NAICS 418320Canadian industry · 6-digitregional market

Seed merchant wholesalers

SoftwareWholesale Distribution ERP & Route Accounting 418

This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in wholesaling seeds for field crops, flowers and plants, garden seeds and grass seeds. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 153
Under 10 employeesA: 66%

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–46744%

5–93422%

10–192114%

20–491912%

50–99107%

100–19921%

200–4990—

500+0—

Of 153 Canadian establishments with employees, 66% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario5536%

Quebec3020%

Manitoba2416%

Alberta2214%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Wholesale Trade, US · opened 2020

82.8%

1 year

64.3%

3 years

51.2%

5 years

34.4%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 418, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

regional competitionmedium capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 418 Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

A residual. Scrap and recycling yards are the distinctive business here: permitted sites buying at the scale and selling into a global commodity.

Who sets the price: Varies — recyclables follow commodity prices; supplies follow contract bids.
The software it runs on: Distribution ERP; scale and yard systems for scrap.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 4183 Agricultural supplies merchant wholesalers covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 4183

Independent Crop Input RetailerOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Seed, feed, crop protection and fertiliser sold to farms from a rural branch. The size-band shape is unlike the rest of wholesale: only 365 of 1,361 establishments have fewer than five staff, and the typical unit is a ten-to-fifty-person branch in Saskatchewan, Alberta or rural Ontario. The group is large and violently cyclical — $35.6B of Canadian operating revenue in 2021, $53.3B in 2022, $46.1B in 2023, at a 5% pre-tax margin with cost of goods at 91% of expenses [A]. The 411 grain-handling record already makes the capital argument, spring credit against an autumn harvest, and it applies here. This record adds who the entrant would be selling against. Nutrien's Retail segment reported $17.6B of sales, $4.6B of gross margin and $1.74B of adjusted EBITDA in 2025; of that gross margin, $1.10B — 24% — came from proprietary products and another $376M from Nutrien Financial [A]. The largest retailer is owned by the manufacturer of the fertiliser it sells, earns a quarter of its margin on house brands an independent cannot stock, and earns more again by lending the farmer the money. The other incumbent type on the Prairies is the co-operative, where the customer owns the competitor and takes the margin back as patronage. An independent sells the same glyphosate and the same urea to a farmer who prices every tonne across three dealers. What is left to it is agronomic service and a relationship, which is a real business for an existing family dealer and no basis for a new one. The distribution software sold to this trade is screened separately.

NAICS 41834 vendors named10 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 418 Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

Wholesale Distribution ERP & Route AccountingStructure decides

binding constraint: entry cost

Incumbent Epicor (Prophet 21, Eclipse) and Infor Distribution

Replacing a distributor's ERP means migrating pricing matrices, contract terms and years of inventory history in a business that ships the next morning — a two-year implementation nobody buys from a new vendor. The generic ERP record at 541514 covers the horizontal alternative; this vertical exists precisely because that alternative does not handle rebates and route settlement. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.

NAICS 4183 vendors namedOpen →

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Wholesale trade, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Retail and wholesale trade managers One industry 16.6%

Retail salespersons and non-technical wholesale trade sales and account representatives Mostly one sector 9.2%

Labourers in processing, manufacturing and utilities Mostly one sector 8.7%

Managers in transportation and postal and courier services Mostly one sector 8.5%

Crane operators and water well drillers Mostly one sector 7.3%

Taxi, personal service and delivery service drivers Mostly one sector 6.8%

Supervisors, processing and manufacturing occupations Mostly one sector 6.1%

Machine operators and related workers in mineral and metal products processing and manufacturing One industry 5.8%

Machine operators and related workers in textile, fabric, fur and leather products processing and manufacturing One industry 5.5%

Machine operators and related workers in food, beverage and associated products processing One industry 5.3%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 10.9%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 7.9%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 6.7%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 6.2%

Customer and information services representatives Across the economy 6%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 5.1%

Technical occupations in computer and information systems Across the economy 4%

Survey, statistical and data entry occupations Across the economy 3.3%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 2.8%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 2.5%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →