Wholesale Handler
EeBria trades under Beer52 ownership
EeBria Limited went into administration on 19 March 2024. Craft Beer Holdings, a Beer52 subsidiary, bought certain trade and assets the following day in a pre-pack, and sixteen full-time staff transferred. The platform has run as a Beer52-owned B2B marketplace since, and relaunched in August 2026 with a new brand and a redesigned trade platform.
The fee model survived the sale unchanged in shape. EeBria charges a percentage of successful sales only, with no monthly subscription, and calculates it from the list price the producer sets. The rate itself is not published anywhere public. It sits in the Producer Terms and Conditions behind a sign-in, so a brewery cannot work out what EeBria costs until it has signed up.
The platform is UK-only, and trade-only since retail closed
EeBria ships to anywhere in the UK and lists UK producers. It does not operate in the United States, so an American brewery has no EeBria account to move anywhere - the argument below applies to whichever marketplace or distributor is taking a cut instead.
The consumer side is gone. The old direct-to-drinker domain now redirects to the trade site, and EeBria's own seller guidance refers to its retail operations as suspended. What remains is a wholesale platform selling to pubs, bars, shops, restaurants and similar venues, with a registered trade buyer base in the tens of thousands.
A percentage of sales does not stop when an account becomes a habit
A commission is priced as though every order is a new introduction. The first order from a pub that found you by browsing is exactly that, and the fee is a fair price for the introduction. The fortieth order from the same pub, placed on a rhythm by a cellar manager who knows your beer by name, is charged at the same rate for no further introduction.
A flat monthly cost has the opposite shape. It is the same in a quiet January and a busy July, and it does not notice whether an account ordered once or forty times. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software sets out what a flat fee covers.
So the decision is not which one is cheaper in the abstract. It is where a repeating account should live.
What a marketplace does that an order desk does not
The first three rows are why the answer is rarely to leave. A brewery with no sales rep and no van has no substitute for a buyer base that browses, and none at all for a platform that settles the invoice.
Moving a repeating account onto your own order desk
Once a venue reorders on a rhythm, the discovery has already happened and cannot happen twice. That account is the one worth carrying yourself. How small breweries take orders from pubs without a distributor covers what the order desk looks like from the pub's side.
What the account needs on arrival is the terms it already had:
- Its own prices. A price list per customer, so a group account and a single free house can see different numbers for the same keg. How to charge different prices to different wholesale customers covers how the lists derive from one another.
- Its delivery days. Each customer is assigned an order profile naming which days they can receive, with a cutoff on each of those days acting as the lead time.
- A floor and a carriage charge. Minimum order values and delivery charges are set per customer, not per platform.
- The repeat itself. A standing order runs weekly, two-, three- or four-weekly on a fixed weekday, places itself at that day's cutoff, and is re-priced at that moment rather than when it was saved. A line that is unavailable that day is dropped and the customer told, not silently shipped. What is a standing order in wholesale covers the pause-and-skip behaviour.
Behind the desk, the same orders collate into a production schedule and a printable make sheet, and packing slips print without prices for the driver or the courier.
What Wholesale Handler does not do
- No money movement of any kind. There are no card payments, no settlement and no payout. EeBria pays the brewery; Wholesale Handler records the invoice and the brewery gets paid directly. Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule either, and there is no automated chasing, no credit notes and no customer-downloadable PDF.
- No discovery. A storefront publishes to a public directory, but carries no enquiry form, so a visitor who likes the beer cannot ask to open an account from the page.
- No logistics. No courier booking, no driver run sheet.
- Nothing brewery-specific. No keg tracking, no brewing, batch or duty management.
- Small by design. Up to 50 customers and 500 products, one sign-in per business, and no daily standing-order cadence.
