Wholesale Marketplaces for Small Brands, Compared

The quick answer

Every one of these gets described as a wholesale platform, which is why the choice is confusing. They are not competing with each other. They solve three different problems.

If you have no stockists, your problem is discovery, and a marketplace is the fastest fix. If you have stockists but your ordering is a mess of PDFs and emails, your problem is admin, and a tool fixes it. If you have a wholesale team and a seasonal line, your problem is scale, and an enterprise platform fits.

Work out which sentence is you before you compare features.

The landscape

Marketplaces: discovery you rent

Faire, Ankorstore and Abound work the same way. You list, retailers browse, and orders arrive from shops you never contacted. The platform handles payment and usually gives retailers terms, which is the real reason shops like ordering there.

The cost is a commission on orders from retailers the platform introduced, and it keeps applying as that retailer reorders. That is fair for a first order and expensive on the tenth. Faire, the biggest of them, charges 15 percent on marketplace reorders and 25 percent on a first order if your brand is based outside North America, checked July 2026. Its own-retailer path, Faire Direct, is 0 percent. Ankorstore has stronger European reach. Abound is smaller, which cuts both ways.

Only the Faire and Upstock numbers here are verified. Rates and terms change on all three, so check the current fee page rather than trusting any comparison table, including this one.

Upstock: free listing, food and drink only

Upstock sits between a marketplace and a tool. It is a wholesale ordering platform for food and drink suppliers, and buyers are cafes, restaurants, bars, bakeries and grocers. Suppliers get a directory listing, a full catalogue and email ordering on a free plan, with no setup fee and no commission. A paid Logistics plan, from $99 a month according to its pricing page in September 2026 (currency not stated), adds purchase orders, invoicing, card payments and delivery management, and connects to Xero, MYOB and Cin7.

The catch is the shape. It does not take a cut, so it does not push you to buyers the way Faire does either. Think of it as a place a venue can find you and order from you without a PDF and a phone call. If you sell food or drink to hospitality, list there for free. If you sell skincare or supplements, it is the wrong room.

Pricing checked September 2026 and the plan details move, so confirm on its pricing page.

Tools: admin, not demand

Brandboom is a different animal. It builds line sheets, sends them, and manages the orders that come back. It is genuinely good at that, and brands who use it tend to like it.

What it does not do is bring you a buyer. If your problem is that nobody knows you exist, a better line sheet does not solve it. If your problem is that you are tracking wholesale orders in a spreadsheet and losing them, it does.

Worth being honest about this, because tools and marketplaces get compared as if they compete. They do not. Plenty of brands run both.

Enterprise: for a wholesale team you probably do not have

Joor sits at the top end. Virtual showrooms, seasonal linebooks, and the retailers it serves are department stores and large multi-door accounts. It is built for fashion brands with a wholesale team and a buying calendar.

If that is not you, it is not a near miss, it is the wrong category. Most of the search interest in Joor is people logging in or researching the company, not small brands weighing it up.

The thing none of them do

Every option above waits. A marketplace waits for a retailer to browse you. A listing waits for a buyer to search. A tool waits for you to send it something. Even the enterprise platforms are servicing relationships that already exist.

None of them will look at the deli two suburbs over, notice it stocks three brands that sit naturally beside yours, and write to the owner about it.

That is the gap. Most shops that could stock you are not on any of these platforms. They are a shopfront with a website and an owner who does the buying. Reaching them means going to them.

Where Synchronise fits

Synchronise does the going. It reads your site, finds shops in your category, checks what they already carry and whether you fit, then drafts the approach and the follow-ups in your voice. You approve, edit or bin each one, and nothing reaches a real person until you do.

It pairs with the list above rather than replacing it. Marketplace for the retailers who find you, outreach for the ones you choose. If a shop you approached says yes, bring them onto whichever platform you use for ordering, and keep the margin you would otherwise have paid as an introduction fee.