Wholesale Handler
The four categories one search returns
Production systems record the make, not the ordering round
DairyCraftPro is the cheapest published product in the whole search: Starter $15 a month, or $12.50 annually, capped at 15 milk suppliers and one facility, then $39 and $69 for the tiers above. It holds milk reception, production batches, fat standardisation and brine calculators, yield figures and HACCP records, and holds no wholesale customers and no orders.
CheeseCrafter, from Page & Pedersen, is sold outright at $4,996 rather than by subscription. It tracks a batch from the dairy source to the finished cheese, records milk composition per vat, predicts yield with a modified Van Slyke formula and prints make sheets.
Meulio crosses the line: alongside production, lot traceability and affinage it carries customer records, price lists, orders and dispatch. It publishes no price and has no pricing page.
A creamery whose missing record is what went into the vat on Tuesday, or which wheels are due to be turned, wants this category. An ordering portal answers none of it.
Dairy ERPs are priced per licence and per module
inecta's dairy ERP runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and covers the specialist parts: pickup-ticket capture with component analysis at receiving, producer settlement on butterfat, protein and solids rather than volume, Federal Milk Marketing Order pricing for Classes I to IV updated monthly, and PMO, HACCP and FSMA 204 documentation. It publishes no price, quotes after a discovery call, and puts its own fit at processors of 20 to 500 or more employees.
Strinos does publish: from $135 per licence a month hosted, or $95 per licence a month on-premise, with concurrent-user licensing and modules bought separately. Its own worked example is $280 a month for two concurrent users once the inventory and sales modules are added. FlexiBake's dairy ERP starts at $295 a month for the Base tier plus $145 for each additional user, rising to $495 plus $175 per user at Corporate.
The figure to model here is the licence count multiplied by the module list, plus implementation, not the entry licence. Wholesale ordering software without ERP integration covers what a producer gives up by not running one.
B2B ecommerce platforms meter what they charge for
Shopify carries B2B on its Basic, Grow and Advanced plans, capped at three catalogs; unlimited catalogs arrive only on Plus, which is $2,300 a month on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term. Those dollar figures come from third-party trackers, because Shopify serves that page in local currency outside the US.
SparkLayer, the B2B layer bolted onto Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce, meters B2B orders per month: 50 orders at $49, 100 at $149, 150 at $299, and from $499 for Enterprise. Twenty accounts ordering once a week is roughly 87 orders a month, so a creamery of that size sits on the $149 tier or above, on top of the store subscription underneath it.
Ordering portals differ on what sits above the monthly fee
Local Line's Core plan is $109 a month, with card processing at 2.9% plus $0.30 and ACH at 1.0%; Ultimate is $399 a month and brings those down to 2.5% plus $0.30 and 0.6%. Now Commerce charges $280 a month for its standalone B2B Customer Portal, $100 less when bundled with the Sales Rep Portal, and writes orders straight into QuickBooks Desktop or Online. BlueCart publishes nothing and gates its pricing behind a demo form, with third-party figures that contradict each other by two orders of magnitude; BlueCart pricing sets out what is actually knowable.
Wholesale Handler is a flat monthly price, free up to 3 customers, with no per-user charge, no per-order fee and no commission on order value. No card payments pass through it, so no processing percentage sits on top of the subscription. Flat-fee wholesale ordering software covers what the billing model does to the bill as order volume grows.
What Wholesale Handler covers for a creamery
Each wholesale account gets its own price list, so the deli that buys six rounds and the distributor that buys pallets see different figures for the same product. Charging different prices to different wholesale customers covers how the lists are assigned. Delivery days, the ordering cutoff, maximum lead time, minimum spend and delivery charge are set per customer, and the cutoff can vary by delivery day, so a Thursday run can close on Wednesday morning while the Monday run stays open over the weekend.
Accounts that take the same thing every week go on a standing order on a weekly, two-weekly, three-weekly or four-weekly cadence, generated automatically at the cutoff and pausable, skippable or updatable by either side. What a standing order is in wholesale covers the mechanics.
A product that is out of the cave until October is marked unavailable with a customer-facing note and a return date, rather than being hidden. Incoming orders consolidate into one production schedule for the week, invoices are generated from un-invoiced orders and emailed, packing slips print as PDFs, and invoice line items export to CSV for the accounts. How to manage wholesale cheese orders takes that round week by week, from the maturing schedule through to the cut-to-order lines.
Catch weight is the test a generic platform fails
Cheese is often a catch-weight trade. A Parmigiano-style wheel has a minimum weight of 66 lb but averages around 84 lb, so the weight on the catalogue is an estimate and the invoice has to follow the weight measured at pick. A storefront built for consumer ecommerce prices a line as quantity times unit price, which is where a creamery selling whole wheels runs out of road. Freshline sells catch weight as a named capability, inecta and NetSuite handle it inside the ERP, and Filljoy is a Shopify app for it from $19 a month.
Wholesale Handler prices each product one of three ways. Per unit is a flat price for a piece, box or case. By weight lets the customer order an exact weight at a per-kg or per-lb rate. Catch weight is ordered by count at a typical price, then re-priced from the weight recorded at picking, so a wheel shows an estimate while the order is open and reaches the invoice as the amount actually sent, priced as "9.4 kg at $28.00/kg". An order whose catch-weight lines have not been weighed yet is not invoiced, so an estimate cannot bill as an actual.
A creamery selling only fixed retail packs - 8 oz logs, 200 g rounds, a cut-and-wrapped wedge at a set price - stays on per-unit pricing and does not meet any of this.
