Where it can be sold changes what you should source.

It changes more than the price. Amazon FBA and Shopify want listing-compliant claims and clean imagery; TikTok and cross-border live selling want fast, repeatable units; salon and spa channels want durability and serviceability. We tailor the shortlist to your real channel, because a device built for one sells poorly through another, and the mismatch is cheaper to avoid than to fix after a container ships.

Build your own store on Shopify with adult-friendly themes and a high-risk-friendly payment processor as the durable asset, because the customer data and the relationship are yours. Amazon allows adult-category listings under its policies and is useful reach; age verification and SSL are baseline, and Google Ads permits some discreet, text-based adult product ads while restricting imagery.

Subscription-box curators routinely rank unboxing as a top selection criterion. Magnetic-closure boxes, an embossed logo and a satin-lined tray signal premium before the product is touched, and a considered package is what unlocks mainstream retail channels that a plain bulk box cannot.

No — not directly. TikTok’s US Prohibited Products Policy lists adult-related products, including vibrators and dildos, as prohibited from sale on the platform, so you cannot run a TikTok Shop checkout for an intimate device the way a skincare brand can. What TikTok is useful for is awareness and creator content that earns a click to your owned store, where the sale happens. Build the plan around that split rather than assuming checkout works where the policy forbids it.

Yes. "Sexual Wellness" requires category approval on every major marketplace — US, UK, EU, Japan and Canada — and approval is per-market, so an Amazon US clearance does not carry to Amazon UK or DE. Expect to submit a commercial invoice from your manufacturer dated within 180 days, CE marking under the LVD and EMC directives for electronics, and a clinical, non-explicit listing tone. FBA packaging must be opaque and neutral, with no product class on the outer carton. An ISO 13485 or ISO 22716 quality system on the factory is a genuine advantage.

Increasingly, yes. As the category destigmatizes into "intimate wellness," pelvic-health practitioners, pharmacies and wellness retailers have become genuine wholesale accounts, and the brands that reposition from "adult toys" to "intimate wellness products" are the ones they open accounts for. A distributor serving that channel typically runs a professional tier with clinic-ready, discreet packaging and low or no minimums on first orders — a different buyer from a marketplace seller ordering by the container. Put the channel in your brief early; it changes the packaging spec and the MOQ conversation.

It is an owned audience — email, SMS, loyalty and referral — that you do not rent from a platform, which matters in a category where ad networks restrict you. The instruments are concrete: a post-purchase flow that teaches the buyer to use the product (the highest-converting retention lever), a subscription or replenishment model to lock in repeat revenue, and tools like Klaviyo, Postscript and Recharge to run them. Watch the cohort retention curve, not the blended rate, because a blended number hides whether your newest cohorts are quietly getting worse.

Partly — and the line is the product's purpose, not its name. Meta's Health and Wellness advertising standard prohibits ads for sex toys and erotic products sold for pleasure or enhancement on both Facebook and Instagram. It allows condoms, lubricants, fertility and erectile-dysfunction treatments only when the creative is health-focused, shows nothing sexual, and targets adults 18 or older. You cannot buy your way past the restriction with careful wording; an owned store plus organic content (SEO, email, creator partnerships) is the durable asset, not the ad account.

Use a processor that explicitly serves the high-risk category. Mainstream providers — Stripe, PayPal and Square — routinely freeze or refuse adult-product accounts, often after the first chargeback, which strands both the money and the launch. The specialists built for this are CCBill, SegPay, Epoch and PaymentCloud. Expect a reserve held against your balance and a higher per-transaction fee; that is the cost of a processor that is still there after month one. Line one up before you launch, not after the first decline.

Yes — Meta rewrote the policy on 22 July 2026. The 18+ targeting rule was extended to weight-gain products, and new bans were added for claims to cure listed incurable diseases and for clickbait health claims. The core rule is unchanged: ads for sex toys and erotic products sold for pleasure are prohibited on Facebook and Instagram, while health-focused wellness products are allowed only for adults 18+. Plan around an owned store plus organic content.

Neither publishes a rate; both price per merchant in underwriting on vertical, volume, chargeback history and region. Plan for the card-scheme high-risk registration that applies regardless — Visa about $950 and Mastercard $500–$1,000 a year — plus processing around 5–10% and a reserve of 0–20% held 90–180 days. CCBill's flat-rate PSP states no monthly fee and is the fastest path live. Segpay names seven acquiring relationships and pays weekly (Tuesdays), the safer bet if an acquirer exits your vertical. Run both for redundancy so one bank leaving does not stop billing. Line them up before launch, not after the first decline.

Opening an account is a documentary step, not a negotiation, and the four things a supplier asks for are the same everywhere: the legal entity name and registration number, the resale or VAT registration that proves you are buying to resell rather than as a consumer, a delivery address that matches the entity, and a first order at or above the published minimum. What varies - and what you should insist on seeing before you commit - is the price list.

A usable wholesale structure states the volume tiers as numbers rather than as adjectives, names the currency and the incoterm the price is quoted on, separates tooling from unit price, states the payment terms and whether a deposit is required, and states the validity period of the quote. A supplier who will only give a price on a call is quoting your tone of voice rather than the order, which means the number moves when you sound less certain. The tier arithmetic behind those break points is worked through in section 4.4 of the MOQ guide, and the entry minimum for each line in this catalogue is on the catalogue index.

Retail chains in this category typically buy at 40–55% of the suggested retail price. On a $45 SRP with a $12 landed cost, a chain buying at 50% of SRP pays $22.50, leaving $10.50 of gross margin — roughly 47% on wholesale revenue. That is thinner than direct-to-consumer, but it arrives without a customer-acquisition cost attached, which is the trade you are actually making. Price the freight to their warehouse in as well: it is your cost, not theirs. Our channel comparison lays out what each route costs and where it breaks.

Net 30 to Net 90, with Net 60 ordinary for mid-size retail chains. The term, not the price, is usually what decides whether a wholesale business survives: while you wait for the invoice to clear, your factory has already taken 30% up front and the balance on shipment. Price the cost of carrying that receivable into the wholesale price before you quote it, and get the term in writing at onboarding rather than at the first invoice.

A useful rule: assume you fund the whole order until the invoice clears. A $50,000 order book at Net 60 can leave $35,000–50,000 in accounts receivable for two months. If you need a credit line to bridge that, its cost belongs in your price. A 47% gross margin that takes 75 days to become cash is worth less than a 40% margin that pays in 30 — compare the two on a cash-conversion basis, not on gross margin alone.

Published per-SKU bands for this category run roughly 12–24 units for an independent boutique, 50–150 for a regional adult chain, 200–500 for a national chain in the EU or UK, and 500–2,000 for pharmacy or mass retail. That spread matters because it decides your tooling route: a boutique order cannot absorb a private mould, a national-chain order can. The channel chooses the tooling, not the other way round. See the comparison on our brand page.

Direct first, almost always. An owned store produces the only asset a retail buyer will ask about — documented sell-through — and a few hundred real orders is enough to say something true about demand. Wholesale without that data is a pitch rather than a procurement conversation. The sequence that works is owned store, then marketplace, then wholesale, then clinical; each stage produces the evidence the next one asks for.

Roughly 20–60% of the unit price, depending on how many tiers sit between you and the factory, and in exchange it carries three things you would otherwise carry: smaller minimums, stock on the shelf today, and the import and warehousing risk. That is a fair trade for a first order or a market test, and a bad trade once you have volume and your own sell-through data — because a public-mould product bought through a chain is the same product your competitor is buying through the same chain.

Yes, in three situations: you have limited capital and need to test whether the market buys; you need inventory inside a week for a seasonal window; or you are still learning import, customs and warehousing. All three are real. What is not real is staying there — a distributor is a starting point, and the signal to move on is having your own sell-through data and a volume band that a factory will quote directly.

Published structures in this category typically step a few points at the 500-unit break and again past 1,000 units. A few points looks trivial until you are funding a promotion out of it. Ask for the tier table in writing before you discuss price at all. A supplier who will not publish the break points is telling you the tiers are set per conversation, which means the number you get depends on how you sounded on the call rather than on the order.

Wholesale describes how you buy — in larger quantities at a better unit price. A distributor is a business partner that supplies a catalogue, stock, delivery, credit terms and support. They are not mutually exclusive: you can buy wholesale from a distributor. The distinction that matters for your margin is how many layers sit between you and the factory, because every layer adds a markup and none of them add a different product.

Compare it against the landed cost of going direct, not against another distributor's quote. If a distributor quotes $17–20 for a unit that leaves the factory at $8–12, the spread is what you are paying for convenience, stock and smaller minimums. That can be the right call at 200 units and the wrong one at 2,000. Ask what the factory-gate price would be at your volume band — a supplier who cannot answer is not a factory.

Most large retailers do, and it is a gate rather than a preference — a supplier who cannot acknowledge an order and send an advance ship notice in the retailer's format does not get onboarded, regardless of the product. Electronic data interchange is the system-to-system exchange of those documents (see the Wikipedia entry). Budget for it before the first purchase order, not after.

Five cover almost the whole relationship: the 846 inventory advice (what you can actually supply), the 850 purchase order (what they want), the 855 purchase order acknowledgment (that you accept it), the 856 advance ship notice (what is in each carton) and the 810 invoice. Some partners treat the 810 as optional where their receiving system generates invoices from the ship confirmation, so check the specific implementation guide — every trading partner publishes its own.

Weeks, not days — network providers commonly quote six to ten weeks from signature to live, and every trading partner has its own specification for the same document number. Build it into the launch calendar alongside production and freight. If you are shipping fewer than a handful of retail orders a month, a provider portal you key orders into by hand is a legitimate interim step; the mistake is discovering the requirement the week the first purchase order arrives.

A chargeback is a penalty a retailer deducts from your invoice for a compliance failure — not a product complaint. Published ranges in this category run about $50–150 per carton for a missing or wrong label, $100–300 per shipment for a ship-notice error, $50–100 per pallet for pallet non-compliance, and a percentage of the purchase order value for a missed delivery window. They are documentation failures, and they all trace back to building the paperwork from what was ordered rather than from what was packed.

It is the retailer's rulebook for how a shipment must be prepared and delivered: which carrier, which label format (GS1-128 and store-specific labels are common), pallet dimensions and stack height, carton weight limits, and whether a delivery appointment is required. It is usually the document nobody reads past page two, and it is where most chargebacks originate. Get the current version before your first shipment and check it again each season — routing guides are revised.

Almost always because the ASN was built from the purchase order rather than from the cartons actually packed. The notice has to match the physical shipment carton by carton, including quantities and lot numbers. Build it from scan data at packing, not from the order, and reconcile before the truck leaves. A late or missing acknowledgment causes the same class of problem: the retailer's system has no confirmed order, so nothing downstream reconciles.

Often yes, and for a small brand it is frequently the cheapest route: the fulfilment partner already maintains the retailer connections and generates compliant ship notices from what it packed. What it cannot do is own your item mapping — retailers order by their own part numbers, which rarely match your SKUs, and that mapping is done once, by you, and has to be right before the first live order.

On Time In Full — the share of orders delivered complete and within the agreed window. It is the single number a retail buyer uses to decide whether a supplier is safe to reorder from, and it is usually measured against a contractual threshold with penalties below it. A brand that cannot state its own OTIF has not been measuring the thing its customer measures, which reads as a risk even when the product is good.

Yes, and it is the least price-sensitive channel in the category because the recommendation comes from a professional rather than from an advert. What it requires is different, not just stricter: a credential-gated professional account, clinic-ready packaging, patient-education material, and a claims rulebook that forbids outcome guarantees. Expect the buyer to verify a licence before approving the account.

Around areas of care, not around the retail taxonomy: pelvic floor, vulvar and intimate care, menopause comfort, prostate and male pelvic health, sexual function, and lubricants. A clinician sourcing for a practice is not browsing a novelty catalogue — a catalogue organised by "for her / for couples" makes the professional do the translation work, and most will not. If that channel is your target, the assortment decision comes before the product decision.

Sometimes, and the difference is documentation and claims discipline rather than hardware. A device needs a clinical use case it can actually support, instructions written for a professional setting, and marketing that makes no therapeutic claim the evidence does not carry. A device that cannot survive clinic packaging and a claims review is a consumer product at any price, and we will say so plainly in a shortlist rather than let a brand discover it in a procurement meeting.

Anything that promises a medical outcome the device is not authorised to deliver: guaranteed results, fixed treatment schedules, cures, or universal safety claims. Those are the claims that get a listing pulled and a professional account closed. Describe what the device does mechanically — vibration, pressure, stimulation — and let the clinician draw the therapeutic conclusion. It is also the safer position under advertising rules in every market we ship to.

Usually much smaller per order, and more frequently. A practice may take a handful of units, a pharmacy chain several hundred. That is exactly why the clinical channel is normally served through a specialist distributor rather than direct from a factory — the order sizes cannot absorb a private-label minimum, but the repeat pattern is steady and the price sensitivity is low.

In five stages, and each stage answers a different question: Google for "who makes this", peer groups on Facebook and Reddit for "has anyone used them", Instagram for "is the plant real", the supplier's own site for "what are the terms", and the first message for "can they build it". A supplier that only exists at stage one fails the other four. Being findable and verifiable at every stage is what shortens the trust gap before a deposit.

By publishing operational evidence rather than product shots: how a mould was tooled, what a batch test showed, how a chargeback was avoided, what a channel's margin actually is. Published B2B research puts the share of B2B decision-makers who use LinkedIn during vendor research at close to nine in ten, and describes a research window measured in weeks rather than minutes — which is why a single post rarely converts and a consistent run of them does. Content that answers a procurement question compounds; content that repeats a brochure does not.

Poorly, on the published numbers: acceptance rates under 12% and reply rates under 3% are typical for cold InMail campaigns in consumer categories, against materially higher conversion when the buyer makes first contact after reading your content. The practical conclusion is not "never send a brief" — it is that a warm message referencing the store, the range and a specific fit converts, and a deck does not.

They are the peer-verification stage, and they are unforgiving. Groups where importers trade factory recommendations and warn about trading-company scams are where a shortlist gets pressure-tested before anyone wires a deposit. A manufacturer that is invisible there is not neutral — it is unverified. The one thing you cannot do is fake it: a group that catches a "factory" that is really a trading company does not forget.

Factory-tour Reels, silicone-injection clips and per-batch QC footage are the proof stage, because a live production line is hard to fake and a catalogue is trivial to fake. The check that follows is the one that matters: does the plant shown in the video match the plant named on the business licence, and can the supplier produce a per-batch test report rather than a brand-level certificate. Buyers increasingly run exactly that comparison.

LinkedIn introduced an authenticity update in March 2026 that reduces reach for content pattern-matching to generic AI output, with reported reductions of up to 60%. Whatever the exact mechanism, the practical rule is stable: specificity survives. A post naming the temperature of a process, the rejection rate on a run, or the exact clause in a routing guide cannot be generated from a prompt, which is precisely why it performs.

LinkedIn's ad policies are narrower than consumer platforms and its audience is professional, so a direct product ad is the wrong instrument. What works is the same content that attracts buyers organically — a documented sourcing process, a compliance explainer, a channel-margin breakdown — promoted to a job-title audience. Meta and Google prohibit sex-toy advertising outright, which is why LinkedIn and an owned store carry more of the B2B acquisition load in this category than they would elsewhere.

Consumers respond to desire and reassurance; buyers respond to risk reduction. The five content types that move a buyer are product-quality proof, sell-through evidence, a brand story they can repeat in-store, merchandising support, and documented compliance. All five are things a buyer would otherwise have to ask for in a meeting — publishing them means the meeting starts at terms instead of at introductions.

Yes, with the method attached — that is what makes it citable rather than promotional. A decibel figure with the meter, the distance and the intensity step is evidence; "whisper quiet" is an adjective. The same number defends a listing to a marketplace reviewer, answers a retail buyer's returns question, and gives a journalist something to quote. Data with a published method is the cheapest durable asset a small brand can own.

Give the answer first, then the argument. A page that opens with a direct answer, states its numbers in text rather than inside an image, labels its tables, and ships structured data (Product, Offer, FAQPage, Dataset) is the page an assistant can lift a sentence from without misrepresenting it. Long preamble, numbers buried in PNGs and unlabelled comparison grids are what make a page unquotable, however good the product is.

Generative engine optimisation: being the source an AI answer cites, rather than the tenth blue link. It matters more in B2B than in consumer retail because the buyer's research window is long and the questions are specific — margin, MOQ, certification, lead time. The mechanics are unglamorous and entirely conventional: specific claims, named sources, dated pages, structured data, and figures with their method attached. Everything that makes a page good for a procurement reader makes it quotable.

Late August for a December peak. Production runs 25–35 days, sea freight 25–38 days, and marketplace check-in about a week — 57–80 days end to end, and those legs add up rather than overlap. Google Trends shows the category peaking in December with secondary peaks in April and July, and Black Friday–Cyber Monday producing the sharpest single week. An October order is a salvage operation, not a plan. Our sourcing guides index carries the same clock as a chart.

It stops the factory for weeks, and the ramp either side is slower than the holiday itself — workers leave early and return late, and the weeks before the break are congested with everyone else's rush orders. If your launch window depends on a Q1 shipment, the order has to be placed so that production completes before the break, not so that it starts before it. Add the holiday to the same backward-planned calendar as the December peak.

Published search data shows a stable three-peak structure: April, July and December, with November ramping into the sharpest single week of the year around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and a trough in May. Planning only for Q4 under-serves the spring and mid-summer waves. The other calendar that matters is Chinese New Year, which is a supply constraint rather than a demand one.

Small enough that being wrong is a tuition payment rather than a bankruptcy. For most devices in our catalogue that means the entry tier — 100 to 300 units depending on the SKU — on a public mould, with the tooling money kept for the third order. The mistake is not starting small; it is spending the tooling budget on the first order, before you know whether anyone wants the shape.

Product cost plus freight plus duty plus insurance plus the last mile, and then the costs people forget: inspection, carton and pallet compliance, and the working capital tied up while the goods are at sea. Duty is set by the customs code the product classifies under, and misclassifying it is a compliance risk rather than a saving. Ask for the HS code in writing and check it with a broker before the first shipment — a landed-cost model built on a guessed code is wrong in both directions.

FOB means the supplier delivers to the port and the risk and freight cost transfer to you; DDP means the supplier delivers duty-paid to your door. DDP is simpler and usually more expensive, and it hides the freight and duty inside the unit price — which makes it hard to see what you are actually paying for the goods. For a first order, FOB plus a named freight forwarder gives you a cost breakdown you can act on; for a small trial order, DDP is often worth the premium in time saved.

Provision for it explicitly rather than hoping, because returns in intimate wellness are driven by two things you can measure: noise at the low setting, and a product that does not match its description. That is the practical argument for publishing measured decibel figures — a buyer who knows how loud it is at 30 cm does not return it for being loud. Budget a percentage of revenue, keep the reason codes, and treat a rising rate on one SKU as a specification problem rather than a customer problem.

Quote in the currency you are paid in and state the incoterm and the validity period next to it. Cross-border wholesale quotes in this category are conventionally in USD, which pushes the exchange risk onto the buyer; some suppliers win goodwill by quoting in the destination currency with a fixed review window. Either way, put an expiry date on the quote — a price held open indefinitely is not a price, and material and freight costs both move.