A wholesale account is someone who is going to meet some minimum amount that is set at a point that is cost effective enough that you can justify accepting a lower price for your product. What your minimum is may be different than someone else's. It depends on the size of your business, how your manufacturing system works, and whether it is cost effective to accept very small orders at wholesale pricing. The minimum for a small single-proprietor soaping business might be, say, one mold's worth of soap bars or at least $50 or $100 of merchandise. Or something like that.
A tip from my own experience is your minimum needs to be high enough to weed out the retail shoppers who are simply bargain hunting. If you don't, you will be doing a whole lot of retail sales and retail customer service and only getting wholesale pricing in return. That gets old really fast, let me tell ya.
A wholesale account is usually someone who is going to re-sell your product to the public and is responsible for collecting the state sales tax. It's important to ensure your wholesaler customers are legitimate retailers, otherwise you need to be collecting sales tax from them. An exception to this general rule -- I sometimes sell at wholesale to non-profits or public institutions who are buying my products to give away as gifts or awards. I know it's probably going to be a one-time purchase, but if the quantity is high enough, it can be worth my while to do this.
Last but not least, a wholesale account is (hopefully) someone who will make repeat purchases to further justify selling to them at a lower wholesale cost. That doesn't always work out, but that's the goal.
