What a B2B ordering portal actually needs to do
A consumer online store answers one question: what does this cost and how fast can it ship? A wholesale portal has to answer different ones. Which price does this account pay? What is the minimum? Does this style come in a case of six or by the each? Is the medium in stock, or can it ship with the next delivery?
If your ordering system cannot express those rules, you end up policing them by hand after the order arrives, which is exactly the work a portal is supposed to remove.
- Prices that change by customer, not one public price
- An order minimum and per-product minimums
- Case multiples, so nobody orders seven of a style packed in sixes
- Variants and assortments, for size runs and color stories
- Stock that updates as orders come in
- Order history per account, so reorders are fast
How it works with LINK
You build the catalog once. Products can be imported from a spreadsheet or added one at a time, with variants, kits, minimum quantities, multiples and the price lists you already use (wholesale, distributor, key account or a one-off deal).
Then you share one link. It goes out by email, SMS, Instagram DM, WhatsApp or a QR code on your trade show table. Each buyer opens it in a normal browser, without creating an account, and sees the prices assigned to them. They build the order in a cart and send it. The order lands in your dashboard with buyer details, quantities and totals, ready for you to confirm, invoice and ship.
Your terms, enforced before the order arrives
The most expensive wholesale orders are the ones you have to send back: under the minimum, broken case packs, sizes you are out of. In LINK you set an order minimum, per-product minimums and case multiples, and the cart enforces them while the buyer is still ordering. You can also choose whether a product can be sold beyond stock, which is useful when you take orders against a future production run.
Payment and shipping stay between you and your buyer. LINK never touches the money, so you keep using the terms you already offer, whether that is a card on file, an invoice with net terms or payment on confirmation.
Reps and your team in the same portal
If you work with independent sales reps or have someone in-house who handles accounts, they can get their own login and permissions. A rep can open the catalog on a phone during a store visit or at a show, place the order on the buyer’s behalf and move on. You see who sold what without handing out your admin password, and a rep only sees what you allow them to see.
Portal vs. marketplace: who owns the account
Wholesale marketplaces can be a good way to get discovered, but they take a commission on the orders that pass through them, and the buyer relationship partly lives on their platform. A portal is the opposite trade: it does not bring you new retailers, but every order from the retailers you already have is yours in full.
Many brands use both. They keep a marketplace listing for discovery and send their established stockists to their own portal for reorders, where there is no commission line. LINK is built for that second job. It is not a marketplace, and it does not put your products in front of other brands’ buyers.
What a small brand usually gets out of switching
The changes are not dramatic, they are just constant. One price change instead of six updated PDFs. Orders that arrive complete instead of a photo of a handwritten form. A reorder that takes the buyer two minutes because last season’s order is already there. Reports that show which accounts reorder and which went quiet, so you know who to call before the next season.
Because pricing is a flat monthly or annual subscription, the cost does not climb as your wholesale volume does. Plans start at $9 a month, and you can try the full product for 30 days without a credit card.