Wholesale gives you confirmed orders months ahead of delivery. You know who is buying, what they are buying, and roughly when it ships.

That is the best information in the business. In most brands it sits in an inbox and gets typed into the ERP by hand.

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Orders arrive in twenty different formats

Every account sends orders their own way. A PDF from one, a spreadsheet from another, an email with the quantities written in the body, a portal that has to be logged into and exported.

Someone then rekeys all of it. On a big season that is weeks of work, and the errors are expensive because they are found late. A wrong quantity or a wrong delivery window is discovered when the order ships.

This is one of the easier things to automate now. AI reads the order in whatever format it arrives, maps the codes to your products, and flags anything that does not match. A person checks the exceptions instead of typing everything. The order book is then accurate and current, which matters for everything downstream.

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Chargebacks nobody traces

Premium and luxury retailers have compliance manuals. Labels in a specific format, cartons packed a certain way, an advance shipping notice sent before the delivery, arrival inside a booked window.

Miss any of it and they deduct a fee from the invoice. Finance sees a short payment, writes it off, and moves on. Most brands we meet cannot tell you what their chargebacks cost last year, let alone which account or which cause they came from.

We pull the deductions into the data, categorise them, and trace each one back to what went wrong. Usually a small number of causes explain most of the cost, and most of them are fixable. Getting the ASN sent on time is not difficult. Nobody had ever put a number on what it was costing.

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What happens after sell in

Most brands manage wholesale up to the point the order ships and then go quiet until the next buy.

Meanwhile the account is selling, or not selling. If you know which products are moving in which doors, you can go back with a replenishment order while the season is live. If you do not, the first news you get is a request for markdown support at the end of it.

Retailers will share sell out data. It arrives in different shapes from each one and that is the reason it usually goes unused. Once it is consolidated you can see sell through by account and by door, spot the accounts buying the wrong assortment, and have a joint business review with numbers in it.

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Real margin by account

Ask most brands what their B2B margin is and you get one number for the channel.

The number by account is very different. Discount structures vary. Freight terms vary, and some accounts have you paying for delivery. Payment terms cost money. Then there are returns, marketing support, chargebacks, split shipments for accounts that order small and often.

Once you build the cost to serve properly, the picture changes. There are usually accounts everyone thinks are important that make very little, and quiet accounts making more than the big ones. That changes who you chase and what terms you are willing to give.

B2B is confirmed demand. You know what is coming, which makes it the easiest part of the business to plan and to automate.

It also opens options that are not available in DTC. When the order is confirmed and the timing is agreed, it does not always need to come through your warehouse at all.

Most brands treat wholesale as the manual channel and put their technology into ecommerce. It is usually the other way round in terms of where the money is.