How to Take Wholesale Food Orders Online: A Step-by-Step Guide

To take wholesale orders online, put four things in place before you invite anyone: a clean product list with pack sizes and units, each customer’s prices, your delivery days and cut-off times, and an ordering tool your customers can use from a phone. Then invite a handful of regular customers, keep taking phone orders alongside the new channel, and track how many orders arrive online each week. The preparation is a few days of office work. Moving customers over happens one account at a time, over several weeks.

This guide walks through each step for a small or mid-size food distributor: produce, meat and seafood, bakery, dairy or specialty goods.

Why move orders online

Phone, text and email orders work, and plenty of distributors have run on them for decades. Their cost hides in small places that add up over a week.

• Mistakes in translation. “Fifteen” heard as “fifty”, a text that says “romaine” when the chef meant romaine hearts, a voicemail cut off halfway. Each one becomes a credit, a second trip or an unhappy customer.
• Retyping. A phone order is written down, typed into your system, then read again by whoever picks it. Every copy is another chance to get it wrong.
• Orders at 11 pm. Chefs and store managers often order after closing, when they finally count the walk-in. A late-night text sits unread until morning, which may be after picking has started.
• The same questions all day. “What’s my price on the striploin?” “Did you get my order?” “When will the truck be here?” A page that shows a customer their own prices and the status of their order answers most of these without a call.
• One person holding everything. If the person who takes orders is out sick, does anyone else know that the bistro on Fifth Street always adds two cases on Fridays?

Online ordering will not replace the phone entirely. Some customers will always call, and that is fine. The aim is to get the routine orders, the ones placed the same way every week, written down once by the person who knows what they want.

What to prepare before you invite anyone

Choosing the tool is the easy part. Whether online ordering works depends mostly on the data behind it, so do this first, in a spreadsheet.

A clean product list

Export what you have from your accounting or inventory system, or copy it from your price sheet. Then go through it the way a customer would read it.

• One row for each thing a customer can order. If you sell Roma tomatoes by the 25 lb case and by the 10 lb box, that is two rows.
• Names a chef would recognize. “TOM ROMA 25# XL” works in the warehouse. “Roma tomatoes, extra large, 25 lb case” is what a customer searches for.
• A pack size and unit on every row: case, each, lb, dozen, bag. Say what is in the case, such as “case of 24” or “10 × 2 lb bags”.
• Items sold by weight flagged, such as meat cuts, fish and cheese, with the usual weight of a piece. Our catch weight pricing guide explains why.
• Categories that match how customers think (produce, dairy, meat, dry goods, supplies), and photos where they help, especially for specialty items.
• Nothing you no longer carry. A discontinued item that a customer orders turns into a phone call and a disappointment.

Your customer list

For each customer, collect the business name, account number, the person who orders, their email and mobile number, and every delivery address with its notes: back door, key drop, receiving hours. Email addresses matter most, because most ordering tools invite customers and sign them in by email.

Each customer’s prices

This is usually the hardest part, because prices live in people’s heads, old emails and the accounting system. Decide how you price: one list for everyone, a few price levels (for example list, restaurant and high-volume), or specific prices per customer for specific products. Write it all down before any customer sees it. A customer who signs in and sees a higher price than they paid last week will call you, and they will be right to.

Delivery days, cut-offs, minimums and fees

Write down which days each route runs, the cut-off for each delivery day, your minimum order, any delivery fee, and the order size above which delivery is free. If these rules have always been flexible, decide now which exceptions you will keep. Our guide to order cut-off times covers how to set them.

Sales tax

Food sold to a restaurant or store for resale is usually exempt with a resale certificate, while supplies such as cleaning products are often taxable, and the details vary by state. Mark which products are taxable, collect certificates from the customers who give them to you, and confirm the rules with your accountant. Customers should see the tax before they place an order, rather than discovering it on the invoice.

Choosing an ordering tool

There are three common ways to put ordering online, and they suit different businesses.

Whichever you choose, check that:

• customers can order from a phone without installing an app or remembering a password;
• each customer sees their own prices, and only their own;
• your cut-offs, delivery days and minimums are applied without you policing them;
• phone and text orders can go into the same list as online ones;
• you can export your products, customers and orders whenever you want.

Our checklist for choosing food distribution software goes through these in more detail.

Inviting customers

Avoid announcing online ordering to every customer on the same morning. Start with five to ten regulars who already text or email their orders, buy roughly the same things each week, and get along well with you. They will forgive a missing product and tell you about it.

Send the invitation from a person they know, through the channel they already use with you. A short message works better than a long one.

Then work through them in small groups.

1. Offer to stay on the phone for their first order. Two minutes together saves a week of “how do I…” messages.
2. After their first order, call to say you received it and ask what was confusing.
3. Fix what they found, whether a product name, a missing pack size or a wrong price, before you invite the next group.
4. Invite the next ten, and repeat each week.

Some customers will not switch, and you do not need all of them to. A chef who calls every Thursday at 6 am because it is part of their routine is a good customer either way.

The first two weeks

• Keep the phone open. Never answer a call with “please order online”. Take the order, and mention the link another time.
• Enter phone and text orders yourself, in the same system. If online orders live in one place and phone orders in another, the warehouse picks from two lists and something gets missed. One list of orders for each delivery day is the whole point.
• Check every online order before it reaches the warehouse, at least at first. Look for odd quantities (50 cases where 5 is normal), items a customer has never bought, and prices that look wrong.
• Watch the cut-off. An hour or two before it, look at which regulars have not ordered yet and send each a short reminder.
• Write down every question, and fix its cause. If three customers ask which lettuce is which, the product names need work.

How to tell it’s working

Two numbers, tracked weekly in a spreadsheet, tell you most of what you need to know.

Share of orders placed online

Count the orders customers placed themselves and divide by all orders for the week. Count orders rather than dollars at first, because you are measuring a habit.

Corrections per order

Count every credit, re-delivery and after-the-fact change caused by a wrong item, quantity or price, and divide by the number of orders. As more orders come in typed by the person who wanted them, this number should fall.

Here is what the first six weeks might look like for a distributor with 40 accounts that each order four times a week. The numbers are only an illustration.

Also worth watching: how many orders arrive after hours, how long the office needs after the cut-off to get orders to the warehouse, and how many calls are about prices or where a delivery is.

Doing this with Supligo

Supligo gives each distributor an invitation-only ordering page. You invite customers by email, or send their invitation link yourself by text or WhatsApp, and they sign in with a six-digit code sent to their email. There is no app to install, and ordering is free for them. Each customer sees their own prices, can repeat their usual order in one tap, and sees the subtotal, delivery fee, sales tax and total before placing the order. Delivery days, cut-offs, minimums and delivery fees are set per customer.

Phone and text orders go into the same list. You type or paste the message in, it becomes order lines at that customer’s prices, and a person checks it before it is confirmed. Regulars who have not ordered yet are listed with a ready message to send from your own phone or email. Products and customers can be imported from Excel or CSV. Plans start at $249 a month with a 30-day free trial; see pricing.