[soundlab]

I run a bootstrapped manufacturing business that sells through a large network of resellers- I'd say I'm squarely in your target market :-)

I have looked a lot at this space and there is a surprising lack of software to handle this that doesn't start to bleed into complex ERP or that isn't a poorly integrated "wholesale" feature for a traditional e-commerce app.

We use a SaaS called NowCommerce to handle this. It is designed with a bridge to our Quickbooks company file and it works really well though with limited functionality.

One key takeaway I've had looking at how orders are placed/processed/fulfilled in my business is that wholesale purchasing practices are VERY ingrained. Typically there is one person responsible for accounts payables and material purchasing in a small business. That person will most often place orders via Purchase Order (if the business is setup on credit terms). In my experience that AP person will simply enter their PO directly into Quickbooks and email it directly to the supplier- whose email contact is already setup in QB. For them to use your portal they would need to separately login to your application and duplicate their PO there by entering the info again.

The Purchase Order is critical for handling the payment of your invoice and for receiving items into inventory when they come in- so not having a PO in Quickbooks is not an option.

A small but growing segment of my customers use our wholesale order portal but you may find that when your customers have the capability right in front of them in QB it might be a trickier adoption curve than you think.

BTW if I had a magic wand I would create an email parsing application that can READ that emailed PDF purchase order and auto-populate an order form or Quickbooks invoice on the portal.

Best of luck from a fellow bootstrapper- please get in touch if I can be of any help!

[captk]

Thanks for chiming in - you're definitely our target market exactly. Good points on POs coming from QB. We thought of QB in that we already built an integration for the seller to push invoices into QB automatically, but I hadn't thought about it from the buyer's perspective with POs. We currently allow you to enter a PO number on each order in OrderCircle so it can be traced back, but I see the need for deeper integration if possible.

Very familiar with NowCommerce - they're really the only one out there doing it even close to correctly (though they're very limited and locked into QB). Also fairly expensive, yes?

Great thought on a QB PO importer/reader. It's a bit tough since POs are free-form and you'd need to somehow automatically map it to the seller's SKUs. But we'll definitely put that on the list to think through further.