Separating retail and wholesale products

Option 1 - Keep retail-only products unpublished

When you connect your ecommerce site to Candid all of the products from your ecommerce site sync over to Candid. However, they aren't immediately visible in your public-facing catalog until you publish them. You can publish products at the individual level or in bulk. The easiest way to keep products hidden from your catalog is to not publish them.

This method is a good option because it keeps wholesale and retail products the same, rather than creating separate wholesale-only copies of the same products. This keeps your DTC site less cluttered and unifies reporting and stock.

Note: When separating out your products in Candid you can add a product note that lets you know which products are for retail only so that it's easier to tell them apart:

Option 2 - Archive your retail-only products

Another really useful option is to archive retail products which not only keeps those products out of your catalog but also hides them from your product manager list. A lot of people like this option because it keeps your product manager uncluttered and easier to manage.

Using Shopify locations

This next solution applies only to Shopify users but since we know that many people use Shopify it's important to talk about this option. With Shopify, you can have multiple locations. Since only one location is synced with Candid it's possible to hold all of your retail or wholesale products in just one location.

Click here to learn more about Shopify locations:

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/locations/getting-started-with-locations

As you can see in the example below you can use your inventory settings to select the location that holds your wholesale-only products.

The trickiest way...

Having two Shopify stores.

In Shopify it's possible to have two different stores, one under www.example.com, and the other at its subdomain, mystore.example.com. Currently it's not possible to run multiple stores under one account/admin so you would need to log in and out of the different stores to manage them both.

Running multiple stores and managing product data and inventory across all of them can become complicated very quickly. For that reason we recommend considering this choice very carefully. If you do decide to go this route please contact Shopify Support for more information on best methods for getting set up.

What if I have product variants that are retail only?

One solution for this is to separate the variants out and use them to create new retail and/or wholesale-only products. You can also unpublish the individual retail-only variants.