A wholesale line for a single cleaning spray can carry three different quantities, two different prices and a unit of measure that is not the unit you sell. Get the reading wrong and you either order six times what you meant to, or you set a retail price that loses money on every bottle.
This is the part of buying nobody trains you on. It is also, in home care specifically, easier to get wrong than in most categories — because case sizes here are unusually small and unusually inconsistent. A laundry sheet pack and a gallon concentrate can sit on the same sheet with case quantities of 12 and 4, and the price column for one is per case while the other is per unit.
The three quantities
Almost every pricelist you will see uses some version of these three, whatever the column headers say.
Each is one saleable unit — one 25 oz trigger spray, one box of 60 detergent sheets. This is what your customer carries to the register and what your shelf tag prices. It is very often not something you can order.
Inner pack is an intermediate carton inside the master case. A case of 24 scouring powders might contain four inner packs of six. Inner packs matter for two reasons: they are usually the display-ready unit that goes straight onto a shelf, and on some lines they are the smallest quantity a distributor will break to.
Case pack — also written master case, or just CS — is the sealed shipping carton. This is the unit of sale for most wholesale home care, ours included. When our sheet says 6 × 25 oz, six bottles is the smallest quantity that leaves the dock.
The trap is a sheet that lists a per-each price beside a case-pack quantity. That price is informational; it tells you your unit cost, not what you can buy. Multiply before you assume anything about the invoice.
Working a line, start to finish
Take a real shape from our own sheet. Item NPC-101, case pack 6 × 25 oz, case cost $34.80.
- Unit cost: $34.80 ÷ 6 = $5.80 per bottle.
- At a 40% margin, retail = $5.80 ÷ 0.60 = $9.67, which you round to $9.79 or $9.99 depending on how your shelf is priced.
- Gross profit per case at $9.99 retail: (9.99 − 5.80) × 6 = $25.14.
Note the first mistake people make here: dividing cost by the margin percentage is not the same as multiplying cost by it. $5.80 × 1.40 is $8.12, which is a 28.6% margin, not 40%. In a category where unit costs sit between $3 and $9, that error is small enough per bottle that it survives a whole season before anyone notices it in the P&L.
Tier breaks change the answer
Most sheets, ours included, have two or three break quantities. If the same item drops to $32.40 at six cases, the unit cost falls to $5.40 and gross profit per case at the same retail rises to $27.54 — about 9.5% more profit for holding five extra cases of a fast-moving spray.
Whether that is worth it is a cash question, not a margin question. Six cases of a 25 oz spray is 36 bottles. If the store sells nine a week, that is a month of stock; if it sells two, you have tied up four months of cash to make an extra $14 in the meantime. Buy the break when the SKU turns, not because the break exists.
The second place the math goes wrong: freight
Home care is heavy and cheap, which is the worst combination for landed cost. A case of six 25 oz sprays weighs about 11 lb. A case of four gallon concentrates weighs 36 lb and costs less per ounce — but if you are paying freight per shipment rather than per pound, those two cases cost you the same to bring in.
The practical version of this: work out your freight-free threshold and build orders to clear it. On our terms freight is free over $900 and a flat $24 below that. On a $400 order, that $24 spreads across roughly 11 cases — about $2.18 per case, or 36 cents on a bottle you are selling at $9.99. That is more than a third of a point of margin, from a line item most buyers never allocate.
What a pallet quantity changes
Above roughly 40 cases the shipment stops being a parcel problem and becomes an LTL problem, quoted per shipment rather than per box. The per-case freight cost usually drops sharply at that point — but you also inherit a delivery appointment, possibly a liftgate charge, and a pallet that has to go somewhere. For a store with a dock this is free money; for a store with a front door and a hand truck, it is not.
Reading the status column
Any sheet worth using tells you what is actually available, not just what exists. Ours marks three states: in stock, low stock, and new line. Low stock means we hold under two weeks of typical draw — order it if you need it, but do not build a promotion around it. New line means the first receipt has landed and the reorder cadence is not yet proven.
If a pricelist has no availability column at all, that is worth a question. It usually means the goods are sold from a supplier's stock rather than the distributor's, which is how a confirmed order becomes a four-week backorder.
A short checklist
Before you send a first order against any home-care sheet:
- Confirm which quantity is the unit of sale, and whether cases can be broken at all.
- Divide, do not multiply, when you set retail from a target margin.
- Allocate freight per case and add it to unit cost before pricing the shelf.
- Check tier breaks against your actual weekly movement, not against the discount.
- Look for an availability column, and ask if there isn't one.
None of this is complicated. It is just five things that each cost about half a point of margin when skipped, in a category that runs on 35 to 45.
Key takeaways
- Case pack is the unit of sale in most home-care wholesale — the per-each price on the sheet is information, not an order option.
- Retail from margin is cost divided by (1 − margin), not cost times margin. The difference is roughly 11 points at 40%.
- Freight belongs in unit cost. At a flat $24 on a $400 order it is worth about a third of a margin point on a $9.99 bottle.
- Take a tier break when the SKU's turn justifies the cash, not because the discount is offered.
- A sheet with no availability column usually means the stock is not the distributor's.