Purchase order automation for B2B wholesalers
Wholesale customers send orders by email, PDF, EDI, spreadsheet, and B2B portal — sometimes all five. Purchase order automation removes the manual data entry between every one of those channels and your Shopify admin. This guide covers what is automatable, what is not, and what to choose.
What is purchase order automation?
Purchase order automation — also called PO automation or sales order automation — turns the purchase orders your customers send (PDFs, emails, spreadsheets) into structured orders in your system without anyone retyping them. The software reads each document, identifies the customer, matches every line to your catalog, captures the PO number, payment terms and tax, and creates the order for a human to review.
For B2B wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers, it replaces the hours spent on manual order entry with a few seconds of automated extraction and a quick approval — so orders are accurate, traceable and ready to ship the same day they arrive. Unlike EDI or a buyer portal, it does not ask your customers to change how they order.
Typing purchase orders by hand
is slow, error-prone, costly
Your customers send purchase orders the way they always have — PDF, email, spreadsheets. Someone on your team still retypes every one of them, line by line. The longer that takes, the later you ship and bill.
Hours lost to retyping
Every PDF and email PO gets keyed in line by line, all day long.
Manual order entry
Every PO becomes a hand-typed order — slow, repetitive and easy to fumble under volume.
Product-matching headaches
PO descriptions rarely match your catalog, so every line is a manual lookup.
Customers typed by hand
Matching the buyer to the right account — and creating new ones — eats time.
One typo, one wrong order
A mis-keyed quantity or product becomes a wrong order, a short shipment, and an awkward call.
Orders stuck in your inbox
An order you have not entered cannot be shipped or invoiced — stretching your cash conversion cycle.
Four steps, applied to every inbound channel
Order arrives in any format
Email, PDF, EDI, Excel, B2B portal entry, or scanned image. Each channel has its own ingestion path.
Structured data is pulled out
Line items, customer, shipping address, PO number, and payment terms are normalized — regardless of source format.
Resolve to your Shopify reality
SKUs match against products. Customer matches against your B2B companies hierarchy. Pricing and terms come from Shopify — never from the inbound document.
Native draft order generated
A Shopify draft order is created. Your team reviews high-value or flagged orders; high-confidence orders can auto-complete.
Six outcomes wholesalers report after automating order intake
Time per order drops from minutes to seconds. The 5–10 minutes a clerk spends keying a typical PO becomes 30 seconds of review.
Order-entry error rate drops to near zero. Pricing and SKU matching come from your Shopify catalog, not from the buyer’s document — eliminating typos and outdated prices.
Buyers do not change behavior. Your customers keep emailing, attaching, or portaling exactly as they did before. The automation is invisible to them.
You scale without hiring order entry clerks. Volume grows with the same headcount. New SKUs and new buyers do not require workflow changes.
Native to Shopify. Draft orders, B2B companies, price lists, payment terms, Shopify Flow, and your existing fulfillment stack all keep working.
It complements rather than replaces. EDI integrations, B2B portals, and ERP connections continue to do their jobs. Order automation handles the channels they do not.
Every B2B order arrives through one of seven channels
Most wholesalers receive orders across three to five channels simultaneously. Each has its own automation path — some mature, some still manual.
How LevelOps fits. As purchase order automation software, LevelOps covers the document-driven channels — email body, PDF, Excel, image — and writes draft orders directly into Shopify. It complements EDI tools (which handle structured files from large retailers) and B2B portals (which handle buyers willing to self-serve). It does not replace either.
Five ways to automate B2B order intake on Shopify
Once you know which channels you receive, the next question is how to automate them. Here is what to expect from each approach.
Runs into the tools you already use
LevelOps writes clean orders straight into Shopify or your ERP — no copy-paste, no migration, no portal for your buyers. When a customer changes their PO format next month, nothing breaks.
See the app →Questions, answered
It is replacing manual purchase order entry with software that reads the POs your customers send and creates the matching order in your system automatically. LevelOps does this for PDF, email and spreadsheet orders, with a human review step before anything is final.
PDFs, plain-text and HTML emails, scanned documents, Excel and CSV attachments — plus the order documents your EDI platform produces. There is no required template.
Matching is highly accurate even with vague descriptions or missing codes. Every order is created for your review first, and LevelOps flags any line it cannot confidently match so nothing wrong is sent.
Shopify draft orders today, with QuickBooks, Odoo and Katana MRP supported through LevelOps. If you run another ERP, book a demo and we will confirm the fit.
EDI requires every trading partner to send a strict electronic format, which is costly and slow to onboard. LevelOps reads the documents your customers already send, so you get automation without forcing anyone to change. When a retail account mandates true X12 EDI, our consulting team can set that up too.
Most teams are processing live orders within their first week. We handle the setup with you, so there is no master-data project and nothing to configure on your own.
Continue the deep dive
Automate your purchase orders
Show us a real purchase order and we will walk you through exactly how LevelOps turns it into a clean, priced order — line by line. No commitment.