Selling to consumers without upsetting your salons
By Ben Carter, 11 October 2026
Every distributor I talk to has thought about selling to the public, and nearly every one of them has put it off for the same reason. The salons are the business, and a salon owner who finds the shampoo they buy from you on your own website, at a discount, is going to ring your rep before lunch.
That fear is reasonable, and it is also solvable. The distributors who sell to both sides without trouble tend to do the same four things.
Keep the two businesses visibly apart
The simplest protection is a separate store with a separate name. The trade site carries your name, sits behind a login and shows trade prices to approved accounts. The consumer store has its own name and its own address, and never mentions trade pricing at all.
A salon owner can live with a distributor who also runs a retail store. What no salon owner can live with is logging in to order colour and seeing a banner offering the public 20% off the range their salon retails.
Let the brand agreement decide the range
Before anything is designed, read the agreements. Some brands allow online retail freely, some allow it at RRP only, some allow it only through approved salons, and some do not allow it at all.
The consumer store should carry only the ranges that are allowed to be there, and the professional only lines should exist only behind the trade login. It is far easier to build this in at the start than to pull products down after a brand manager has found them.
Hold the retail price
Selling at RRP is what keeps the peace. If your consumer store holds the recommended price, a salon retailing the same product is never undercut by its own supplier, and the brand has nothing to complain about.
The discounting that does the damage is rarely a decision. It is usually a sitewide promotion that somebody forgot to exclude a brand from, which is why the rules belong in the store’s settings and not in somebody’s memory.
Send something back to the salon
Where a brand allows it, a consumer sale can still benefit the salon that recommended the product. A customer chooses their salon at checkout, and that salon earns a credit on its trade account.
It changes the conversation. The consumer store stops being a competitor and becomes a way for the salon to earn from the clients who were going to buy online anyway.
What to do first
Read your brand agreements with the consumer store in mind and make a plain list of what each brand allows. That list decides the range, the pricing rules and whether a salon credit is possible, and it is the first thing we ask for when a distributor wants to talk about selling to the public.
