Wholesale Handler
Pepper's smallest customer is a distributor
Pepper's chief executive describes the range it covers as "small distributors with a single warehouse and a couple of trucks all the way through to larger enterprises with billions of dollars of revenue and multiple warehouses". The gap he names Pepper as filling is distributors turning over US$250 million a year with no online ordering at all. A warehouse with trucks in the yard is Pepper's small end.
The market Pepper is addressing is the long tail of distribution rather than the long tail of production: 25,000 food distributors across the US and Canada, carrying about US$1.4 trillion of wholesale spend, of which the top 50 account for only a third. A baker, roaster, brewer or cheesemaker delivering their own goods is not in that count.
Pepper's offer to a food brand is reach into distributors, not a storefront
Pepper also sells to manufacturers. What it sells there is advertising and market access through distributors: a stated reach of 150,000 operators across 600-plus distribution partners, targeted campaigns placed on distributor order guides, product pages and checkout, and a GS1-compliant product content library kept in step across hundreds of distributors at once.
That is a demand-generation product for a brand already listed by distributors. It is not an ordering portal for a producer's own trade customers, and it does not give a supplier a catalogue, a cutoff or an invoice of their own.
Pepper publishes no price and no currency
Pepper's pricing page carries no figure, no tier price and no currency. Its entire statement is that there are no hidden fees, with an invitation to talk about a plan tailored to the organisation, framed as a pay-for-performance philosophy. The buttons marked "Check Our Prices" go to the demo booking form, and the alternative route is a phone number for sales.
Lite, Pro and Enterprise do exist, as service levels on Pepper's Sales Hub, and the help documentation says to ask customer success about moving between them. No figure is attached to any of the three.
The cost of Pepper therefore cannot be established from the outside, in any currency, without a sales conversation. Why wholesale software is so expensive covers why quote-only pricing is the norm in this field and what running the process costs a supplier.
Onboarding runs one to three months, set by ERP complexity
Pepper's onboarding "typically takes one to three months depending on the complexity of distributors' ERP systems". It has integrated with 90-plus ERP systems and reports 500-plus integration projects over five years, which is the work that timeline is made of.
For a distributor mid-migration or still on spreadsheets, Pepper offers a CSV route instead of an ERP connection - a downloadable template, a defined set of required fields, and delta updates applied by downloading the catalogue, editing it and uploading it back. That is the lightest path in, and it exists because the ERP connection is otherwise the slowest part of the work.
A producer running on a spreadsheet has no ERP to connect in the first place. Wholesale ordering software without ERP integration covers what the category looks like once that integration is off the table entirely.
A twenty-customer producer and a 200-customer distributor buy different software
Choco alternative for wholesalers covers a platform that bills the supplier and puts the ordering inside its own buyer app, and Upstock alternative for wholesale suppliers covers one that charges on monthly order volume and publishes its starting figure only.
What Wholesale Handler does at that size
The paid plans differ only in how many trade customers a merchant can hold. Nothing is held back on the free plan and no feature unlocks on subscribing, so the decision is a customer count rather than a feature matrix.
- Bring an existing customer list in from a spreadsheet, and keep those customers as managed accounts - the merchant takes their orders by phone, text or in person and no email is sent until they choose to invite them.
- Group customers who share a delivery run into an order profile carrying its delivery days, per-day cutoffs, delivery charge and minimum spend, and update the run once for everyone on it.
- Set a product as available March to April once and it repeats every year, with out-of-season customers told when it returns rather than finding it gone.
- Price by weight or by catch weight, so a whole salmon or a leg of lamb is ordered by the piece and settled at the weight recorded at pick.
- Collate every order for a delivery date into one total per product, and print it with checkboxes for the day's production.
- Issue invoices with each customer's own payment terms and due date, track what is outstanding against what is overdue, and export invoice line items as a CSV with the column names an accounting package expects.
Simple wholesale ordering software covers how much documentation a small wholesaler should have to read before taking a first order.
Limits
- Pro is the highest plan, so its customer ceiling is the product's ceiling. A supplier past that number has outgrown Wholesale Handler.
- 500 products, 20 price lists, 10 team members.
- No ERP or accounting-system connection. Invoice line items leave as a CSV.
- No AI order capture from email, text or voicemail. An order arriving by phone or text is entered by the merchant.
- No payment processing. Wholesale Handler records a two-sided payment handshake - the customer declares an invoice paid, the merchant confirms, disputes or notes it - but money moves through the bank, not through the platform.
- No delivery routing or vehicle tracking.
