Wholesale Handler
What is a wholesale customer portal?
A wholesale customer portal is a private website where your trade customers sign in, see their own prices, and place their own orders. Instead of texting, phoning, or emailing you, they pick what they want, choose a delivery date, and submit. The order arrives in one place, already priced and legible.
It's the experience your customers already know from Amazon - they browse a catalogue, add the products they want, check out, and reorder from their history. The differences are the ones that make it work for trade: it carries only your products, it shows each customer the price you've set for them, and at checkout they pick from the delivery days that match the rules you've set - not any date they like.
"Customer portal" and "ordering portal" name the same thing from two angles. One emphasises who it's for - your customers, each with their own account to sign in to. The other emphasises what they do in it - place orders without going through you. Either way, a wholesale order portal takes the place of phone calls, texts, and emailed order lists.
Wholesale Handler is a wholesale customer portal for small food and drink producers - fresh produce wholesalers, bakeries, coffee roasters, egg producers, breweries that deliver direct to pubs, and seasonal growers like Christmas trees and pumpkins. Each of your customers can sign in to see their own prices, place orders against your delivery rules, and pick up their invoices - so the order desk largely runs itself.
What these trades share is how the goods reach the buyer: their own van on a local round, to a known set of regular trade customers - cafes, restaurants, shops, pubs, farm shops. Wholesale Handler is built for wholesalers who run their own deliveries like that. It's not for mail-order sellers who post to whoever buys, or large distributors running fleets of HGVs across the country - they need the shipping and logistics software that I have deliberately not built.
What a customer order portal does
Every feature of a customer portal takes over a piece of work that otherwise gets done by hand:
- Self-service ordering
Customers pick what they want and submit it themselves - no orders to take down by phone, text, or WhatsApp in the middle of a delivery round.
- Per-customer prices
Each customer sees the rate set for them - no looking up who pays what before an order can be totalled.
- Delivery rules, built in
Customers are only offered the delivery days, cut-offs, and minimums that apply to them - the software polices the rules instead of a person.
- Standing orders
The weekly regulars repeat on their own - nobody re-keys a predictable order, and nobody forgets to send one.
- Orders that arrive clean
Every order arrives as a clean, priced list, ready to pick - nothing to decipher, read back, or copy somewhere safe.
None of that work is hard - it's just relentless, and it grows with every new account, because a small customer makes as much paperwork as a big one. A portal breaks that link. A new customer is a new account, not another hour of admin, and the hours that order-taking used to fill go into winning the next account and loading a fuller van.
Self-service ordering, around the clock
Your customers order when it suits them. A restaurant manager doing the next day's order at 11pm, a cafe owner before they open - the portal is open outside your working hours. Orders arrive itemised and priced, not as "the usual plus a few extra croissants."
Because the customer builds the order from your live product list, nobody needs to ring and ask what's available. When an item is out of stock or out of season, Wholesale Handler shows that on the order form, with the date it's back. They can't order what you can't supply, so there's no bad news to break later.
How Wholesale Handler handles per-customer prices
A portal only removes work if it knows what each customer pays. Wholesale Handler's price lists handle that: assign a customer to a named list and those are the prices they see, every time.
The customer never sees the list name or anyone else's rate - just one price per product, theirs. When you raise a price, you update the list once and everyone on it sees the new rate on their next order. No spreadsheet column gets missed, and no invoice goes out at last month's price.
Your delivery rules, enforced by Wholesale Handler
Delivery days, cut-off times, lead time, minimum spend - Wholesale Handler applies them on every order. A customer on a Tuesday-and-Friday run is only offered Tuesday and Friday. Once Friday's cut-off passes, that order locks, with a message in your own words about how to reach you for a genuine emergency.
Different customers can run on different schedules. Group everyone who shares a delivery pattern and terms into one order profile - "Far North," "City centre" - and when the run changes, change it once; every customer on it follows. The rules sit in the software, not in anyone's head, and they hold without a gatekeeper.
Standing orders place themselves
Customers who order the same thing every week set up a standing order once. Three days before each delivery, Wholesale Handler emails them a preview at today's prices with a one-click skip button - do nothing and it goes through. The most predictable orders become the ones nobody has to think about.
Invoices and payments without the reconciliation
Orders become invoices without re-entry, since the order already holds the priced lines. Generate an invoice from one order or batch a customer's whole month, email it, and track what's paid. Customers can declare a payment from the same portal; you confirm it after checking your bank once a week. Wholesale Handler keeps the running total of who owes what - no spreadsheet to cross-reference against a bank statement.
What your customers get out of it
A portal is easier to sell to your customers when it makes their life easier too, not just yours. In Wholesale Handler they can:
- Order any time, in a few taps, from a phone browser - no app to download
- See their full order history and repeat a past order without rebuilding it
- Get invoices by email and download PDFs whenever they need them
- Set up their own standing orders, skip a week, or pause while they're closed
The easier their side is, the more of them actually switch - and the order desk only goes quiet once they do.
When customers won't use the portal
Some customers will take to a portal in a week. Others have ordered by phone for twenty years and have no intention of stopping. Most portal software treats the second kind as a failure - the whole pitch is to get everyone off the phone, so the customer who won't budge either gets badgered onto a website they resent or handled outside the system, back in the spreadsheet the portal was meant to replace.
Wholesale Handler treats them as a customer type. A managed customer is one whose account you run: the order still arrives by phone or text, you enter it yourself, and it lands in the same order list with the same prices, delivery rules, and invoices as every self-serve order. A managed customer never signs in and doesn't even need an email address - though add one and they can receive their invoices and order confirmations by email, still without going near the portal.
This is what makes gradual adoption possible. Invite the keen customers first, keep taking the phone orders from the rest, and run both side by side - one customer list, one order list, one set of invoices. If a managed customer decides they want to place their own orders, one invitation promotes them, and their whole order history and price list come along. Nobody gets forced online, and nobody gets left out of the books.
What the portal deliberately doesn't do
Wholesale Handler is a wholesale customer portal, not an ERP or a warehouse system. There's no payment processing - you keep your existing bank transfer or direct debit arrangements, pay no transaction fees, and the software tracks payments without ever touching the money. There's no multi-location warehouse management or delivery-vehicle tracking, because most wholesalers already know their customers and their routes. It does the order desk, and only the order desk, well.
See it as your customer would
The fastest way to judge a portal is to place an order in one. Open the Wholesale Handler demo, build an order the way a customer would, then look at the merchant side and watch it arrive priced and ready. Five minutes as your own customer tells you more than any feature list.
