Many manufacturers and distributors sell the same product through more than one channel. Dealers get one price, wholesalers another, and end users shopping on the company's own website a completely different one. On marketplaces, the price changes yet again because of commissions and shipping costs. When each of these prices lives in a separate Excel file, a separate e-commerce dashboard, or a sales rep's memory, tracking what got updated during a price increase becomes nearly impossible.
In this article, we explain why it matters to manage retail and wholesale prices in the same system and how you can set it up.
The Hidden Cost of Separate Price Lists
Working with separate lists seems practical at first. But as the number of products and channels grows, these problems start to show:
- When prices go up, one list gets updated and another gets forgotten, creating inconsistencies such as a dealer paying more than the end user.
- The sales team has to ask which list is current before quoting a price to a customer.
- The retail price on your own website doesn't match the recommended retail price your dealers use, and dealers are bothered by it.
- Because a customer-specific discount isn't on record, profitability calculations come out wrong at year-end.
The core problem is the same: there is no single source of truth for pricing. And this isn't just an operational hassle. If your dealers think you're selling cheaper on your own website, channel conflict begins; instead of featuring your products on their shelves, dealers may turn to other brands. And when the advantage you give wholesalers also shows up on the retail side, it hurts both profitability and price discipline. Managing prices from one central place is the shortest path to keeping this balance.
How Price Types and Customer Groups Work
Two concepts sit at the heart of managing prices in a single system. A price type is one of the different price levels you define for the same product, such as retail, wholesale, and dealer prices. A customer group is a cluster of customers you work with on similar terms. When you link a price type to each customer group, anyone who signs in to the portal sees only their own price.
| Customer group | Price they see | Example of an extra condition |
|---|---|---|
| End user (website) | Retail price | Cart promotion |
| Wholesaler | Wholesale price | Minimum order quantity |
| Dealer | Dealer price | Dealer-specific discount and credit limit |
| Corporate customer | Project price | Customer-specific price |
In Multistok, you can define customer group-based prices, customer-specific prices, and discounts. The number of price types you can use depends on your package: Multismart includes 3, Multicore 6, and Multibusiness 10 price types. You can compare the details on the packages page. We covered how customer-specific pricing affects sales relationships in detail in this article.
Your ERP Should Be the Source of Pricing
The soundest way to bring prices together in one system is to keep the master price data in your ERP and distribute it to the other channels from there. Multistok sets up real-time, two-way synchronization with your ERP. When you update a price in the ERP, your B2B portal picks up the change immediately.
The same logic applies on the retail side. Multistok can integrate with e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Ticimax, Ideasoft, and T-Soft, as well as marketplaces such as Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Amazon, and N11. That way, you can manage your retail prices centrally instead of changing them one by one in each dashboard. If you sell internationally, multi-currency support lets you price the same product in different currencies too.
Managing prices from a single source also means clear responsibility. Having one team update prices in the ERP and the other channels pick up those updates automatically puts an end to the "which list is right?" debate. With role-based permissions in Multistok, you can also set separately which screens the sales, accounting, and warehouse teams can access on the portal.
Rewarding Wholesale Buying With Promotions and Quantity Tiers
Wholesale is built on the idea that "the more you buy, the less you pay." Managing this with promotion rules rather than a separate price list is more flexible. In Multistok, you can define these promotion types:
- Quantity tiers: The unit price drops for purchases above a certain quantity.
- Cart discount: A discount applies when the cart total exceeds a certain amount.
- Seasonal promotion: Time-limited discounts for periods such as a season launch or stock clearance.
On top of that, you can set minimum and maximum order quantities and hide certain products from specific customer groups. For example, you can keep a product you offer only to dealers completely hidden from end users on your website.
Checklist for the Transition
Before moving your prices into a single system, we recommend completing these steps:
- Gather all the price lists you use into a single table and merge the duplicates.
- Divide your customers into groups and decide which price type each group will see.
- Put the customer-specific discounts you offer in writing.
- Clarify your promotion rules; separate which discounts belong to a price type and which belong to a promotion.
- Decide who will update prices and from which system.
- If you have international customers, clarify which products will be priced in which currency.
- Before the switch, run a trial with a few dealers and check together that the prices they see are correct.
Conclusion
Managing retail and wholesale prices in the same system reduces the chaos of price increase periods, protects your relationship of trust with dealers, and gives you a more accurate view of your profitability. With price types, customer groups, and promotion rules, every channel can see its own price. If you'd like to see how your own pricing structure would be set up in Multistok, you can request a demo.
