Your Settings Are Costing You Sales
Most Faire brands spend hours perfecting product photos and writing descriptions. Then they leave every account setting on default and wonder why retailers never find them.
Here's the thing: Faire's algorithm decides who sees your products. And that algorithm reads your settings — MOQ, lead time, collections, promotions — to decide where you rank. Get them wrong and you're invisible. Get them right and you show up in 3x more searches without changing a single product.
This is the complete settings playbook. Every toggle, every field, every configuration that actually moves the needle.
Set Your Minimum Order Quantity to Zero
This is the single highest-leverage setting on your entire account.
Faire lets retailers filter by MOQ: zero, $100, or $200. If your MOQ is set to $200, you only appear when a retailer selects that exact filter. Set it to zero and you show up in all three filter buckets — that's 3x the visibility from one setting change.
Yes, you'll get some small orders. A boutique owner testing one unit before committing. That's not a problem — that's a feature. Those small orders build reviews, train the algorithm that your products convert, and turn into full reorders down the line.
Trust your product. A retailer doesn't need to buy a case pack to know it's going to sell.
Keep Your Lead Time Low — And Never Use Holiday Mode
Set the lowest lead time you can actually meet. One to three business days is the sweet spot. Retailers are conditioned by Amazon-speed fulfillment. A 14-day lead time feels like a red flag, even if your product is worth the wait.
Missing your stated lead time is even worse. It tanks your algorithm ranking and generates negative reviews. Both are hard to recover from.
Now here's the critical mistake that kills Faire accounts: when you go on vacation or need a break, never use Holiday Mode or Pause Mode. The algorithm essentially resets. You come back to a dead store, fighting for visibility you already earned.
Instead, extend your lead time to 40+ days. You'll get fewer orders during that period, but your ranking stays intact. This is the difference between a two-week vacation and a two-month recovery.
Use All 20 Collections
Faire now allows 20 collections. Most brands use three or four. Use all 20.
Think of collections in two categories:
Product-centric collections organize your catalog: Bestsellers, New Arrivals, seasonal themes like Summer Essentials or Holiday Gift Sets, and product categories specific to your line.
Retailer-centric collections match how buyers search: "For Gift Shops," "For Boutiques," "For Online Retailers," "For Spa & Wellness." When a gift shop owner searches for products that fit their store, your collection title is what surfaces your brand.
Add seasonal market collections too — "Summer Market Picks," "Winter Market Deals." These align with how retailers think about buying cycles and trade show timing.
Collections are SEO for Faire's internal search. Every collection you don't create is a search result you don't appear in.
Run Always-On Tiered Promotions
Static pricing leaves money on the table. Tiered promotions push retailers toward larger orders and signal that you can fulfill at scale. Here's the structure that works:
- Free shipping above your average order value
- 10% off + free shipping at a higher tier
- 20% off at $1,000-$2,000+ (this is distributor-light pricing that attracts serious buyers)
- Pre-order discounts of 5% on upcoming products
The psychology matters. A retailer who sees tiered pricing thinks: this brand has volume capacity, established logistics, and confidence in their margins. That's the kind of brand retailers want to build a relationship with.
Get Your Shipping Settings Right
Set shipping costs that push orders above your target average order value. Free shipping above a threshold is the clearest lever — retailers will add one more product to hit the free shipping line every time.
One rule: build handling and packaging costs into your product pricing. Do not add them as separate line items. Surprise fees at checkout kill conversion rates. Retailers have been trained by platforms to expect transparent pricing, and a $7 "handling fee" at the end of an order feels dishonest even when it's legitimate.
Optimize Your Shop Page
Your shop page is your trade show booth. Most brands treat it as an afterthought.
Cover image and profile image should make it instantly clear what you sell. Not your logo on a white background — a lifestyle shot that communicates your category and quality level in one glance.
Upload a video. Think virtual trade show pitch: who you are, what you make, why retailers should carry it. Very few brands do this, which means the ones that do get disproportionate attention. Faire surfaces video content because it drives engagement.
Brand story: Focus on your unique selling propositions, not your personal journey. Retailers don't need your origin story. They need to know why your product sells off their shelves.
Brand practices: Check every box that honestly applies — eco-friendly, gives back, women-owned, handmade. These are active filters that retailers use. Every unchecked box is a filter you're excluded from.
Product details: Fill out every field. Categories, seasons, aesthetics, occasions. These feed directly into Faire's search and recommendation algorithm. Incomplete product details mean incomplete visibility.
List Pre-Orders Before Products Are in Stock
This is an underused tactic that drives a 5-10% sales boost.
Listing products before they're available gets them indexed in the algorithm early. By the time inventory arrives, you've already built search history and potentially collected orders.
Create a "Pre-Order" collection with a small discount (5% off) to incentivize early buying. When mixed orders come in — some items in stock, some pre-order — the in-stock items ship immediately and the pre-order items ship later. That's two touchpoints with the same retailer from one order. Two tracking emails. Two unboxing moments. Two chances to impress.
Use Faire Ads Strategically
Faire's Promoted Listings work on a cost-per-click model, and the returns are strong if you ramp correctly.
Set a high monthly budget — higher than you think. You won't spend it all. Faire's ad inventory is limited, and a $500 budget doesn't mean $500 in spend. Real-world numbers: $570 in ad spend generated $1,979 in first-order sales. That's a 3.5x return, and it doesn't count reorders from those same retailers.
Start modest and increase your budget over three to four months. Don't jump straight to a $20,000 monthly budget — if something in your funnel is broken (bad images, unclear descriptions, wrong pricing), you want to catch it before you scale spend.
Turn On Open Sizing
If you sell products with size or color variants, let retailers buy individual units instead of requiring case packs. This removes friction for new retailers who want to test your product without committing to 12 units of each size.
More orders from more retailers means more reviews, more algorithm data, and more reorder potential. The retailers who start with three units and sell through become the ones ordering full case packs next quarter.
Settings Are Just the Start
Getting your Faire settings dialed in puts you ahead of 80% of brands on the platform. But the brands that scale past that point — the ones building from 100 retailers to 1,000 — they're doing something else entirely: building direct relationships with their buyers outside of Faire.
Your settings get you found. Your relationships get you reordered.
At Smoothed, we help Faire brands build that relationship layer — recovering buyer contact data, running outreach that drives reorders through Faire, and turning one-time buyers into long-term accounts. If you've got your settings locked in and you're ready for the next lever, let's talk.