The short version
- A retailer who finds you on the Faire marketplace costs you 15% commission. A retailer you bring in yourself through your Faire Direct link costs you 0%, permanently, on every order they ever place.
- The retailer loses nothing by coming through your link. They still get net-60 terms and free shipping for their first year, which is most of why they buy on Faire at all.
- So every wholesale conversation you're already having should end with your Faire Direct link rather than an invoice and a spreadsheet.
- Titles on Faire are keyword-led, not brand-led, because buyers are filling shelves rather than shopping your brand.
- Almost nobody specializes in this platform, which is the opposite of the Amazon situation and the reason the basics still work.
What's in here: what Faire Direct is · why the retailer doesn't mind · how buyers actually search · listing every SKU including the ones you can't ship · Faire Market · what a couple of hundred a month buys
Most brands we talk to have a Faire store they set up once and haven't touched since, and a separate wholesale process running through email and a PDF line sheet. Those two things should be the same thing, and joining them is the closest thing to free money on this platform.
Faire charges 15% commission on a retailer who discovers you through its marketplace, and 0% on a retailer you bring to Faire yourself through your Faire Direct link. Same platform, same order, same retailer benefits, and the commission difference runs on every order that retailer ever places with you.
A lot of brands don't know the distinction exists, which is understandable, because Faire has no reason to lead with it.
What is Faire Direct and how does it work?
Faire Direct is a link you own that routes a retailer onto the platform as your customer rather than as a marketplace discovery.
If a shop owner emails you asking about wholesale, and you send them your Faire Direct link, they set up on Faire, order from you, and the order carries no commission. If that same shop owner had found you by browsing Faire's category pages, the order carries 15%, and so does every reorder.
The order of operations is what matters. You have to send them the link before they find you on their own, which means the link belongs in your email signature, on your website's wholesale page, on your line sheet, on the card in your trade show booth, and in the reply you send to every inbound wholesale inquiry.
There's a first-order fee on marketplace orders as well, on top of the commission, that disappears on reorders. Faire Direct sidesteps that too.
Why would a retailer use my link instead of just ordering direct?
Because the link doesn't cost them anything and it gets them the terms they want.
A retailer buying through your Faire Direct link still gets net-60 payment terms and free shipping for their first year, which is the reason independent shops like buying on Faire in the first place. They also get Faire's ordering interface, their purchase history in one place, and the returns policy. None of that is stripped out because you sent the link.
From their side it's better than a PDF and an invoice, and from your side it's free. That's an unusually easy conversation to have, and it's why this is the first thing we'd fix on almost any brand's Faire setup.
Faire guarantees payment to you as well, so if a retailer can't pay, you're still paid in full. For a brand that's been burned by a wholesale account going under, that guarantee is worth more than the commission it costs on marketplace orders.
How do buyers actually search on Faire?
Not the way your customers search, and this is where most brand-run Faire stores go wrong.
A retailer on Faire is filling shelves. They're thinking "I need a gluten free baking mix," not "I wonder what that brand I saw on Instagram is called." So your product title needs to be keyword-led rather than brand-led, and it should say the category plainly even though that feels like burying your own name.
This inverts what you'd do on Amazon, where brand terms matter, and it inverts what most brands' instincts tell them. The first few hundred characters are for the human retailer scanning the page. What follows can carry the search terms.
The thing that makes this worth doing is how fast Faire responds. Unlike Google, where an optimization might show up in six months, changes here move quickly. A product sitting on page five can be in the first few rows within weeks of a proper title and tag pass, and you can measure it because the products tab shows you views.
Take a snapshot of where you currently rank for the terms you care about before you change anything, so you can see the movement.
Should I list products I can't currently ship?
Yes, all of them, and this is the advice brands push back on hardest.
The instinct is to list your three bestsellers, because inventory is tight and you don't want to sit on stock that isn't selling. The algorithm rewards a complete catalog, so a partial listing costs you visibility across everything, including the three products you did list.
The way around the inventory problem is presale. Mark items out of stock with a date, or set them available from a future month, and retailers will still order. They understand production runs in a way consumers don't, because they run inventory themselves. A retailer reading "ships in three weeks" places the order and waits.
That also turns your catalog into demand research. Watch what gets ordered before you make it, then run production against real orders rather than a guess. A brand we worked with was sitting on a handful of units of its top three SKUs and agonizing over what to manufacture next. The Faire orders answered the question for them.
What is Faire Market and why does it matter?
Faire Market is the platform's periodic buying event, and across every brand we've seen go through one, it produces roughly a month's revenue in three days.
That ratio holds at any size. A brand doing very little will do very little across three days. A brand doing seven figures a month will do close to a seven-figure week. The event doesn't change what you're worth to retailers, it compresses a month of ordering into a window.
The practical implication is calendar rather than strategy. Know when the next one is, have your catalog complete and your promotions set before it opens, and make sure you can actually fulfill a month of orders arriving at once. Brands that discover Faire Market a week out get a fraction of what was available to them.
What's worth spending money on?
Two things, and neither is expensive.
Promoted listings. A couple of hundred dollars a month is enough to matter, you aren't billed until the month closes, and I've never seen the return come in below three or four times spend. Brands skip it because they've decided they don't pay for advertising, which is a strange place to hold the line given the numbers.
The Insider program. Faire's top retailers get certain benefits, and participating means covering shipping on some orders. It costs you something and it puts you in front of the buyers who order most and return least, which is generally worth the trade.
The free thing worth more than either is collections. Most brands treat collections as tidy groupings of similar products, and built properly they're merchandised bundles with a job. A coffee shop starter pack that a buyer can add to their cart in one move does two things at once: it makes the decision easier for a retailer who doesn't know your range, and it gives the algorithm another surface to put you on.
One more, and it stops scaling almost immediately, so do it while you can. When an order comes in, message that retailer personally through Faire's messenger and thank them. Not the automated drip, an actual note. It's the digital version of a handwritten card and it lands, right up until you're getting enough orders that it can't.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Faire charge brands?
15% commission on orders from retailers who discover you through the marketplace, plus a small first-order fee that drops away on reorders. Retailers you bring in yourself through your Faire Direct link carry 0% commission, permanently. There's also a payment processing fee that varies by how quickly you want to be paid, with faster payout costing more.
Is Faire Direct free?
Yes, for both sides. You pay no commission on those orders and the retailer keeps net-60 terms and free shipping for their first year. The only cost is remembering to send the link before the retailer finds you another way.
How do I get retailers onto Faire Direct?
Put the link everywhere a wholesale conversation happens: email signature, website wholesale page, line sheet, trade show materials, and every reply to an inbound inquiry. If you already have wholesale accounts buying by invoice, moving them onto the link gets them better terms and gets you the same money with less admin.
How should I write my Faire product titles?
Lead with the category term a retailer would search, not with your brand name. Buyers are filling shelves, so they search for the type of product rather than for you. Keep the first few hundred characters readable for a human, then let the rest carry search terms.
Should I list products that are out of stock?
Yes. A complete catalog performs better across the whole store, and out-of-stock or presale items with a date are normal to retailers, who understand production timelines. Presale also tells you what to manufacture next, because the orders arrive before the stock does.
Is Faire worth it if I'm mostly focused on Amazon?
It's a different buyer and a different job. Amazon reaches the consumer directly. Faire reaches the independent shops and specialty retailers who put you on a physical shelf, and for a brand whose story lands better with a shopkeeper explaining it than with a search result, that's a route Amazon can't replicate. A lot of brands run both, with Faire building the ground game and Amazon capturing the demand it creates.
The bottom line
Faire is the rare platform where the basics still work, because almost nobody has specialized in it. The people who ended up good at it mostly fell into it, which means a brand that does the obvious things properly is competing against stores nobody has touched in two years.
Start with the link. If you do nothing else after reading this, put your Faire Direct link into your email signature and your wholesale page today, and route the next retailer who asks about wholesale through it. That one change pays for itself on the first reorder.
If you want a look at your Faire store before you invest more time in it, send us the link and we'll tell you what we'd change first.
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