Can Your Current System Support Wholesale and DTC Together?

If you have taken on trade accounts in the last year or two, you will recognise the workarounds. A spreadsheet of agreed prices per account. An invoice raised by hand because the system expected payment at checkout. Stock set aside for an order the DTC side cannot see. A credit note typed up after a part shipment went out short.

Each one is small, and each one is a process your system is not running. They compound with every account you add, which is why wholesale tends to feel manageable at five stockists and unmanageable at twenty.

The useful question, whether you have twenty stockists or are about to sign your first, is which of those workarounds you have chosen and which are your system telling you it was built for a card payment and a single parcel. Work through the five areas below, and you will know which is which: pricing, payment terms, the order lifecycle, stock allocation and reporting.

Five Areas Where B2B Works Differently from DTC

1. Pricing that varies by account

Consumer pricing is one price per product, with discounts applied by promotion. Trade pricing is a different price per account or per group of accounts, often with volume breaks, and sometimes negotiated per customer.

What to check: whether price lists can be assigned by account and by group, whether a salesperson can hold their own list, and how a price list behaves when you change the underlying product price.

2. Payment terms and the money that has not arrived yet

This is the area most often missing. DTC systems assume payment precedes dispatch. Wholesale inverts that, which introduces invoices, terms, deposits, part payments and an accounts receivable position to manage.

What to check: proforma and full invoices, payments on account, deposits and part payments, and whether you can see which accounts owe you money and how overdue they are without exporting anything.

3. The order lifecycle

A trade order rarely moves in one step from placed to dispatched. It may sit as a quote, convert to an order, ship partially, carry a backorder for several weeks and generate a credit at the end.

What to check: partial fulfilment, backorders, order splitting, back-to-back ordering against an incoming purchase order, and whether a part shipment invoices correctly for what actually went out.

4. Allocation between the two sides

Here is the operational question underneath all of it. When a trade customer commits to 400 units for delivery in six weeks, and your DTC channel is selling the same SKU today, what stops you from selling that stock twice?

Ring-fencing everything for wholesale leaves consumer demand unserved. Leaving it all open risks missing a committed trade order, which costs more than a consumer stockout because it costs the account.

What to check: whether stock can be committed against a future trade order while the remainder stays available to other channels, and whether that commitment is visible to the people running DTC.

5. Reporting that separates the two

Blended reporting across DTC and wholesale hides more than it shows. The margin profile, the cost to serve and the cash timing are all different, and a single gross margin figure across both tells you very little.

What to check: whether margin, sell-through and cost to serve can be reported by channel without rebuilding the report each time.

One Stock Pool or Two?

The instinct when adding wholesale is often to keep it separate: separate stock, sometimes a separate system. It feels safer, and it avoids the allocation problem by removing it.

The cost is that you now hold two inventory positions of the same products, which means more stock than either side needs on its own, and two sets of numbers to reconcile at month-end. It also makes it harder to move units towards whichever side is selling, which is the main commercial advantage of running both.

The usual middle position is one pool with commitments against it: stock sits in a single record, trade orders reserve what has been agreed, and everything uncommitted stays available to every channel. That keeps the capital efficiency of one pool while protecting the orders you have promised.

Worth noting that this is as much a process decision as a software one. Someone has to own the rule about what gets ring-fenced and for how long.

Questions for a Vendor

• Can price lists be set by account, by group and by salesperson, and who maintains them?
• How are payment terms, credit and accounts receivable handled, and can we see the overdue position live?
• How does a part shipment invoice work, and what happens to the remainder?
• Can we commit stock to a trade order without taking it out of the DTC pool entirely?
• Can we report margin separately for wholesale and DTC without a manual export?
• If we want a B2B ordering site, what are the options, and what is native versus built?

What a System Built for Both Sides Looks Like

Systems that handle wholesale well treat it as a first-class part of the product rather than an add-on, which shows up in the detail of the order and the invoice rather than in the feature list.

Brightpearl by Sage is a Retail-First ERP System built for retailers and wholesalers, so the trade side is part of the system rather than something bolted onto a consumer platform. Against the five areas above:

• Pricing. Individual price lists managed by account, by group of accounts or by salesperson.
• Payment. Proforma invoices, true invoices, payments on account, deposits and part payments.
• Order lifecycle. The Automation Engine handles dropshipping, partial fulfilment, back-to-back ordering, warehouse transfers and order splitting, which covers the awkward middle of a trade order.
• Allocation. DTC and trade run on one inventory record and one ledger, which is what makes the single pool approach workable rather than risky.
• Reporting. Accounts receivable reporting shows which clients owe you money and how overdue they are, with tagging for statements, account status and dunning letters.

For a separate B2B ordering site, Brightpearl is a Shopify Plus certified partner, so you can run one on Shopify Wholesale with Brightpearl behind it holding the pricing, terms, stock and invoicing.

What that adds up to for brands running both sides is best heard from them. 

Nick Ernst of Snap Supply: "Before Brightpearl, we were behind on shipping and overselling on Amazon. Since implementing Brightpearl, we've been growing between five and 10% every month, and we've tripled our net profits." 

David Keith of Growers House puts the evaluation more plainly: "Brightpearl was actually the only software that met all of our requirements."

We went through the commercial side of the move in more detail in our guide on why DTC brands are turning to wholesale (and how to do it successfully). 

Ready to run wholesale and DTC without running two systems?

Discover how Brightpearl handles trade pricing, payment terms and shared stock alongside your DTC channels. Book a demo today.

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