Wholesale Linesheet Ordering on Shopify for Fashion Brands

Uncap builds Shopify commerce for fashion and branded apparel brands where the wholesale motion is built properly rather than approximated: linesheet ordering by delivery window, size run and prepack minimums enforced in the grid, future season preorders with cancel dates, split shipments, and a consumer storefront running from the same catalog and the same inventory.

Uncap is a Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, with 380+ Shopify stores launched.

This page covers brand wholesale: linesheets, prebooks, sales reps and retailer accounts. For the whole category, start with fashion ecommerce for B2B sellers. Its sibling, Workwear and Uniforms, covers a genuinely different business: employee ordering programs with per-person allowances, decoration at the line item, and corporate catalogs by department. The dividing line is simple. If your buyer is a retail buyer choosing next season, you are on the right page. If your buyer is an HR or procurement manager issuing garments to staff against a budget, go to the sibling.

Where a lookbook shows the collection, the linesheet gives a retail buyer what they need to write the order:

• Brand and contact details. Your logo, the sales contact and the rep or showroom that handles the account.
• Product details. A photo, style name, style number or SKU and a short description for every style.
• Prices. The wholesale price the retailer pays and the MSRP, the retail price you recommend.
• Colors, sizes and packs. Every colorway, the size range, and any prepack or case pack breakdown.
• Order terms. Minimum order quantities, payment terms, delivery windows, cancel dates and shipping policy.

Your wholesale season does not start with an order. It starts with a linesheet, a market appointment, and a buyer choosing delivery windows for goods that do not exist yet. Six weeks later that becomes a size run against prepack minimums, split across three ship dates, with a cancel date attached. None of that is a shopping cart.

A linesheet sent as a PDF or a spreadsheet still has to become an order by hand. The buyer marks it up and sends it back, and someone on your team rekeys it, size by size.

On Shopify, the linesheet becomes the catalog a buyer orders from. Shopify B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus plans, and each part of the linesheet maps to something Shopify or Uncap provides:

• Styles, colors and sizes. Shopify says "You can create up to 2,048 variants for a product" and "Each product can have up to three options," so one style carries its colors and sizes as variants.
• Wholesale prices by account. B2B catalogs carry custom pricing and product availability. On the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans you can have "up to 3 active catalog assignments across active B2B markets," and on Shopify Plus "you can also assign catalogs directly to specific companies."
• Minimums and packs. Quantity rules set a minimum, maximum and increment for each variant, and Shopify notes that "Customers can’t combine 5 gray hats and 5 blue hats to meet the minimum of 10 hats." A style minimum met across sizes, or a prepack sold as a fixed size curve, is built on top during implementation.
• Terms and deposits. "Payment terms define how long a company has to pay for an order." "Deposit requirements, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfillment are available only on the Shopify Plus plan," and those are the native features for taking a prebook deposit or requesting payment per shipment.
• Delivery windows, prebooks and cancel dates. Built during implementation, alongside the order grid.

Sales reps can order for an account too: when a draft order has a B2B customer and a company location assigned, Shopify says "the prices, payment terms, and checkout options automatically reflect the settings for that company." In Uncap Portal, reps and admins manage users, limits and approvals from the same place buyers self-serve. For the account side of wholesale on its own, see how Uncap builds a wholesale portal on Shopify.

Shopify B2B covers companies, catalogs, quantity rules, quantity price breaks and net terms. The apparel-specific layer, meaning size run matrices, prepacks, prebooks, delivery windows and split-ship wholesale ordering, is built during implementation.

The usual answer to that gap is to run two systems: a fashion wholesale platform for the wholesale motion and Shopify for DTC.

A second wholesale platform means a second catalog, a second inventory position, a second place where a style gets discontinued, and an integration between them that somebody owns. It also means the DTC business and the wholesale business disagree about what is available, which is the single most expensive disagreement in apparel.

Every brand that has run this setup knows the failure: a style sells through at retail while a wholesale prebook is still open against it, or an allocation is committed in one system that the other cannot see.

A wholesale apparel order is a matrix, not a list. Style by color by size, with a size run curve, prepack configurations that cannot be broken, style minimums, and an order total that has to clear a threshold before it is valid.

A prebook is a commitment for goods that will exist. It carries a delivery window, a cancel date, and often a deposit. It has to hold inventory it does not have yet, convert when production lands, and release cleanly when a buyer cancels in a market where cancellation is routine rather than exceptional.

One order, three delivery windows, partial fulfillment, backorder handling, and an invoice per shipment. Handled badly this becomes a reconciliation problem that lands on whoever runs credit.

The two-platform recommendation is right about the requirements. It draws the wrong conclusion, and that conclusion is worth arguing with directly, because it is the one your buyers will arrive with.

A fashion-native wholesale platform gives you a strong linesheet motion and a second system of record. What it does not give you is one inventory position across wholesale and DTC, one catalog, one place a style is retired, and one ERP connection. In apparel, those four are where the money leaks.

Uncap's argument is that the apparel wholesale layer is buildable on Shopify and the unified inventory is not buildable across two platforms.

Uncap Quotes gives buyers self-serve configuration against their account's negotiated pricing, with the approved version converting to a Shopify order in one click. The style, color and size matrix that turns into a single validated order, rather than forty separate additions to a cart, is built on top of it during implementation.

Uncap Quotes runs the full configure, price, quote workflow inside the Shopify admin, with negotiated prices, tiers and volume breaks applied automatically, approvals routed to the right approver, revisions that keep the version history, and an approved quote converting to a Shopify order in one click. In an apparel season, validity windows are the cancel date and the revision history is the argument you do not have in October about what was agreed in February.

Uncap Portal gives buyers multi-user accounts with roles and permissions, where each buyer sees their own assortment and pricing, which maps to a retail group where a buyer selects and a merchandise director approves.

Linesheet ordering by delivery window, prepack configurations, size run curves, style minimums and split ship logic are implementation work, and they belong in a scope with a price rather than on a feature list.

Both channels draw from the same product catalog and the same inventory. A prebook holds against future production. A DTC sale draws from available stock. A style retired in the back office disappears from both. Uncap Connect syncs pricing, inventory, customer accounts and orders between Shopify and the ERP, so the position everyone is working from is the same position.

Uncap built Mata Traders, an ethical contemporary women's fashion brand sourcing from fair trade partners in Nepal and India, on Shopify. That is a brand build rather than a wholesale linesheet build, and it is described here as what it is.

Linesheet ordering by delivery window. Seasonal assortments presented by drop and delivery window rather than as a flat catalog, with the buyer selecting into windows rather than into a cart.

Size run and prepack enforcement. Style by color by size grids with prepack configurations that cannot be broken, size curve defaults, style minimums and order minimums validated before submission.

Preorders with cancel dates. Future season commitments carrying delivery windows, cancel dates and deposits where required, converting when production lands and releasing cleanly when they do not.

Split shipments. One order, several ship windows, partial fulfillment, backorder handling and invoicing per shipment.

Account structure for retail groups. Multi-user accounts with roles and permissions, where each buyer sees their own assortment and pricing.

Quoting with validity windows and revision history. Configure, price and quote inside the Shopify admin, with approval routing and a full revision history across a season of changes.

One inventory position across wholesale and DTC. Prebooks, allocations and retail availability drawn from the same source rather than reconciled between two platforms.

ERP integration. Thirteen published integrations covering NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, Epicor, Infor, Sage, Acumatica, Odoo, QuickBooks, Fishbowl, Cin7 and Syspro.

The two-platform recommendation is the problem being solved. A specialist wholesale platform alongside Shopify creates the inventory split apparel brands lose money on.

The apparel layer is scoped, not assumed. Size run grids, prepacks, prebooks and split ship logic are built during implementation. Here they appear in a scope with a number rather than in a feature list.

Unified inventory is the deliverable. One catalog, one inventory position, one ERP connection across wholesale and DTC. That is the thing a split stack cannot give you at any price.

Scoped before it is built. The Uncap Blueprint maps the wholesale ordering model, season calendar, inventory architecture and ERP integration before any build begins. You leave with a plan you can take to any agency, including the ones selling the second platform.

Related pages: Workwear and Uniforms, the sibling page for employee programs and decorated corporate apparel, and Sporting Goods for brands selling through authorized dealers with preseason booking and MAP terms, which shares most of this architecture. Distributors and manufacturers selling blank apparel and decorating supplies to screen printers and embroiderers are covered on wholesale blank t-shirts and decorating supplies, where size run entry, fiber by color and supply suggestions are built during implementation on Shopify. Bag and backpack brands and wholesalers selling by the case to schools, nonprofits, resellers and promotional buyers are covered on wholesale backpacks, where case pack rules, unit price breaks, tax-exempt accounts and logo quotes run on Shopify B2B.

Bring last season's linesheet and one buyer's order as it was actually submitted, amendments included. Those two documents describe the build better than a requirements list will.

Talk to Our Experts, or start with a Blueprint if what you need first is an architecture that settles the two-platform question with numbers.