Wholesale Handler
Zoho Inventory is built for a business counting stock across warehouses: items in several locations, purchase orders and bills, serial and batch tracking, and picklists batched across many confirmed sales orders. Taking repeat orders from shops, cafes and restaurants is a different job, and the part of Zoho Inventory a trade customer touches is the customer portal.
The customer portal views documents and cannot take an order
Verbatim from Zoho Inventory's help documentation: "Your customers cannot add items and place orders directly from the customer portal."
What the portal does carry is seven modules, all of them read-and-pay: Home, with a balance summary, payment history, the customer's own details and shared documents; Sales Orders; Subscriptions; Retainer Invoices; Invoices, which the customer can pay online; Payments Made; and Statement of Accounts. Zoho's own wording on the sales order gives the direction of travel: the merchant creates the sales order so the customer can confirm the items and the price, and the customer views it in the portal.
Portal access costs nothing per customer, so the limit is not a seat price. Zoho states that a customer does not need a Zoho account - the merchant sends an invitation, and the customer signs in with the email address it went to - and the user counts on each Inventory plan cover internal staff rather than customers. A wholesaler can put forty accounts in the portal for free. There is just no ordering screen in it for them.
Taking a trade order means running a webstore
The same help page names the fix: integrate with Zoho Commerce, Amazon or Shopify "to display items in your online store enabling your customers to add items and place their orders online". For a wholesaler that means Zoho Commerce, and the parts of Commerce a wholesaler needs sit high on its ladder. The Commerce plan comparison marks Price lists, Request for Quote and Credit limit for B2B customers as available on Premium and Plus and absent on Standard and Professional.
Commerce Premium on its own is US$99 a month, or US$79 a month billed annually. Inventory's Plus plan bundles the Zoho Commerce Premium Plan outright, so US$129 a month is the price of a Zoho order desk a trade customer can use, against the US$29 Standard tier a review site usually quotes.
US$129 buys a public online store with wholesale behaviour switched on inside it rather than a trade order desk. The retail shape can be closed down: Commerce's checkout settings include "Customers who can checkout" and "Restrict guest orders for existing customers", and a signed-in customer carrying a price list sees their own prices while everyone else sees retail. Shopify B2B for a small wholesale producer and Wix for wholesale B2B ordering cover the same arrangement on two other platforms.
Per-customer prices work, per-customer schedules do not
Price lists are the strongest part of Zoho for a wholesaler, and they are better than a flat percentage. A list can mark prices up or down by a percentage or set a unique price per item, and volume-based tiered pricing puts several rates on one product at different quantities. A list is assigned on the contact record under Other Details, applies automatically from then on, and up to a hundred customers can be moved onto one list in a single bulk update.
The schedule side has nothing to work with. Zoho Inventory's Sales Order object carries date, shipment_date, created_time, last_modified_time and delivery_method. There is no field for a delivery date, a delivery day or an ordering cutoff, and shipment_date records when the goods leave rather than the day the customer expects them.
Commerce's checkout is the same. The General tab of its checkout settings holds Customers who can checkout, Additional Address Field, Notes, Company Name and Tax Details, Show Terms and Conditions, Restrict out of stock purchases, Split line item based on custom field values, Restrict guest orders for existing customers, Order Fulfilment and Set Minimum Cart Amount. A delivery date is not among them. The documented route is a custom Date field added on the Checkout Layout tab, which gives a buyer a box to type a date into. A typed date does not close Thursday's orders at noon on Wednesday, nobody picking the run can filter the day's orders by it, and nothing checks it against a day the van does not go out.
Set Minimum Cart Amount is one store-wide figure, not a minimum per customer. The one per-customer commercial gate Zoho does have is the credit limit, which restricts new orders once a customer has used theirs up.
Limits worth knowing before you buy
- Four monthly meters, not one. Orders and invoices are counted separately against the same ladder, 50 / 500 / 3,000 / 7,500 / 15,000 across the five plans, and purchase orders and bills against a second, 20 / 300 / 1,500 / 3,000 / 7,500. Standard's 500 orders is not a binding limit for a book of forty accounts ordering twice a week, which is roughly 346 orders a month. The Free plan's 50 is unusable for a real trade book.
- The meter's terms are unpublished. Zoho's pricing pages define neither what counts as an order nor what happens when a month's count is exceeded.
- The ladder is a different product in each country. Zoho's UK pricing page lists Standard £25, Professional £65, Premium £105 and Enterprise £199 a month billed annually, with two users on every tier below Enterprise and no Commerce plan bundled with any of them. A UK reader checking a US review's tier names is reading about a ladder that does not exist in their market. Zoho Commerce's pricing page also publishes a Starter plan at ₹99 a month from its Indian price list beside the US dollar tiers.
- A repeat order is typed in by hand each time. Zoho's knowledge base states that without a sales order you cannot create packages, and the packages API requires a sales order id. There is no recurrence field on a sales order, and Sales Order Cycle automation creates the invoice, the package and the shipment after an order exists rather than creating the order. So a standing weekly delivery is somebody raising a fresh sales order every week, per customer.
Wholesale Handler puts the delivery day and the cutoff on the order
Every delivery day on an order profile carries its own ordering cutoff, written the way a merchant would say it out loud: order by noon, one day before. A Saturday run can close Friday lunchtime while a Monday run stays open until Sunday evening, and the ordering screen locks each date to match, naming which rule closed it. The cutoff is structural rather than optional, because a day that accepts orders cannot be stored without one. Minimum spend and delivery charge sit on the same profile, so a group of customers can carry its own commercial terms without a second catalogue.
A customer does not need a sign-in at all. A fully managed customer has no portal account and no email on file: the merchant takes the order by phone and places it, overriding the delivery day or the minimum spend where the situation calls for it, with every override named back at the review step. That same customer record is later promoted to a self-serve sign-in without losing a single order. Standing orders run weekly to four-weekly, set up by either side, with a preview email three days ahead carrying a one-click skip that needs no sign-in.
Twenty price lists and twenty order profiles sit inside one flat subscription of US$109 a month, with no per-transaction fee and no per-order meter. Accounting is fed by an export rather than a live sync: invoice line items leave as a CSV shaped the way Xero and QuickBooks import one, with the merchant choosing and renaming the columns. Wholesale ordering software without ERP integration covers why that shape suits a small producer.
Two things in this comparison run the other way. A Wholesale Handler price list holds one price per product, so a volume discount means putting the customer on a second list rather than adding a quantity tier to the product, which is what Zoho's volume-based tiered pricing does. And Zoho's credit limit blocks a customer who has run up their balance, where Wholesale Handler has no stop-credit gate. Neither is built today; the roadmap lists what is planned.
