How to Buy Wine and Spirits at Trade Prices

If you're buying wine, champagne or spirits regularly for a bar, a restaurant, an event business, a members' club, or simply because you go through more bottles than the average household — paying full retail on every order is money left on the table. Trade pricing exists for exactly this reason. Here's how it actually works.

What a trade account actually gets you

A trade account isn't a discount code. It's a different relationship with the supplier entirely:

• Trade pricing across the range — not just a handful of promotional lines, but genuine pricing on the bottles you'll actually be reordering.
• A dedicated account manager — someone who knows your order history and flags stock or allocation issues before they become a problem, rather than a generic customer service inbox.
• Free delivery on qualifying orders — with Whisky Brokers Associates, that's free delivery on trade orders over £250.
• Access to allocated bottles — some of the more sought-after releases are allocated to trade buyers first, before they're ever listed for retail customers.

Who actually qualifies for trade pricing

Trade accounts are generally for anyone buying to resell, serve, or gift at volume — bars, restaurants, hotels, event and hospitality companies, corporate gifting resellers, and retailers. If you're ordering the same handful of products repeatedly rather than a one-off case for a dinner party, it's almost always worth asking whether a trade account applies to you.

The difference volume pricing makes

The maths is simple but easy to underestimate. A restaurant going through several cases of champagne a month at retail price versus trade price isn't a rounding error — over a year, it's the difference between a wine budget that works and one that quietly eats into margin every single month. The same logic applies to a corporate gifting business buying bottles in bulk, or an events company stocking a season's worth of bars.

Setting one up doesn't take long

Most trade accounts start with a short conversation about what you buy, how often, and in what volume — from there, pricing and an account manager get set up around your actual buying pattern rather than a generic tier.

If you're currently paying retail for anything you buy regularly, it's worth a five-minute conversation to check whether that needs to keep being true. Get in touch about setting up a trade account and we'll walk you through what trade pricing looks like for your business specifically.