Wholesale Handler
Upstock's free plan is a directory listing with orders by email
The free plan makes a supplier visible in the Upstock directory, holds the full catalogue, and takes orders by email. Upstock states no setup fee and no sales commission on it, and describes it as free forever.
That is a shopfront and an inbox. It is not a system of record. A supplier with a short customer book, one price for everyone and a spreadsheet behind it gets a working catalogue for nothing. Wholesale Handler is free too, up to 3 customers and with every feature switched on, so at that size the question is which free plan does more rather than what a subscription buys.
Every feature that automates an order sits on the volume-priced plan
Upstock's Logistics plan is where purchase-order capture, automated invoicing, pick lists and packing slips, freight and delivery management, proof of delivery, the sales-rep and driver apps, consolidated invoices, CRM and order exports all live.
Three more sit there that are not automation in any ordinary sense. Custom price lists and catalogues, minimum order values and standing orders are on the Logistics plan too. A supplier whose only requirement is that the cafe pays a different rate to the deli is buying the whole automation tier to get it. How to charge different prices to different wholesale customers covers what per-customer pricing has to do to stay consistent once a base price moves.
The bands behind the volume price are no longer published
Upstock's supplier plans page gives a starting figure for Logistics and then says pricing scales with monthly order volume and to book a demo for a quote. Until the middle of 2026 it also published a band table, eight steps of monthly order volume against a monthly price, so a supplier could read off what four hundred orders a month would cost before speaking to anyone. That table is no longer public.
The practical effect is that the crossover exists and cannot be located. A volume price starts below a flat fee and passes it somewhere, and the order count where that happens is the single number a supplier needs. It is not obtainable from public information. You learn it by requesting a quote, and you learn the next one when your volume moves.
The currency is unstated as well. The plans page prints a bare dollar sign with GST added on top, and the Australian and New Zealand listings for Upstock's Xero integration carry the same figure as each other, so the number is localised and not named. GST is not a United States tax. A US supplier reading that page has no price at all. Why is wholesale software so expensive covers where per-order and per-seat pricing in this category comes from.
A flat fee is the same number in a busy month
Wholesale Handler has three plans, and they differ only in how many customers you trade with. No per-user charge, no per-order charge, no commission on what you sell, and no tier holding features back. Every price is published, so the year's software cost is a multiplication you can do before signing up, and it does not change when a summer peak triples your order count for six weeks.
That matters more in fresh produce than in most trades, because order volume is the thing that swings. A price that tracks volume bills hardest in the weeks the business is already stretched. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software covers what a flat fee has to include before it counts as one.
The two differ on pricing, invoicing and reach
Wholesale Handler runs a private order desk, not a buyer network
Upstock is a marketplace as well as an ordering system. Over a thousand suppliers list on it and thousands of venues buy through it, concentrated in Australia and New Zealand, and a supplier there can be found by a cafe that has not heard of them. Wholesale Handler cannot do that. It publishes an optional storefront and lists approved storefronts in a public directory, but a directory of merchants is not a demand-side network. An Upstock alternative for wholesale butchers in the US and UK covers what is left of that listing for a supplier outside those two countries, and where catch weight lands.
What Wholesale Handler does instead is run the desk for the customers you already have. Each one sits on their own price list, their own delivery days, their own cutoff time and their own minimum order value, inherited from an order profile rather than set thirty times by hand. Standing orders place themselves when the cutoff passes, drop any line that has gone unavailable rather than ordering it silently, and stop instead of placing when the basket falls under the minimum. Orders for a delivery date total into one make-list by product, packing slips print without prices on them, and processed orders collate into one draft invoice per customer that emails as a PDF when you finalise it. Wholesale customer portal covers what the buyer sees on the other side of that.
Two of Upstock's capabilities are reasons to stay with it that have nothing to do with price. Its supermarket connections into Woolworths and Foodstuffs are a route to accounts Wholesale Handler has no path to at all, and its driver and sales-rep apps with proof of delivery are a fleet-side product Wholesale Handler does not attempt.
What Wholesale Handler does not do
- Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule. A merchant picks the processed orders and the drafts collate from there, one per customer.
- There is no accounting integration. Invoice lines export as a CSV over any period, with the columns picked and named by you, and that file is what goes into Xero or QuickBooks.
- Credit notes against an invoice already sent are not built.
- Unpaid invoices are not chased automatically. The dashboard bands what is outstanding against each customer's own terms, and the chasing is yours.
- One person signs in per business. A second seat for a colleague does not exist yet.
- Every document prints A4, which a US Letter tray does not take.
