QCan a print shop publish trade-only pricing without undercutting resellers?

The worry is real: if your public website shows prices lower than what a reseller charges their own client, you've just competed with the customer who buys from you. You can run trade only pricing for a print shop and a public site at the same time, but only if the two price lists never meet.

Why a public price list can cost you trade customers

Printers and sign makers who sell wholesale have been arguing about this for years. In a Signs101 thread about VistaPrint and wholesale pricing, owners describe trade-only pricing as the only real defense against competing with your own customers. If a sign shop buys your printed banners and resells them, and their client can find your website selling the same banner for less, you lose the sign shop.

It's also why many printers don't publish prices at all. In an r/CommercialPrinting discussion about quoting, shops describe pricing so complex that they build their own estimators rather than publish a list. That's a fine choice, but it doesn't solve the trade problem on its own. Resellers still need fast, predictable prices, and they'll go to a wholesaler who gives them one.

How to set up trade only pricing for a print shop

This is the setup I'd use for any printer or sign shop that sells to both end customers and resellers. It works whether you publish full prices or only a quote form.

1. Write down who counts as trade. Sign shops, print brokers, designers and agencies who resell print, promotional product distributors. Decide what they have to show you: a business website, a resale certificate or tax registration where your state or province uses one, or a history of orders.
2. Put an application form on the public site. A short "Trade accounts" page explains who it's for and what they get, then collects the business name, website and contact. Approve each one by hand. It takes a minute and stops end customers signing up for trade prices.
3. Keep trade prices behind a login. I'd never put them on a public page, a PDF linked from the site or a page that's only "hidden" from the menu. Anything reachable without logging in can be found, shared or indexed.
4. Set public prices with a gap for resellers. Whatever you show publicly, as a full price list or "starting at" prices, should sit comfortably above your trade price, so a reseller can buy from you, add their margin and still not look expensive next to your own site.
5. Offer blind shipping and unbranded packaging. Ship to the reseller's client with no invoice, logo or price inside, and send proofs without your branding. This is what lets a reseller put their name on your work.
6. Write a rule for when a reseller's client contacts you. If a client who came through a reseller calls you directly, send them back to the reseller or quote them at your public price. Tell resellers you do this. In my experience it's the promise that makes them trust you with their clients' contact details.

What's different for print shops and sign shops

For a commercial printer, most trade buyers are designers, agencies and brokers. They care about gated prices, blind shipping and a proofing process they can show their client. The trade page is really the same page you'd build to win designers, which I cover in the post on becoming a trade printer for designers.

For a sign shop, the trade side is often other sign shops buying fabrication: channel letters, cabinets, large-format prints or install services. They're direct competitors in the retail market and customers in the trade one, which makes the direct-contact rule in step six even more important. I'd also keep a sign shop's trade catalog focused on what you actually fabricate for others, not everything you sell retail. It's a detail I check early in SEO for sign shops.

The edge cases

• If you only sell to the trade, say so clearly on the public site and don't show any prices without a login. End customers who find you can be pointed to your reseller list.
• If you mostly sell retail and do a little trade, a simple trade discount off your public prices, applied at login, is easier to manage than a separate price list.
• If your pricing is too complex to publish, keep a quote form on the public site and give trade accounts faster quotes or an estimator only they can use.
• If an online wholesaler already sells the same product to your resellers, compete on what they can't do: proofing, local pickup, rush jobs and a person who answers.

Setting this up is mostly a website job: a public catalog, a trade login and an application form that go together. That's the kind of small business website build we do for printers, and it's usually part of the groundwork in print shop SEO too.

• Printing
• Sign Shop
• Website Design