Selling wholesale without a second platform

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. Disclosure first: we build Orbit Commerce, and its trade tools come up below.

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, but a lot of wholesalers don't need a second system; they need their existing store to understand two things: who the buyer works for and what prices they agreed.

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 and as many team members as they need. Permissions split sensibly: admins manage the account, buyers just place orders.

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 and their company's order history. 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, 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.

How trade buyers pay, and the limits you set

Trade buyers pay at checkout, at their company's prices, by card or by a manual method you offer, such as bank transfer, and their orders land in the same Orders screen as your retail ones. Each buyer can also carry a per-order spending limit: an order over it is stopped at checkout with a message that says why.

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 (company accounts and trade price lists) 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.

On the other side of the trade counter, if you are deciding whether to buy wholesale stock at all, our comparison of dropshipping, print on demand and wholesale weighs it against the two ways of selling without holding stock.