Your trade customers order the way they always have: an email with a list, a phone call, sometimes a photograph of a handwritten sheet. Somebody in your office reads it, works out which price that account gets, checks whether you have the stock, and types it into your system. A B2B wholesale ordering website is meant to end that, and the question is which kind you need. Every order costs you fifteen minutes and occasionally goes wrong in a way that costs a great deal more.
The decision about how to put that online is not really a decision about platforms. It is decided by five rules your business already has, and if you can answer those, the route picks itself. The rules are how many different prices the same product can have, whether minimums and multiples apply, whether customers buy on credit, whether another system owns your stock and prices, and how big and how strange your catalogue is.
What wholesale ordering has to do that retail does not
Putting trade ordering online is not the same job as building an online store, and treating it as one is the usual mistake. A retail store shows one price to everyone and takes a card. Almost every part of that sentence is wrong for trade, which is why bolting wholesale onto a retail setup so often produces a mess of workarounds.
- The price depends on who is logged in. Not a discount code, not a sale: a genuinely different price per account or per group, sometimes negotiated per product, sometimes on a schedule that changes annually.
- Quantities have rules. Minimum order values, minimum quantities per line, case sizes and multiples, pallet breaks. A trade customer ordering seven of something you sell in twelves is an error you want caught at the basket, not at the warehouse.
- Payment is often not payment. Invoice on thirty days, a credit limit, a purchase order number that must appear on the paperwork, an account on hold when it is overdue. A card field is not what these customers need.
- Ordering is repetitive. They buy the same forty lines every month. An order pad, a reorder-from-last-time button and a saved list matter more than beautiful photography.
- Somebody else already owns the truth. Your accounts package or ERP knows the prices, the credit position and probably the stock. The website has to agree with it rather than compete with it, which is where most of the real work sits.
- Sometimes a human must price it. Non-standard quantities, specials, anything shipped oddly. There has to be a route to a human-priced quote rather than a checkout.
Route one: the B2B features of your platform
The major hosted platforms have grown genuine wholesale capability, and for a large number of businesses this is the whole answer. You get company accounts with several buyers under one login, price lists attached to a company rather than a product, payment terms rather than only cards, and it all sits inside the store you already run.
Where it runs out is worth knowing before you start rather than after. On the lower plan tiers there is usually a cap on how many distinct price lists you can have active at once, which sounds generous until you realise most wholesalers have more pricing arrangements than they think. Self-service trade registration, bulk order pads, and pricing driven by customer tags rather than formal company records are commonly missing or need an app. Point-of-sale and some marketing tools may not respect the B2B pricing at all. And the top tier that removes those limits is a substantial step up in monthly cost.
The honest test: count your genuinely distinct price arrangements. If it is two or three simple tiers, this route is almost certainly right and you should stop reading and go and configure it.
Route two: apps and plugins on top
The gaps above have a marketplace full of solutions: wholesale pricing apps, order-form apps, registration-form apps, minimum-quantity apps, net-terms apps. Individually they are cheap and they work.
The trouble is arithmetic and fragility rather than capability. Four or five apps at thirty to eighty dollars a month is a real monthly number, several of them charge a percentage per order on top, and they do not know about each other, so the minimum-quantity app and the pricing app disagree at the basket in a way that is nobody's fault and everybody's problem. Each one is also a dependency: it updates on its own schedule, and when one is discontinued you find out at a bad moment.
Apps are the right answer for one specific gap. They are the wrong answer for four, and the moment you are running four you are paying custom prices for a system nobody designed.
Route three: a portal built for you
Here the trade side is its own thing: customers log in to an ordering portal built around how they actually buy, with your pricing rules encoded properly, your minimums enforced at the basket, order pads and reorder from history, credit position visible, and orders flowing into the system that owns them.
It does not have to mean replacing your retail store, and usually should not. The common shape is the platform continuing to run retail, payments and stock, with the trade portal beside it reading from the same data. That is what much of our customer portal work is, and it is a smaller project than people expect because it is a focused tool for a known set of users rather than a public shop.
| Platform B2B | Platform plus apps | A portal built for you | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fits when | Two or three simple price tiers, an ordinary catalogue, standard terms. | The platform does almost everything and you have exactly one gap. | Pricing genuinely per account, real minimums and multiples, credit terms, another system owning the data. |
| Illustrative cost | Configuration only: $2,000 to $12,000, plus your existing plan or a step up in tier. | The above plus $100 to $400 a month in apps, some charging per order. | $25,000 to $90,000 to build, plus hosting and maintenance. |
| Where it breaks | Price-list caps on lower tiers, no self-service trade sign-up, tag-based pricing and order pads missing. | Apps disagreeing with each other at the basket, and a monthly bill that grows with orders rather than with value. | It is a build: it needs scoping, and it needs someone to own it afterwards. |
| Integration | Whatever the platform's connectors offer, which is usually good for accounts and adequate for stock. | Same, with more moving parts to keep in step. | Built to fit: the system that owns price and stock stays the master, and the portal never overwrites it. |
Most businesses adding trade ordering belong in the first column. The third earns its place when two or more of the five rules at the top of this article are genuinely true of your business.
The integration is the project
Whichever route you take, the question that decides whether this succeeds is which system is the master for each piece of data. Your accounts package or ERP almost certainly owns prices, credit limits and customer records. Your warehouse owns stock. The website owns the order and nothing else.
Write that down before anyone builds anything, because two systems both believing they are in charge of a price is the single most common cause of wholesale projects that technically work and are quietly abandoned. Agree what happens when the connection fails: an order that cannot reach the accounts system should queue and alert somebody, not vanish or silently duplicate. That plumbing is what our connecting your systems work is, and it is usually the larger half of the estimate.
Not for you if
The decision checklist
- How many genuinely distinct price arrangements do you have? Count them properly, including the ones that only exist in somebody's head.
- Do minimum quantities, case sizes or minimum order values apply, and are they the same for every customer?
- Do customers buy on credit, and does anything need to stop when an account is overdue?
- Which system owns price, stock and the customer record today, and must it stay the master?
- How many products, and how many variants of each?
- Do trade customers need to register themselves, or do you set every account up by hand?
- How much of an order is repeat business from the same lines each month?
- What has to be quoted by a person rather than checked out?
Two or fewer complications across those eight, and the platform's own B2B tier is your answer. Four or more, and price the portal, because the workarounds will cost more in fragility than the build costs in money. In between, ask for both quotes and compare them over three years rather than at signature, which is the same arithmetic our guide to what an online store costs applies to the retail side.