Wholesale buyers order the way they want to.
Earth Fed Muscle is a US sports nutrition brand, whey protein, greens, collagen, casein, preworkout. The DTC channel is clean and modern. The B2B channel is something else entirely.
The team's own observation in their public review captures the operational reality every B2B brand recognizes: many wholesale customers will only place orders the way they want to. Different retailers send different formats. A boutique gym chain's PO does not look like a distributor's. A specialty grocery's purchase request does not look like an Amazon-style EDI feed. You can build the most beautiful B2B portal in the world, and your high-revenue accounts will keep emailing you a PDF.
That leaves you with one option: someone on the team manually keys those orders in. Earth Fed Muscle was doing it that way. The drag on the team's time was significant.
- Wholesale orders arriving in every customer's preferred format
- No realistic path to forcing format standardization across the buyer base
- Manual keying of "large B2B orders" eating team hours
- A workflow nobody on the team was excited about