Why Wholesale Is the #1 Channel Brands Invest In for 2026

We work with consumer brands deciding where the next dollar of growth investment should go in 2026, and the answer has quietly flipped. For four years the default was to pour money into direct-to-consumer (DTC): buy the customer on Meta and Google, open your own stores, own the experience end to end. That playbook got expensive. A new self-reported survey of 200 senior wholesale leaders, published in NuORDER's 2026 State of B2B eCommerce Report, captures the shift in one number: 78% now rank B2B wholesale their top investment channel. The reason matters because it is not about growth for its own sake, it is about control. Here is what the data says, and what to watch as you set your own channel mix.

The pivot in one number: 78% now rank wholesale their top channel

Among the surveyed leaders, B2B wholesale is the single most-prioritized investment channel for 2026 at 78%, up from 70% a year earlier. B2C eCommerce sits just behind at 72% (up from 64%), and online retail rose to 34% from 24%. The number that should stop you is the one going the other way: investment in DTC physical retail, brands running their own stores, fell to 18% from 40%. That is the steepest drop of any channel in the study, and it more than halved in a single year.

A quick honesty check before we go further: this is self-reported survey data, not independent market measurement. The respondents are wholesale-first by design (the screen required wholesale to be at least 25% of revenue), so the sample leans toward leaders who already believe in the channel. What makes it useful anyway is that 100% of them also sell DTC. These are not wholesale purists dunking on DTC. They are omnichannel operators who run both and are telling you where the marginal dollar is going.

The report's own explanation for the DTC physical retail collapse is the one operators feel in their P&L: higher fixed costs, less flexibility, and weaker data feedback loops. A store is a five-year lease, a payroll, and a fit-out you cannot dial down when demand softens. When we talk to founders who opened their own retail in 2021 and 2022, the regret is almost never the brand-building. It is the cost structure running the wrong way: the rent and the staff do not flex when a quarter comes in soft, and the contribution that looked fine at full sell-through evaporates the moment traffic dips.

Why wholesale wins: control, not just revenue

Ask the surveyed brands why they invest in wholesale and the answers are about economics, not vanity. The top reason, cited by 63%, is that larger orders mean higher revenue. Next, 58% say retailers expand their brand reach, 54% use wholesale to enter new markets, and 43% point directly to lower operating costs than DTC.

Read those four reasons together and the theme is capital efficiency. A wholesale order is one invoice for hundreds of units, not hundreds of individually acquired DTC orders each carrying its own ad cost, pick, pack, and parcel. You are renting the retailer's foot traffic and shelf instead of renting attention in an auction that gets more expensive every year. The pattern we see again and again with brands at $5M to $50M is that the wholesale gross margin looks lower on a spreadsheet than DTC, until you net DTC down for customer acquisition cost, returns, and fulfillment. After that, the wholesale order is frequently the more profitable unit, and it lands as a predictable purchase order instead of a number you have to re-earn every single month.

The leader framing in the report is worth quoting directly. Chris Akrimi, NuORDER's VP of Supplier Network and B2B GTM, puts it as "precision over volume": brands are "doubling down on what they know works and extracting more value from the demand that already exists. That's why 78% of senior leaders now rank B2B wholesale as their top investment channel. It's not just because the channel is growing. It's because wholesale is one of the parts of the business where leaders feel they are firmly in control."

Control is the word that keeps recurring. You cannot control the Meta auction or the cost of your next store lease. You can control which retailers you sell to, the terms you negotiate, and the assortment you ship. That is the real reallocation happening underneath the headline number.

Growth-at-all-costs is dead: the profitability reset

The same discipline shows up when you ask what brands are actually prioritizing for profit in 2026. The top priority, named by 54% of surveyed leaders, is reducing operational and supply-chain costs. Then 46% want more pricing flexibility through retailer negotiations, 43% are chasing better margins via those same negotiations, and 41% are shifting product mix toward higher-margin SKUs.

None of those four levers is "spend more to grow faster." Every one is about protecting and extracting margin from demand that already exists. The report calls this "profitability replaces growth-at-all-costs," and it lines up with what we see on calls: the brands that survived the 2022 to 2024 squeeze did it by getting religious about contribution margin, not by finding one more growth channel. When a founder tells us they want to "grow into profitability," the conversation we have is the opposite of the 2021 one. It is which SKUs to cut, which accounts to deepen, and where the price has room to move, not how much more to pour into the top of the funnel.

This is also why wholesale and the profitability agenda reinforce each other. A retailer relationship is a negotiation table. It is where pricing flexibility, assortment mix, and cost-to-serve all get set. DTC paid acquisition has no negotiation table; the auction sets the price and you take it.

Expansion got intentional: deeper before wider

Brands have not stopped growing. They have stopped growing recklessly. The primary expansion goals for 2026 skew toward building on existing strengths: 52% are strengthening existing retail partnerships, 47% are entering new geographic markets, 44% are launching new product categories or SKUs, 41% are growing their digital presence through B2B eCommerce investments, and 38% are expanding into new sales channels.

The most-cited goal, strengthening existing partnerships, is the tell. Going deeper with the accounts you already have is cheaper and lower-risk than acquiring new ones, and it compounds. There is one nuance in the report that keeps this from being a story about a slick digital order portal: online-only wholesale does not lead. Relationship-led wholesale, through showrooms, distributors, and trade shows, still tops the channel. B2B eCommerce matters, but as the infrastructure underneath the relationship, not a replacement for it. The brands winning here are not the ones who put up an ordering website. They are the ones who made themselves the easiest brand for a buyer to work with, then wired the technology in behind that.

What this means for where you invest in 2026

If you run an omnichannel brand, the survey is a prompt, not a prescription. A few ways to use it this quarter:

First, run the real unit economics side by side before you reallocate. The reason wholesale is winning in this data is margin and control, so prove it in your own numbers: take your DTC contribution margin after acquisition cost, returns, and fulfillment, and put it next to your wholesale margin after the retailer's cut, terms, and any markdown or chargeback money. We see brands assume DTC is more profitable because the gross margin is higher, then discover the wholesale order wins once everything below the gross line is counted.

Second, respect what wholesale actually costs. This report is a vendor survey of wholesale leaders, so it is naturally bullish on the channel. Wholesale is not free money. You cede margin to the retailer, you carry net-30 to net-60 payment terms that can strain cash, and you take on chargeback and markdown exposure. The brands that win wholesale treat those as managed costs, not surprises.

Third, if you are deciding between opening your own store and selling through a retailer, the data is a heavy thumb on the scale toward the retailer in 2026. Your own store is the highest-fixed-cost, lowest-flexibility option on the board, which is exactly why investment in it halved.

The headline is not that wholesale got exciting. It is that brands stopped chasing growth they cannot control. Wholesale wins in this survey because it offers larger orders, lower operating cost than DTC, and a negotiation table where margin gets set. If you only read the 78%, you would just sell more wholesale. If you read why, you would re-underwrite every channel on margin and control first.

Related reading. For the channel margin math behind that reallocation, see our wholesale versus DTC pricing breakdown and the wholesale revenue share by vertical benchmarks. For how we model the channel mix decision with brands, see fractional CFO for ecommerce.

Sources and methodology

The data spine is a self-reported vendor survey, not independent market measurement. Every figure in this post comes from NuORDER's 2026 State of B2B eCommerce Report: Wholesale Reengineered, published by NuORDER, a Lightspeed Commerce company. We have framed every stat as what surveyed leaders reported, never as universal market fact.

Who was surveyed. The study reflects 200 senior wholesale decision-makers (director level and above; 46% final decision-makers). Screening required companies with $5M or more in annual revenue, $1M or more in wholesale revenue, and wholesale making up at least 25% of total revenue. Every respondent sells wholesale to retailers and also sells DTC; 60% manage 10 or more retail partners. Industry mix: apparel 57%, accessories 17%, footwear 12%, home and outdoor 10%, beauty 6%. The survey was fielded in January 2026.

How to read the percentages. On several questions respondents could select multiple options, so shares total more than 100%. The channel-investment, reasons-to-invest, profitability-priority, and expansion-goal figures are all "share of respondents who selected this," not mutually exclusive splits.

Why the channel shift is plausible beyond the survey. Independent retail reporting through 2025 and 2026 has documented the same pressure on DTC economics, from rising customer acquisition costs to the fixed-cost drag of physical retail. See dated coverage from Modern Retail and Retail Dive on brands rebalancing toward wholesale and pulling back on owned stores. We use those only as context; the numbers in this post are NuORDER's.

What we did not do. We did not independently verify the survey's sampling or weighting, and we did not combine it with third-party panel data. Treat the figures as directional sentiment from a senior, wholesale-first audience.

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