Wholesale buyers usually don't reorder for one of three reasons: the product didn't sell through, it sold through and nobody reminded them, or reordering was harder than it needed to be. The middle one is the most common and the most fixable.
A store that sold out of your product and didn't reorder isn't unhappy — it's busy. Reordering is nobody's job on their side, and following up is nobody's job on yours.
It didn't sell through. The product sat on their shelf. This is the only one of the three that is really about your product, and it is the one no amount of follow-up will fix. It is also the least common of the three at most brands.
It sold and nobody reminded them. The store sold out, was pleased, and moved on to the forty other things a small shop owner does in a week. Nothing prompted a reorder because nothing was assigned to prompt it. This is the big one.
Reordering was harder than it needed to be. They couldn't find the link, didn't remember which SKUs they carried, or hit a minimum they weren't ready for. On Faire a brand sets separate first-order and reorder minimums, and the reorder one is usually lower — but a buyer only discovers where she stands while filling the cart, which is small friction at exactly the moment of low motivation.
Ask. Genuinely — one short email to five stores that bought once and never came back will tell you more than any model. The three answers sound completely different: "it didn't move for us" is sell-through, "oh, I've been meaning to" is the reminder problem, and "I couldn't find where to reorder" is friction. If most of what you hear is the second one, you have a follow-up problem, and it is the cheapest of the three to fix — see how do I get a Faire store to reorder for what fixing it actually looks like. If you're arriving here because a whole month looked off rather than one store, start with why did my Faire sales suddenly drop? instead — it's the acquisition-versus-retention version of this same question.
Earlier than feels natural. Of the stores that do reorder in their first year, most place that second order within the first couple of months of the original sale — not spread evenly across the following twelve.
Which means: if your follow-up goes out at ninety days, a large share of the second orders you were ever going to get have already happened without you — and the ones that hadn't have gone cold. The instinct to "give them time to sell through" is one of the more expensive habits in wholesale.
Far more than a one-time buyer. Repeat business tends to make up the bulk of a wholesale brand's lifetime revenue from any given store, even though repeat buyers are a minority of everyone who ever orders.
And it compounds: a large share of stores never place a second order at all, but once a store clears that bar, it becomes substantially more likely to keep buying. Getting the second order is most of the work.
Short, specific, and about them. Name the product they bought. Say what usually sells alongside it. Give them a reason to reply that isn't "buy more" — asking how it moved is a real question and gets real answers, including the ones you need to hear.
Don't send a newsletter. A newsletter is not a follow-up, it's a broadcast, and store owners can tell the difference instantly.
If a store bought once, small, two years ago, and has never replied to anything, let it go. Retention effort belongs on stores that showed a real signal — a second order, a large first order, a reply to something. Chasing everyone equally is how follow-up becomes spam, and it is also how you burn the hours you needed for the twenty accounts that would actually have come back. Once you're doing this by hand for more than a handful of accounts, it's worth reading do I need a Faire analytics tool? to see whether software actually earns its cost yet.
Last updated August 2026. Written by the maker of FaireSight, a retention tool for brands selling wholesale. Not affiliated with Faire.