Services provided by wholesalers involve both manufacturers and retailers. Producers, once product is manufactured, begin incurring storage costs as well as logistical issues involved with keeping product onsite. Wholesalers usually pay transportation costs, as well as reducing costs involved with producer storage by removing manufactured product to a warehouser's own utilities, providing financial benefits as well. These costs incurred by a warehouser can be spread among many more products than a retailer or producer, thereby reducing per-item cost to a retailer. A warehouser also takes burden off producer for possible detrimental stockpiling of goods, as warehouser often has agreements to purchase certain quantities in exchange for reduced product costs, reassuring manufacturer that there will be a market for certain production levels and allowing manufacture at most efficient levels possible.

There are three different general classifications of wholesalers, defined by criteria such as whether wholesaler is independently owned or owned by a producer, whether wholesaler takes title to products they handle, or lastly by range of services, most relevant of which known as Merchant Wholesale will be primary topic in this article.

"Merchant wholesalers take title [ownership] to product they deal in, assume risk and buy and resell products to other wholesalers, to retailers, or to other business customers" (Ferrell & Pride, 2003). This is further broken down into Full-service wholesalers and Limited-service wholesalers.

Full-service wholesalers include General-merchandise, Limited-line and Specialty-line classifications. General-merchandise wholesalers carry a wide variety of products, but do not specialize within product lines.