Every guide to wholesale outreach tells you to "find the buyer's email". Almost none of them tell you what you will actually find. We looked at our own data: every US buyer email that WholesalePilot discovered on public websites and ran through a verification provider before sending. Here are the numbers, unedited, with the caveats.
The dataset
- 616 unique buyer email addresses, each verified once (latest result kept when an address was checked more than once).
- Addresses belong to US companies discovered for wholesale campaigns: distributors, wholesalers, independent retailers, catering and food-service businesses, event venues, spas and gift buyers. Food service is over-represented because one large campaign targeted it; treat the split as a first read, not a market study.
- Verification was done with a commercial email verification provider before any email left our servers. "Verified" means the mailbox accepted the check; "risky" means the server exists but would not confirm the mailbox (catch-all domains, greylisting, unknown users); "invalid" means a hard bounce would follow.
What we found
1. Only 8% of publicly listed buyer emails verify as deliverable.
- Verified: 50 (8.1%)
- Risky: 475 (77.1%)
- Invalid: 44 (7.1%)
- Unknown: 47 (7.6%)
Three out of four addresses sit on catch-all or non-confirming mail servers. That is not the same as undeliverable, but it means you cannot know before you send, and a bounce rate above 2 to 3% is what gets a sending domain throttled or blocked.
2. 81% of buyer emails are role-based inboxes.
- 497 of 616 addresses (80.7%) are role accounts, not a person.
- info@ alone is 353 addresses (57% of the whole dataset).
- sales@ 46, hello@ 37, contact@ 27, then a long tail of orders@, office@, accounting@ and customerservice@.
If you have been told to "never email info@", the data says that for US wholesale buyers you mostly have no other public choice. The named buyer sits behind that inbox.
3. Disposable and free mailboxes are rare.
- Disposable addresses: 5 (0.8%).
- Free webmail (gmail, yahoo): effectively none among role-based addresses; small businesses do use gmail as their main address, but those show up as personal, not role-based.
What this means for your outreach
Verify before you send, every time. With 7% hard-invalid addresses in the raw list, a 200-email campaign sent blind puts about 14 bounces on your domain in one day. That alone can push you over the bounce threshold at Google and Microsoft. Verification costs cents per address; a burned domain costs weeks. Cold email deliverability covers the warm-up and bounce math.
Treat "risky" as a separate lane, not as junk. 77% of your list is catch-all. Send to it, but pace it: smaller daily batches, from a warmed domain, and stop the sequence on the first bounce per company. Our own sender does exactly this after a guard rule tripped on a catch-all-heavy batch.
Write for the inbox owner, not "the buyer". 57% of your emails will land in info@ and be read by whoever screens it: an owner, an office manager, a receptionist. A subject line that says what you sell and who it is for gets forwarded. A clever one gets deleted. How to get past the gatekeeper has working examples.
Personal addresses are a bonus, not a plan. 19% of the list was a named person. Enrichment tools can raise that, at a cost per contact, and it is worth paying for distributors and chains where one buyer controls many doors. For independent stores, the role inbox is the buyer.
Caveats, honestly
- One verification provider; a second provider would classify some "risky" addresses differently.
- The sample skews to food service and hospitality because of one large campaign. Distributors and wholesalers are 16 of the underlying companies, too few to report separately yet.
- Public-website discovery only. Addresses from trade-show lists, LinkedIn or paid databases would look different.
We will update this page as the sample grows across categories. If you want to cite a number, link to this page and we will keep it current.
Try it on your own product
WholesalePilot finds the US distributors, wholesalers and retail buyers who stock products like yours, verifies every address before sending, and emails them in your name. The buyer preview is free: paste a product link and see the companies before you decide anything.