How to order wholesale stationery

Why Stationery is a wholesale marketplace. Listings are bought by the box, not by the piece: you pick a design, choose a quantity at or above that listing's minimum, and the per-piece price steps down as the quantity goes up. This guide covers how that works, what you can change on someone else's design, and the one deadline that decides whether an order is still refundable.

Minimum order quantities

Every wholesale listing states a minimum order quantity — its MOQ. You cannot order fewer than that number of pieces from that listing.

The platform floor is 50 pieces. A seller may set a higher minimum on their own listing — some designs only make sense at 100 or 250 — but nobody can set one lower. That floor is what keeps this a wholesale marketplace rather than a single-piece retail shop, and it's enforced in the code that validates a listing, not just in policy.

The upper bound on a single line is 100,000 pieces. A genuine wholesale run sits far below that; the ceiling exists to catch typos and abuse.

How volume price tiers work

A wholesale listing carries a tier ladder: a set of quantity breakpoints, each with its own per-piece price. Order more, pay less per piece.

The ladder follows three rules, all enforced when a seller saves the listing:

1. The first tier's quantity is the MOQ — the smallest order the listing accepts.
2. Each tier starts at a larger quantity than the one before it.
3. A tier can never cost more per piece than a smaller one. Prices step down or stay flat, never up.

So a ladder might read:

Quantity	Price per piece
50 – 99	$2.40
100 – 249	$2.10
250+	$1.85

At 60 pieces you pay $2.40 each — $144. At 100 pieces you pay $2.10 each — $210 for nearly twice as many. At 250 you're at $1.85. The price that applies is the one attached to the highest breakpoint your quantity reaches; ordering 249 pieces does not get you the 250 rate.

It's worth checking the next breakpoint before you commit. Going from 90 pieces to 100 in the ladder above adds pieces and costs $6 more in total — the kind of gap that's easy to miss and annoying to discover afterwards.

What you can change on a design

The artwork belongs to the maker who made it. What you're allowed to change is set per listing, and it's stated on the listing itself:

• Sell as-is — you order the design exactly as shown.
• Light personalization — you change the words; the artwork stays as the maker built it. This is the common case for wholesale: your shop name or a line of copy, set in the maker's layout.
• Fully customizable — you can rework the artwork and layout.

Whatever you type appears on a live preview of the actual product before you pay. What you approve is what gets printed, so read it carefully — spelling, names and dates included.

Payment, proofing and production

Wholesale orders are paid in full at checkout. After that, the order goes to the seller, who reviews it and comes back to you before anything is printed. Each shop sets its own proofing and production times, and those are shown on the listing.

When a wholesale order stops being refundable

This is the part worth reading twice, because wholesale works differently from a single personalized item.

For a one-off personalized order, a non-refundable design fee — the greater of 20% or $6 — applies once the seller starts design work. That model does not apply to wholesale orders. On a bulk run the seller's real commitment isn't the design work, which is usually a name and a font. It's the print run.

So wholesale follows a production-based rule instead:

1. Fully refundable until production starts. You can cancel for a complete refund any time before the seller begins your print run — even after proofs and messages have gone back and forth.
2. Non-refundable once production starts. When the run begins, the order is non-refundable. Several hundred pieces carrying your copy cannot be resold to anyone else. Your order page shows when production has begun.
3. Final sale after shipping.

A seller may still choose to refund some or all of a post-production cancellation as a courtesy, but they are not required to.

Two protections always apply on top of that. If an order arrives damaged, defective, wrong or lost, the returns policy covers it regardless of production status. And if a seller doesn't respond to a pre-shipping cancellation request within 5 business days, contact Why Stationery and we will cancel the order for a full refund.

The full terms are in the returns and cancellation policy, section 3A.

Before you place a large order

• Check the next price breakpoint. A few more pieces often costs less in total.
• Read the proof properly. The run is printed exactly as approved, and an approved typo is not a defect.
• Ask about turnaround before you need it. Proofing and production times are per-shop and are shown on the listing.
• Decide before production starts. That's the moment the money stops being refundable, and it's shown on your order page.