One year of Orderchamp Cloud: what we’ve learned about modern wholesale

Over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to speak with many brands about how they run their wholesale business. Sometimes those conversations happen during trade fairs, sometimes on calls, and sometimes through the feedback many of you send us directly.

One thing that always stands out to me is how much of wholesale is still managed manually. Orders arrive through email. Retailers send spreadsheets. Sales teams collect orders during trade fairs and later re-enter them into systems. Pricing rules are still stored in Excel files or in someone’s head. And to be honest, for many brands this has worked for a long time. Wholesale is relationship-driven, and the processes around it have grown organically over the years.

But what we kept hearing (and seeing) from brands is that these ways of working start to become difficult once a business begins to scale. When you’re selling in more markets, working with more retailers, or simply receiving more orders, the manual work quickly starts to pile up. What once felt manageable suddenly becomes a constant source of friction.

Reflecting on the launch Orderchamp Cloud

About a year ago, that’s exactly the challenge we wanted to help solve when we introduced Orderchamp Cloud: our modern B2B ecommerce platform.

Our idea was not to build just another piece of software, but to create tools that actually fit the reality of wholesale, at affordable fees. Wholesale doesn’t work like traditional ecommerce. Pricing is rarely one-size-fits-all for customers. Retailers have different agreements. Sales reps still play an important role in building relationships. Trade fairs remain one of the most important moments for brands and retailers to meet each other.

So instead of trying to replace those workflows, we wanted to support them while removing some of the manual work happening behind the scenes. Moreover, as other B2B software vendors started to tackle these problems, software rates got bloated and are very nontransparent. We wanted to change this, to improve the margins of our brands.

Over the last period, our team spent a lot of time speaking with brands about how wholesale actually works in practice. I remember a conversation with a brand owner three weeks ago who told me that after every trade fair they would spend days going through handwritten orders and email confirmations just to get everything into their system. It’s a process many brands recognize, and it’s exactly the kind of challenge we wanted to help simplify.

Offering key solutions to drive wholesale 2.0

Looking back now, quite a lot has happened since we first launched Orderchamp Cloud. We’ve continued improving our B2B Portal, giving brands more ways to customize their wholesale environment and manage complex pricing or customer relationships. At the same time, we introduced two new solutions designed to solve very practical problems that many brands told us about.

One of those is the Sales App, which helps field sales teams capture orders more easily when visiting retailers or attending trade fairs. The other is AI Order Convert, which automatically converts orders from emails, PDFs, or spreadsheets into structured digital orders. What used to take hours of manual work can now happen in seconds.

Each of these tools was built to solve a very specific challenge that brands deal with every day.

Communicating about our wholesale stack

What we realized recently is that while we’ve been building all these improvements, many brands in our community haven’t yet seen the full picture of what Orderchamp Cloud is capable of. So over the coming weeks, we want to show the developments of the past year, and will officially launch our newest solutions and features.

In a series of articles, we’ll take a closer look at the different parts of the platform and the challenges they were designed to solve. We’ll share how brands are creating better buying experiences for retailers through their B2B environments, how sales teams are capturing orders more efficiently in the field, and how automation can remove hours of manual work from order processing.

But just as importantly, we want to keep the conversation going with the brands in our community.

Introducing B2B Next community

That’s why we’ve also launched a new initiative called B2B Next. Last month, we hosted the first edition, and it was a great success.

Through this event, we want to bring brand owners together in person to talk about how wholesale is evolving, share ideas, and explore how digital tools can support the way modern wholesale businesses operate. It’s also an opportunity for us to show, first hand, some of the solutions we’ve been working on over the past year and to hear directly from brands about the challenges they’re facing.

We’re already exploring future editions—creating a platform for both returning and new participants, and bringing past attendees together to continue the conversations and build on the many great ideas we discussed. Because ultimately, the most valuable insights rarely come from inside our office - they come from the brands building wholesale businesses every day.

So if you have thoughts, suggestions, or challenges you’d like us to help solve, please keep sharing them with us. We’re excited to continue building the future of wholesale together.

Joost Brugmans
Co-founder & CEO, Orderchamp