Table of Contents
- Why I'm Still on Faire
- The Allure of Faire for Retailers
- But Is Faire Still Fair?
- What Makers Actually Experience
- The Hidden Pressures Faire Puts on Small Brands
- The Mass Production Flood
- How Faire's Marketplace Model Hurts Small Businesses
- The Growing Power Imbalance
- Why Transparency Matters
Click any section above to jump directly to that part of this Faire wholesale review.
I've been hand-making candles for nearly a decade, long before wholesale marketplaces like Faire became the go-to for retailers. While Faire offers plenty of convenience for shops and boutiques, it creates a very different set of challenges for the makers behind the scenes. In this post, I break down what it's really like to sell on Faire in 2025: the fees, the policies, and why small brands often find themselves squeezed between convenience and profitability.
Why I'm Still on Faire
I reluctantly returned to Faire in early 2025.
Not because it works well for makers like me, but because the current wholesale landscape makes it nearly impossible to avoid. I lost several retailers when I took a hiatus in 2024. The convenience offered to retailers is simply too strong, and that’s exactly how Faire designed it. Like any good magic trick, the ease you see on the surface depends entirely on hidden work happening behind the curtain.
For Faire, that hidden cost falls heavily on makers.
The Allure of Faire for Retailers
Faire offers retailers a long list of irresistible perks:
- Free returns on first orders
- Net 60 terms
- Free shipping (subsidized through Faire Insider)
- Small business grants (for retailers only)
- 50% off first-time orders with new brands
- Credit card payments fully handled
- International ordering made easy
- One-stop wholesale ordering
This is why Faire has become the default wholesale platform. Retailers save time, minimize risk, and enjoy major perks. But like Amazon for consumers, these "too good to be true" benefits are only possible because someone else pays the price. And that someone is often the brand making the product.
But Is Faire Still Fair?
At this point, it’s hard not to notice the irony baked into the name. Once upon a time, Faire may have represented a curated marketplace supporting small makers. These days, the experience feels a little less like a charming artisan fair and a little more like a digital flea market.
The more the platform grows, the more the playing field tilts. The influx of mass-produced goods, race-to-the-bottom pricing, and pay-to-play ad systems make it feel like the name Faire no longer quite fits. For makers, it often feels anything but fair.
What Makers Actually Experience
The Stacking Fees
On nearly every wholesale order (except my dear Faire Direct retailers), here’s what I give up before even packing and shipping:
- 15% platform commission
- 3.5% payment processing fee
- Up to 13% of the order value goes toward covering shipping costs for Faire Insider customers
- A one-time $10 "new customer fee" for every retailer who orders from me for the first time
According to Faire, the $10 new customer fee helps "cover the costs of driving retailers to discover your brand," including first-time discounts, free returns, and marketing incentives. That explanation feels a bit hollow when I’m also encouraged to spend hundreds more per month on ads just to stay visible in search results. In practice, a $300 order easily turns into roughly $60 to $70 in platform fees and subsidized shipping before I’ve even touched packaging or fulfillment. That’s before factoring in any brand promotions or discounts that further shrink my payout.
Cash Flow Delays: The Net 60 Problem
Faire offers makers different payout options depending on how long we're willing to wait:
As a small brand, I pay upfront for the majority of my materials in bulk: wax, fragrance, labels, packaging, etc. My suppliers don’t give me 60-day terms, yet Faire conditions retailers to expect delayed payments at my expense.
Strict Pricing Controls
Faire prohibits us from adjusting pricing on Faire differently than elsewhere. I cannot build in extra margin to absorb platform fees. If I did, my account would risk suspension. That leaves only two options. I can either eat the cost or raise prices across the board, which isn’t fair to the loyal retailers who aren’t even using Faire.
The Hidden Pressures Faire Puts on Small Brands
Global Free Shipping Pressure
Faire heavily encourages makers to offer free or flat-rate shipping worldwide. This may sound nice for buyers, but for products like heavy glass candles, it's extremely costly. I don’t have global distribution warehouses or discounted freight rates. Every international order becomes a logistical problem and a margin killer.
The Faire Insider program complicates this even further. Insider uses estimated shipping costs to offer free shipping when it makes financial sense to drive conversion. Specifically, when you become an Insider Partner, Insiders will see free shipping on your brand if the estimated shipping cost to their location is less than 13% of the total order value. Faire uses your prior reported shipping costs and the buyer's location to calculate eligibility.
If actual shipping costs exceed 13% of the order amount, Faire covers the difference. However, makers are still expected to absorb shipping up to that 13% threshold. There is a lower-cost option (Insider Partner Basic) that uses a 10% guardrail, but either way, brands are expected to subsidize a significant share of fulfillment costs before Faire steps in.
For heavy products like candles, even a 10 to 13% threshold rarely covers the true cost of packing, insuring, and shipping fragile glass. Yet retailers only see "free shipping" at checkout, unaware of how much of that cost is absorbed by the maker.
Discouraging Handling Fees
Even adding a modest handling fee to cover boxes, void fill, tape, labor, gas, and delivery time can trigger warnings that it might interfere with retailer free shipping eligibility. This discourages us from recovering basic fulfillment costs.
Pushing Lower Order Minimums
Faire suggests lowering first order minimums to $100 or $150 to "match buyer expectations." But those expectations largely exist because Faire trained them. Small orders may feel easy for buyers, but they make it difficult for makers to cover fixed labor, materials, and packaging costs.
For context, $150 is roughly 8 of my glass tumbler candles — not even enough to fill one wholesale shipping box. Smaller orders often require multiple boxes, multiple trips to the post office, and almost as much packing, paperwork, and back-end coordination as larger orders. The workload stays the same, but gets spread across fewer units, making it far less efficient.
Constant Discount Pressure
Faire regularly runs site-wide sales, often encouraging makers to offer 5% to 50% off — plus free shipping, which is typically paid for by the maker. These sales often feel mandatory just to stay visible in search results. During their Winter and Summer Market events, Faire will usually offer to match maker discounts to help drive sales, but in reality, they only match up to 5%. So if you offer 10% off, Faire might cover just 5% of that discount.
It’s worth noting that these discounts are added on top of wholesale pricing, which is already significantly reduced from retail. For handmade products, where labor and materials are already expensive, these additional markdowns can make profitability nearly impossible. This kind of discount culture puts pressure on handmade businesses to race toward unsustainable margins — a textbook example of what Seth Godin calls the race to the bottom.
The Mass Production Flood
Since returning to Faire, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in what fills its catalog. Many listings appear to come directly from mass-manufacturing sources like Alibaba and AliExpress. New brands pop up with hundreds of SKUs, often filled with generic, mass-produced home goods and AI-generated product photos.
For independent boutique owners who once used Faire to find unique, handmade goods, it’s worth asking whether the site still functions as a true small maker marketplace. In many ways, it's starting to resemble a wholesale version of Amazon or Temu.
How Faire's Marketplace Model Hurts Small Businesses
Faire’s open-door policy allows mass-produced products to overwhelm search results, pushing independent makers out of view. To regain visibility, small brands are pushed into buying ads, generating more revenue for Faire and its investors. This creates a pay-to-play system where indie businesses pay twice: first in platform fees, then again in ad costs just to stay competitive.
A curated marketplace could better support independent makers. Instead, the current model prioritizes short-term growth over long-term scalability for small businesses.
The Growing Power Imbalance
Faire has shifted more risk and expense onto makers while offering Amazon-level convenience to retailers:
- Retailers get free returns, free shipping, and steep discounts.
- Makers absorb fees, discounts, shipping, and labor costs.
- Faire collects commissions regardless of maker profitability.
As of 2021, Faire raised over $1 billion in venture capital and was valued at $12.4 billion (source). That kind of valuation doesn’t happen by accident — and it comes with heavy pressure to keep delivering returns to investors.
Like any venture-backed business, Faire is constantly juggling the demands of its investors, employees, retailers, and brands. But the makers (those of us actually producing the goods) often feel like the last priority. As Faire adds more perks to attract retailers and fuel growth, small brands absorb more fees, shipping costs, and discount pressures to keep everything spinning.
Even returns create additional issues. When a retailer initiates a return, makers like me never actually see that product come back. Instead, returned inventory is sent to Faire’s warehouse, where it may eventually be resold at a discount. Makers lose the revenue from that sale and have no option to reclaim the returned inventory for quality control, resale, or repurposing.
The system favors scale, not small brand growth. As buyer convenience grows, makers find it harder to operate profitably behind the scenes.
Why Transparency Matters
I remain on Faire because that’s where wholesale lives right now. My retailers are overwhelmingly still on the platform. I can't afford to leave, but I believe it’s important to be transparent.
Retailers who want to support small makers should understand how these platforms work behind the scenes. Faire is no longer simply a marketplace for small brands. It increasingly resembles Amazon for wholesale. And if the current model continues, it will continue to squeeze out many of the makers who built its early reputation.
If you want to truly support brands like mine:
- Order directly from makers when possible. If you’re shopping on Faire for the first time, consider reaching out to your favorite small brands before placing an order — many of us can provide a Faire Direct link, which allows us to bypass Faire’s standard 15% commission.
- Understand that "free" shipping and returns aren’t actually free.
- Ask makers how they prefer to work together. Some of us might be able to offer tiered discounts, early access to new product releases, or wholesale perks that aren't always available through Faire’s system.
Convenience is easy. But meaningful retail was never supposed to be easy. It’s built on relationships, on knowing who makes your products, and on choosing what you carry for reasons bigger than just what’s fastest and cheapest to order.
If you’ve made it this far and still want to chat wholesale, brainstorm ideas, or just vent about the state of retail, you can always reach me here.
