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Self-service ordering portal for wholesalers. Orders, inventory, invoices, and customer management.

Set up your account, invite your first customers, and see how everything fits together. Begin with accounts and invitations.

Sale or return means the shop pays for what sold and hands back what did not, so the count that decides the bill happens at the next delivery rather than at the order. Wholesale Handler has no returns field. The arrangement runs on the invoice instead - a week of deliveries collates into one draft, and the unsold comes off it as a discount line before it is sent. Crediting an invoice already sent is the thing it will not do.

Comparing Local Line and Wholesale Handler for small farms that sell wholesale. Full pricing and feature breakdown.

A pre-order is an ordinary order with a delivery date months out rather than days. Nothing special has to be built for it, but three settings decide whether your customers can place one at all - the maximum lead time on their order profile, the dates the product is available, and where you put the cutoff. Get those wrong and the date simply shows as closed, with no indication that a setting is the reason.

A peak sells more than you can make, and the difference gets rationed whether you choose the method or not. There are four to choose from - close the date, cap the line, ask for confirmed numbers, or charge more - and all four have to be in place before you announce anything, because the announcement is what starts the rush.

The pitch is smaller than most people expect - one sample, one page, and a price the shop can make its own margin on. Landing the account is the easy half. Whether it becomes a second order is decided by how well your product sold on their shelf and how much work it takes them to order it again.

A wholesale price list is a named set of trade prices covering your whole catalogue, applied to the customers you put on it. Most suppliers end up running several - a full-price list, one or two discounted ones for volume or loyalty - with every account sitting on exactly one of them. The customer sees a price against each product and nothing else.

Five things have to be settled before the first trade order lands - what goes on the trade list, the price, the minimum, the days you deliver and close ordering, and when you get paid. The last one is what catches people out, because wholesale reverses the order of the cash - you buy the ingredients, make the goods and deliver them, and the money turns up weeks later.

Past about ten accounts the difficulty is recall rather than arithmetic - what each customer was promised, and when. Wholesale Handler holds trade prices as price lists rather than per-customer deals. Each customer is assigned to one list, a list derives its prices from a single Default catalogue by percentage, and any price typed in by hand is labelled as an override so it can be found again.

A cutoff you have to enforce by saying no is not a cutoff, it is a preference. Stopping late orders means the date is closed to the customer before they ask - they cannot select it, so there is no request to turn down. In Wholesale Handler that closure is worked out on the server against the rules on the customer's own order profile.

A glut is a short window with too much of one thing in it. Selling it through accounts you already have is faster than finding new buyers, but it needs three things done in the right order - a price low enough to displace something already on their order, an end date set before you forget, and a message, because nothing about a glut reaches a customer on its own.

Ordering software does not need an ERP behind it to be useful. Taking a trade order needs a product list, a price per customer, a cutoff and a delivery date - none of which live in an ERP. What integration adds is a pipe to a system you may not run, and the cost of maintaining that pipe is the single clearest reason one ordering tool costs ten times another.

Now Commerce is a wholesale ordering portal built as a QuickBooks add-on. Orders you take post into QuickBooks, and QuickBooks does the invoicing. That tether is the whole comparison - it is the reason the product works well if your books are already there, and the reason it does not fit if they are not.

Notion holds wholesale orders better than a board and about as well as a well-built spreadsheet - a database of orders related to a database of lines does total correctly. What it does not do is let the customer place one. The block is that a Notion page shows the same content to everyone who opens it, and a trade price depends on which customer is asking.

A board or a CRM tracks the progress of an order you have already taken. It does not take one. The gap matters because taking the order - the lines, the quantities, the price for that particular customer - is the part that costs you time, and it happens before a card exists.

A paper order book is a working system, and for a producer with a few accounts on a steady weekly order it beats software. What ends it is not a customer count but a change rate. Paper is cheap to write and expensive to re-read, so it holds up while orders arrive once and stay put, and falls apart when they start moving after they are written.

A produce portal is a wholesale customer portal configured around a list that changes. What a bakery sets once - the catalogue, the price, the weight of the thing - moves in produce from week to week and sometimes from day to day, so four settings decide whether the portal is any use: what the chef sees as sellable, when ordering closes, how a price change reaches them, and how a box that weighs something different every time gets billed.

A bakery portal is a wholesale customer portal configured around a production run. The bake happens once, to a quantity fixed before it starts, so three settings decide whether a portal is useful to a bakery - where the cutoff falls, whether orders are totalled per product, and how the repeating part of the week is handled.

A bakery minimum is a cash figure, not a loaf count. Wholesale Handler holds one minimum spend on each order profile, measures it against the goods subtotal before delivery and tax, and keeps the Place order button disabled until the customer reaches it. Picking the number is covered in set and enforce a minimum order value; this is what the setting does once it is in.

Delivery days are not held on the customer in Wholesale Handler. They sit on an order profile - a named set of ordering rules - and each customer is assigned exactly one. A profile carries the days you deliver, and every day carries its own ordering deadline, so cafes taking Monday and Thursday and shops taking Tuesday are two profiles rather than a setting per account.

Trade suppliers treat late payment as an escalation sequence rather than a persuasion problem - terms agreed before credit is extended, an invoice carrying explicit dates, reminders on a fixed cadence, then commercial consequences. Applying the same sequence to every account is what makes it work, because a cafe paying twenty suppliers pays the ones whose position in the queue is clearest. Wholesale Handler covers the invoice itself; the chasing and the consequences are run from your own diary.

Jam, chutney and hot sauce are ambient and keep for a year, so nothing about a preserve order is urgent. The difficulty is the shape of the range instead - dozens of flavours and sizes, each made in a batch that runs out, reordered by stockists on no particular rhythm. What you need is a catalogue that tells the truth about what is left.

A packing slip lists what is in a delivery. An invoice asks for the money. The slip travels with the goods and carries no prices; the invoice arrives afterwards and carries little else. Both are generated from the same order, so nothing is typed twice.

Wholesale Handler is the ordering layer between you and your trade customers, so the back office is out of scope on purpose. Payment processing, accounting sync, delivery routing, stock as the system of record and point of sale will not be built. Credit notes, automatic invoicing and deposits are not built yet and sit on the roadmap. Everything else is a plan limit, and plan limits can be raised.

Delivery settings control which dates your customers can order for. They live on your Settings page and apply to every customer. Rules that vary by customer - delivery days, cutoffs, maximum lead time, minimum spend - live on an order profile instead.

Bring your customer list and your product catalogue in from a spreadsheet. Paste a block of rows or drop a file, fix whatever the grid flags, and import only what is clean.

Most wholesale bakeries pay $40-100/month for the software they actually need.

Most bakery software companies want to sell you an "all-in-one platform." This usually means paying for features you won't use while the core ordering workflow gets buried under complexity.

Stop taking Christmas tree orders by phone. Let your trade customers order online with delivery week selection, seasonal availability, and invoicing built straight from the orders.

Comparing BakeSmart and Wholesale Handler for wholesale bakery ordering. See the full pricing and feature breakdown.

Comparing CyBake and Wholesale Handler for wholesale bakery ordering. See the full pricing and feature breakdown.

Comparing FlexiBake and Wholesale Handler for wholesale bakery ordering. See the full pricing and feature breakdown.

Orderlion is built for large food and drink distributors with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planner) systems. For smaller wholesalers, here's a simpler, cheaper alternative.

BlueCart doesn't publish pricing. I gathered what third-party sources report, what reviewers say about contracts, and what to ask before you sign.

The advertised monthly fee is rarely what you pay. Most wholesale software charges a percentage of every order on top - and that pricing model shapes the product itself.

AI order processing reads your WhatsApp messages and emails and tries to turn them into orders. But what if the mess never happened in the first place?

Shopify is built for retail. Wholesale Handler is built for wholesale ordering. See the feature and pricing comparison for bakeries.

The café texts at 6am to add four sourdoughs. The coffee shop calls to halve their croissant order after you've already started baking. Every wholesale baker knows this problem. Here's how to stop it ruining your morning.

WhatsApp works until it doesn't. Missed orders buried in group chats, customers messaging a personal phone at 11pm, duplicate requests across three different threads. Running wholesale on WhatsApp breaks down fast.

Friday afternoon goes to typing up invoices from a week's worth of orders. Copying prices into a spreadsheet, checking what was delivered, emailing PDFs. There's a better way.

Every morning, wholesale bakeries add up orders by hand to work out what to bake. Scanning messages, checking standing orders, hoping nothing's been missed. There's a faster way to get from confirmed orders to production numbers.

Every wholesale bakery needs a cutoff time. The hard part isn't choosing one - it's enforcing it when a good customer texts you after hours asking to squeeze in one more change.

A packing slip tells your driver exactly what goes in each crate for each customer. Most wholesale bakeries handwrite them or print a spreadsheet. Both cause errors at the van.

Wholesale bakery owners end up spending half their morning answering the phone, replying to WhatsApp messages, and manually writing down orders. Here's how to get out of the loop.

The bread was delivered. The invoice was sent. Three weeks later, it's unclear whether it was paid. Checking the bank, scrolling through transactions, trying to match amounts to customers. There's a better way to track this.

The spreadsheet worked with three customers. Now there are eight and Friday afternoon disappears into admin. Here are the signs it's time to move on.

Wholesale customers all want "a bit more than usual" for Christmas. None of them can say exactly how much. Here's how to get confirmed numbers before it's too late.

WhatsApp works until it doesn't. Orders buried in group chats, customers messaging a personal phone at 5am, no single list of what needs packing. Running an egg round from text messages breaks down fast.

Your hens don't care about your delivery schedule. Production drops in winter and during moulting, but your customers still expect the same order. Here's how to stay ahead of the gap between what your flock produces and what your accounts need.

Shopify is built for retail growth. Egg wholesale is about selling all of what you have, fairly, every week. Here's a tool built for that.

Stop taking fruit and veg orders by phone. Let your trade customers order online with current prices, order cutoffs, and invoicing built straight from the orders.

Ordering portals, AI platforms, and ERP systems compared. What each type does, what it really costs, and which one you actually need.

Shopify is built for retail. Wholesale Handler is built for wholesale ordering. Feature and pricing comparison for fresh produce wholesalers.

Orderlion is built for large distributors with ERP systems. Wholesale Handler is built for small wholesalers who need a simple ordering portal.

Fresh produce wholesalers lose hours every night copying orders from WhatsApp, text, and voicemail into spreadsheets. There's a simpler way.

Wholesale pricing starts simple: one price for everyone. Then a loyal customer asks for a better rate. Then another. Before long, the only record of who pays what is a spreadsheet, a mental note, or both.

Take wholesale pumpkin orders online instead of by phone and text. Customers order by the bin, pick a delivery week, and reorder through the season while you are out in the field.

A Google Form is the natural first step for taking wholesale orders online. It is free, everyone has a Google account, and it beats fishing orders out of texts - until your catalogue and customer list grow and the work creeps back in.

Yes, you can run wholesale orders on a spreadsheet. But the version that actually works is advanced Excel - the kind most people believe they have and do not - and even a perfect build still cannot take a customer's order.

Sell direct to free houses and the order desk is yours - the Friday ring-round, a different price for every pub, delivery days that match your dray, and payment to chase across dozens of accounts.

The accounts are won. Now the weekly order has to come in, land before the roast, and match what each cafe agreed to pay - without living in texts, DMs, and a Sunday-night inbox.

A standing order in wholesale is a repeating delivery on a set schedule - the same products, the same day, billed to the customer's account, without anyone placing the order each time. It's not the bank term most people picture.

Orders come in by text, email, a DM and a Faire notification, then get copied into a spreadsheet to make one list to bake from. There is software for running a pet shop and software for running a treat factory, but very little built for the bit in between - a small maker taking repeat orders from the shops that stock them.

A wholesale customer portal gives each of your trade customers their own sign-in to see their prices and place their orders - replacing the phone calls, texts, and emailed lists that fill the order desk's day.

Yes - for your own side of the operation. Airtable is a genuinely good database for keeping products, customers and the orders you've already taken in one organised, linked place, and a real step up from Excel or Google Sheets. Where it runs out of road is the other half of wholesale: letting your customers sign in and place their own orders at their own prices. That's the part Airtable wasn't built for, and it's the part that costs you the most time.

Flat-fee means one price that doesn't move - it stays the same whether you add a customer, take a hundred more orders, or have your best month ever. Genuinely flat software is rarer than it looks, because a lot of "affordable" wholesale tools advertise a low headline number with a meter running underneath it. Flat isn't always the cheapest sticker price, but it's the only model where growing your business doesn't quietly grow your bill.

Products are the items your customers order. You set the name, pack details, VAT, prices and (optionally) stock and seasonal availability. Each customer sees their personalised product list with the prices you've assigned them.

A standing order places the same delivery on a repeating schedule, so a regular customer doesn't have to repeat last week's order every week. Wholesale Handler generates each delivery a few days ahead, emails a preview with a one-click skip link, then locks at the cutoff.

Customers place orders themselves through the Orders page, picking from the products, prices and delivery dates you've set up. Each order is editable while pending, locks at the cutoff, then moves to processed once you've prepared it. Processed orders are ready to invoice.

An invoice is a priced record of what a customer owes you for one or more orders. Wholesale Handler creates it from the orders, you finalise and send, then both sides track payment together until it's marked paid.

An order profile is a reusable bundle of ordering rules - delivery days, ordering cutoff, maximum lead time, minimum spend and delivery charge - that you assign to customers. Every merchant starts with a Default profile. Create more when a group of customers orders on a different schedule or pays a different delivery charge, then assign each customer to the profile that fits them.

A peak-season cutoff is the date and time after which you stop accepting orders for a given delivery, set early enough that you can actually produce and pack everything that came in. The cutoff itself is the easy part. Holding it when every customer is pushing for one more case is the hard part, and peak season is when it matters most and slips most.

Managing seasonal availability has two sides: sourcing (making sure you have product) and communication (making sure your buyers know what's available and what's changing). Most wholesalers handle sourcing reasonably well. Communication is where they lose customers.

The hens are rarely the problem. The hours disappear into the order desk: orders arriving by text, WhatsApp, and voicemail, the mental map of who gets what on which day, the packing list scribbled the night before, invoices waiting for a quiet evening that never comes. A few dozen trade accounts - cafes, farm stores, bakeries, a couple of restaurants - each one adds a little more of the same admin.

Every customer belongs to one wholesaler. You add them yourself and choose how hands-on the relationship is - place their orders, email their invoices, or invite them to sign in and order themselves.

Wholesale Handler is a flat monthly subscription. You sign up, get a 30-day free trial with full access, then subscribe to carry on. No transaction fees, no contract, and your customers don't pay anything.

Orderlion has 27 pages of documentation for wholesalers. If you just want customers to order online instead of texting you, there's a simpler option.

Deciding a minimum order value takes about five minutes. Making customers actually respect it is the part that drags on for months.

Take microgreens orders online instead of out of texts and DMs. Chefs place a weekly standing order, you switch varieties on and off as trays cut, and the same order repeats without anyone re-typing it.

Wholesale Handler can email both sides of an order. Customers switch on order receipts to get a copy of every order they place, update or cancel. Merchants switch on order activity emails to hear when a customer does the same. Both are off by default and work independently.

A cafe owner asks for ten dozen a week. A handshake later, it's a wholesale egg business - except nobody mentioned what to agree, what to write down, or how to actually manage a recurring trade account.

Data export gets your invoice line items out of Wholesale Handler and into your accounting software as a CSV. Pick a date range, choose your columns, click Download CSV - your browser saves a file that's already in the shape Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent expect.

BakeSmart used to publish per-module prices. As of May 2026 most modules just say "Learn more". Here's what's still public, what's sales-call-gated, and what the modules used to cost.

A packing slip is a printable PDF telling whoever's loading the van exactly what goes in each customer's crate. Wholesale Handler generates them directly from the order, with quantities, delivery date and any standing notes you want printed on every slip.

A production schedule is the merchant's view of what to make for a given day or week. Wholesale Handler totals up every customer's order by product, so you can see what to bake, pack or pick - then print it as a PDF to help prepare your orders.

Price lists let you charge different customers different amounts for the same products. Every merchant starts with a Default list. You can create more, set a percentage of the Default, override individual prices and assign each customer to one list.

A storefront is an opt-in public page that lets prospective customers find your wholesale business through Google. You set it up in three steps, submit for review, and once approved your page goes live at /stores/your-slug.

Restaurant customers phone, text, and WhatsApp their produce orders out of habit. Here's how to move them to an online portal without losing anyone.

At fifteen customers, the delivery round stops fitting in anyone's head. At twenty-five, it's scribbled on the back of a feed receipt and someone's been missed. Here's how to get a packing list that builds itself.

Eggs delivered on Monday. Invoice still not sent by Wednesday. By the end of the month, money is owed by several customers and it's unclear exactly how much. Here's how to fix invoicing before it costs real money.

Stop calling, texting, and broadcasting every price change. Update once, and every customer sees the current price when they order.

Orderlion doesn't publish pricing. I calculated the average from their own public revenue data and broke down what each tier includes.