Wholesale Handler
Both do the same job - taking a trade customer's order out of email, voicemail and WhatsApp and into a system - and on the map they overlap only in the UK and Ireland. The structural difference between them is what each assumes about the rest of your back office.
Fresho publishes a floor, Orderlion publishes nothing
Fresho's floor is a different number in each market: US$499 a month on the United States page, £249 on the UK and Ireland page. The same $499 numeral also appears on the Australian and New Zealand pages, where the dollar is a different one, so a single converted "Fresho starts at" figure is a price nobody is charged. There are no named tiers either - the page sells three solutions, OrderPilot for AI order capture, eCommerce for the buyer-facing shop and Operations for the back office, and prices whichever combination you pick against your average order volume.
Orderlion's three tiers - Starter, Professional and Enterprise - each read "Contact sales for pricing", and no currency appears on the page at all. Orderlion pricing works out what the public data implies.
Fresho's own regional pages disagree on the commitment. The United States produce page describes the monthly subscription as coming "with an annual contract"; the New Zealand food-wholesalers page describes it as "cancellable anytime" in an otherwise identical sentence. Which of the two applies depends on which regional site the deal came from.
Orderlion front-ends an ERP, Fresho sells the back office
Orderlion describes itself as bringing orders into one system and sending them straight into your ERP, which is then where invoicing, consolidation and statements happen. Full ERP integration is the headline item on its middle tier.
Fresho sells both halves. Its larger costed example is a wholesaler who keeps an existing ERP and buys only AI order entry plus the web shop; Fresho Operations is the other route, covering online ordering, picking, delivery, invoicing, payments and reporting in place of one. So a wholesaler with no ERP and no intention of buying one is choosing between a platform that replaces the back office and a front end for a system that does not exist yet. Orderlion alternative for wholesalers covers that case.
Cutoffs, AI capture and delivery sit behind different gates
A produce wholesaler loading a van at four in the morning needs orders to close the evening before, which makes a cutoff deadline a requirement rather than a refinement. On Orderlion it arrives bundled with the tier that also carries ERP integration, so a wholesaler who wants only the deadline pays for the integration alongside it.
Both are subscription-only
Orderlion's own FAQ says it "uses a transparent subscription model with no transaction fees". Fresho's pricing FAQ describes a one-off setup fee and a recurring monthly subscription based on average order volume and the solutions chosen, with no percentage of order value anywhere in its published material.
So the money question between these two is sticker price and how much of the stack you are buying. That is not the case across the wider field, where a card fee of several per cent on top of the subscription is common. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software prices the field side by side.
What Wholesale Handler charges
One flat monthly fee for the whole business, set by how many trade customers you have and nothing else. Free up to three customers with no card, Starter up to ten, and Pro up to fifty at US$109 a month. Every feature is on every plan, including the free one. No per-seat charge, no setup fee, no contract, cancel anytime, and no cut of what you sell.
Cutoffs are part of it rather than a tier above it, and can vary per delivery day, so a Saturday run closes to new orders on Friday lunchtime while Monday's stays open until Sunday evening. A customer can also be created with no email address at all, ordered for over the phone by whoever picked it up, and promoted to their own sign-in later without losing a single order of their history.
What Wholesale Handler does not do
- No ERP integration. If stock, purchasing and accounts already live in one system, orders do not flow into it. Invoice lines export to CSV instead.
- No AI order capture. An order is placed in the portal by the customer or entered by the merchant. Nothing parses an email, a voicemail or a WhatsApp message.
- No delivery routing or driver app. The day's deliveries are a list grouped by order profile, with no stop sequencing and no proof-of-delivery capture.
- No barcode scanning and no multi-location warehousing.
- No app-store app. Wholesale Handler installs to a phone's home screen from the browser and opens in its own window, which is not the same as a branded native app.
- Stock control is an optional quantity per product, with restock notifications. It is not purchase orders and replenishment.
