer gets the parts from the shop they ordered from, and your listings keep shipping.
Option B: have the wholesale run made
Send the wholesale run out and keep your own printers on retail. This is usually the cheaper of the two, because a single design in a single colour is exactly the kind of run that gets the deepest quantity pricing. On our ladder, copies of one file in one colour that share a plate take 10% off their labour from the second copy, 20% from the fifth and 30% from the tenth — so a 200-unit run is priced with almost every copy on the deepest rung.
Either way: sample first
Order one unit, in the real material and colour, and have your buyer approve it before the run starts. One wrong assumption times 200 is the most expensive mistake available here.
Protecting yourself
- Deposit before production. Half is normal for a first order.
- Written confirmation of the final file, material and colour, with the approved sample referenced.
- A stated tolerance for colour and finish variation between batches.
- A quantity tolerance if the parts are small: agree a ±2% delivered count rather than promising exactly 200 usable units.
- What happens if they cancel mid-run, in one sentence, before you start.
If you take it, take it properly
A wholesale order is the best kind of customer a small shop can get: one design, one address, repeatable. The shops that turn one into a standing account are the ones that quote a real date, send a sample, and deliver the count they promised. The ones that lose the account are the ones that quoted optimistically in week one.
FAQ
Build up from make cost: material plus machine time, then the per-unit handling (support removal, inspection, packing), then your margin. Check the margin per machine hour against your ordinary listings — if the wholesale order earns less per hour, the discount is too deep.
There is no standard, and you do not owe one. Volume genuinely lowers your cost per unit only if it shortens setup per part — copies that share a plate, one colour, one shipment. Pass on the saving you actually get rather than a percentage you picked.
Yes, for any first-time wholesale buyer. Made-to-order parts with someone else’s design or branding have no resale value if the order is abandoned. Half up front, balance before shipping, is a normal arrangement.
Yes, and one design in one colour is the case where it is cheapest, because quantity pricing applies to copies that share a plate. Approve a sample in the real material first, and quote your buyer a date that includes the partner’s lead time.
Agree in advance whether the price holds for a repeat. A second identical run is easier for you — the file is proven and the sample is approved — so it is reasonable to keep the price and worth saying so.
Say yes to the 200.
Price the run from your own file in seconds, quantity pricing included. Larger runs are quoted and scheduled to the date your buyer needs.
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