Most small UK wholesale operations run on the same stack: a price spreadsheet, an inbox, and patience. A trade customer emails an order. You check their column in the spreadsheet — was it 35% off, or the special prices from last spring? — key the order in by hand, raise an invoice in your accounting software, and email it over. Thirty days later, you check whether it was paid. Often it wasn't, so you write the awkward chasing email.
At five trade accounts this is fine. At twenty it's a part-time job. Call it 25 trade orders a month at twenty minutes of admin each — that's a full working day gone, before you count the pricing mistakes. Quote someone last year's discount on a £600 order and you've given away £30 to £60 without noticing; quote too high and you've started a tense conversation with a good customer.
The usual advice is to buy a separate B2B platform. Sometimes that's right — more on when, below. But a lot of wholesalers don't need a second system; they need their existing store to understand three things: who the buyer works for, what prices they agreed, and when the money is due.
Company accounts: who's buying, and for whom
The first shift is that trade customers stop being a note in a spreadsheet and become companies in your store — with a VAT number, one or more locations with their own addresses, and as many team members as they need. Roles split sensibly: admins manage the account, buyers just place orders. One person can belong to more than one company, which matters more than it sounds — agencies and buying groups do this constantly.
The practical change is on their side. Buyers sign in to your ordinary storefront like any customer, except they see their world: trade prices instead of retail, their company's order history, and the state of their invoices. The Monday-morning "can you resend the price list?" email stops arriving, because the price list is just what the website shows them.
Price lists: the negotiated price, applied automatically
This is where the spreadsheet actually dies. A price list holds your agreed prices — either a fixed trade price or a percentage off retail — set per product or per variant. So your £24 retail candle can be a flat £14.50 trade, while everything else on the list sits at 40% off, and the 1-litre variant of something can carry a different price from the 500ml. You assign the list to a company location, and from then on their buyers see those prices automatically. No human applies the discount, so no human forgets it.
Two details earn their keep. A restricted list also controls visibility — the company only sees the products on it, useful when your trade range isn't your full retail range. And each list is set in one currency, converting automatically at your store's exchange rates when a buyer checks out in another currency you support; if a rate isn't available, pricing falls back safely to retail rather than guessing.
Invoices on terms: where the chasing gets lighter
Wholesale runs on credit terms, and this is the part spreadsheets handle worst. Terms here come in four shapes, agreed per company up front: net terms (Net 15, 30, 60 or 90 — any number of days), due on receipt, due on fulfilment (the clock starts when the order is fully fulfilled — fair when you sometimes ship in stages), or a fixed calendar date, which suits seasonal accounts settling after their selling period.
When a buyer places an order, it raises an invoice on those agreed terms — issue date, due date, and a status of open, paid, or past due. Invoices sync to Stripe, which hosts the payment page, and payment status reconciles back automatically. The buyer sees the invoice, the due date, and a pay link in their account; no PDF needs emailing, and "I never received the invoice" stops being a workable excuse.
Be clear about who chases what. The system does the bookkeeping: you see what's open, paid, or past due at a glance, and overdue invoices are flagged. The actual chasing — the phone call, the decision to pause an account — is still yours. What changes is that it takes a glance to know who to call, instead of an afternoon of reconciling.
When a separate B2B platform still makes sense
Honesty section. If your wholesale business involves heavy EDI — big retailers or distributors sending purchase orders system-to-system in their own formats — a dedicated B2B platform built around EDI will serve you better. The same goes for complex approval chains, where a buyer's order must pass through two or three internal sign-offs with rules per spend level before it's confirmed.
And if you need credit limits — a hard cap on what a company can owe before new orders are blocked — Orbit doesn't do that today. Past-due invoices are flagged so you can act, but the enforcement decision is manual. If automated credit control is non-negotiable for how you trade, say so in any platform evaluation and weigh it honestly.
Two smaller boundaries worth knowing before you commit. There's no self-serve trade application: you create companies from your dashboard, so if you want strangers applying for trade accounts, you'll run that intake yourself with a form or an email and set the account up once you've approved them. And buyers don't choose payment terms at checkout — terms are agreed per company in advance, which most wholesalers will recognise as how trade actually works, but it's worth stating plainly.
One store, one catalogue, one set of orders
The quiet payoff is everything you don't duplicate. Wholesale runs inside the same store as retail — same catalogue, same orders — so there's no second platform to keep in sync and no second stock number to argue with. In Orbit, the B2B suite — companies, price lists, payment terms, and Stripe-synced invoicing — is an Enterprise plan feature, so it's worth checking that tier fits before you plan around it; if you're juggling that spreadsheet today, the maths on a day of admin a month makes the comparison straightforward.