You email a distributor asking for a price list. They email back asking for your EIN, your resale certificate, your entity registration and the name on your business bank account. No prices.
It feels like a brush-off. It usually isn't.
The supplier that sends you a full catalog with pricing five minutes after you fill in a web form is not being generous. They are telling you something about how they make money, and it is worth reading carefully before you wire anything.
The gate is a tax problem before it is anything else
Start with the least glamorous reason, because it is the one that actually forces the behavior.
In a wholesale sale, the supplier does not charge you sales tax. That exemption is not automatic — it has to be documented, and the document is your resale certificate. If it is missing, expired, filled in wrong, or issued by a state that does not apply to the transaction, the liability does not land on you. It lands on the supplier. Avalara's guidance puts it plainly: if anything is out of order with the certificate, the seller is responsible for any uncollected sales tax.
So when a distributor asks for your certificate before quoting, they are protecting their own balance sheet, not testing your patience.
It gets more specific once goods move across state lines. In a drop-shipment, where the supplier ships straight to your customer or straight into a fulfillment center, ten jurisdictions refuse to accept an out-of-state resale certificate: California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Washington. A supplier with economic nexus in one of those states either gets a certificate valid in that state or charges you tax. If they do neither and an auditor comes calling, they are assessed the back tax plus interest on the sale price.
There are workarounds. The Multistate Tax Commission's Uniform Sales and Use Tax Resale Certificate and the Streamlined Sales Tax Certificate of Exemption both cover multiple states with one form. Not every state takes them. Four states have no state sales tax at all: Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon. That changes the question without removing it.
None of this is visible to you as a buyer. All you see is a form.
The second reason: brands watch who their goods reach
Selective distribution is legal in the United States, and brands use it. A manufacturer can decide by contract who it sells to, on what terms, and with what obligations. That contract runs down the chain.
What a brand generally cannot do is stop a downstream reseller who lawfully bought genuine goods from listing them. That is the first sale doctrine, and it is why so much marketplace selling exists at all. The exception that matters is material difference: if a unit differs in a way that matters to a consumer, such as different voltage, different warranty coverage or different labeling, the trademark owner has a much stronger position.
Pricing works on the same logic. Under the Colgate doctrine, settled in 1919 and still the safest tool a brand has, a manufacturer can announce the prices at which its goods may be advertised and simply refuse to keep dealing with anyone who ignores it. The word doing the work is unilaterally. The moment a supplier negotiates that policy with you, it stops being a unilateral announcement and starts being an agreement, which drags it into antitrust territory. That is why a distributor will tell you the MAP and will not discuss it. It is not stonewalling. It is the only way the policy stays legal.
A distributor who cannot describe any of this — no view on channels, no view on advertised pricing, no interest in what you do with the goods — is a distributor with nothing upstream to protect.
The third reason: the marketplace may call them
If you sell on Amazon or Walmart, your supplier is not an anonymous line item. Amazon's supply chain verification requests ask for contact information for both the supplier and the original manufacturer, and Amazon states that it may contact them to verify the documents.
Think about what that means from the other side of the table. A supplier who takes on a buyer they have not qualified is signing up to field verification calls about a customer they know nothing about. Suppliers who intend to still be here in five years care about that. Suppliers selling documents rather than goods do not, because by then the domain has changed.
This is also the honest answer to the letter-of-authorization question, which comes up in almost every qualification conversation. A distributor can write you a letter on letterhead saying you are authorized. It is worth nothing to Amazon. The document that carries weight is a real invoice for goods that were really bought, from a supplier that answers the phone. Anyone offering you the letter instead of the goods is selling the wrong product.
What a real qualification actually asks for
Distributors screening marketplace sellers tend to look at a fairly consistent set of things: a registered entity rather than a personal name, an EIN, a resale certificate, a business bank account in the company's name, and some evidence that the business exists in public. Larger houses often add trade references, and many have an informal preference for businesses that have been trading six months or a year.
Some go further and screen on projected volume, product category, or which channels you sell on. That is their right. It is also where a lot of buyers get quietly filtered out for reasons nobody explains to them.
We screen on two things: proof of a registered business entity, and a resale certificate. Not your channel, not your category, not a volume commitment before you have seen anything. You are welcome to sell on Amazon, on Walmart, in a physical store, or all three, and we would rather you told us so we can give you a straight answer about the product.
We will not publish pricing, and the reason is boring rather than strategic: price moves with quantity, and any number posted on a website is wrong for most of the people reading it. Tell us what you want and how much, and you get a real figure.
Reading the gate as a signal
Here is the part worth internalizing, because it inverts the instinct most new buyers have.
Every serious vetting guide written for marketplace sellers lists the same things as warning signs: wholesale pricing published openly with no account approval, very low minimums with no account setup at all, an address that turns out to be a mailbox store or a house, and pressure toward payment methods that cannot be traced or reversed.
Those are exactly the traits of the supplier that feels easiest to deal with on day one.
The friction runs the other way. An application form, a certificate request, a conversation before a number: all of it costs the supplier time, and costs them buyers. A business with no goods and no future has no reason to build any of it. The gate is expensive to fake.
A related test that costs you nothing: ask how you can pay. A supplier that accepts card payments is accepting chargebacks, and a business built on taking money for goods it will not ship cannot survive chargebacks. We take bank transfer and card through Stripe, with card carrying a three percent processing fee. Invoices go out in USD or EUR against your purchase order, and lead time is confirmed with you before you are billed. No order is invoiced against a delivery window you have not agreed to.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you that a marketplace will approve your listing. No supplier can, and the ones who say otherwise are describing a decision that belongs entirely to the marketplace. We supply goods and the documentation that comes with them. What you are eligible to sell, and where, is yours to determine.
We will not tell you a category is available when it is not, and we will not invent a price to keep a conversation going.
If you have a registered business and a resale certificate, the rest is a conversation about what you need and how much of it. That is all the gate is for.