B2B ordering portal for food distributors: a field guide

If you distribute produce to restaurants and grocers, your order book is your business. Most distributors still run it on a patchwork of texts, voicemails, order sheets, and a spreadsheet that only one person fully understands. It works, until it doesn't — a chef leaves a 5 a.m. voicemail that never gets transcribed, a price gets keyed wrong, a customer over their limit gets another delivery, and the whole thing gets reconciled by hand on invoice day.

A wholesale ordering portal doesn't change what you sell. It changes how the order gets from your customer's kitchen to your delivery truck without going through someone's memory. This guide walks through how B2B ordering actually works — account approval, terms, pricing, limits, case quantities, and invoicing — and what a good online portal changes about each piece.

Wholesale is not retail with bigger numbers

It's tempting to think a wholesale storefront is just a retail store with a higher order minimum. It isn't. In retail, anyone with a card can buy at one public price and pay on the spot. Wholesale is the opposite on almost every axis:

Buyers are vetted. You approve who gets an account, and you can turn them off.
Prices are private and per-customer. The steakhouse and the taqueria pay different numbers for the same case, and neither should see the other's.
Payment happens later. Net 30 or net 60 is normal, which means you're extending credit every time you load a truck.
Orders follow rules. Case quantities, order minimums, delivery-day cutoffs, credit limits — all the guardrails that keep a route profitable.

Any tool you use for wholesale has to respect those differences. A generic online store built for retail will fight you on every one. This is why Minori Midori keeps the wholesale side of a distributor's storefront separate from the retail side — they run on different rules, and pretending otherwise is where the pain starts.

The account approval workflow

Wholesale starts with a gate: a restaurant or grocer applies, and you decide whether to open an account. On paper it's a credit application. In practice it's the moment you set the terms of the whole relationship — who they are, what they can see, how they pay, and how much rope they get.

A good online portal makes this an explicit workflow instead of a paper form in a drawer:

The prospect applies through your storefront — business name, contact, resale certificate, references.
You review and approve (or decline, or hold). Nothing is visible or orderable until you do.
On approval you set the account up: assign their price list, choose their payment terms, set a credit limit and an order minimum.
They log in and order — and every guardrail you set is now enforced automatically, on every order, without you re-checking it.

The point of the gate isn't bureaucracy. It's that the decisions you make once at approval — terms, limit, pricing — then run themselves. That only holds if the software actually enforces them at order time, which is the theme running through everything below.

Net terms vs. prepaid

The biggest decision at approval is how a customer pays. Two models cover almost everyone:

Prepaid — they pay when they order (or on delivery). No credit risk, no collections, no aging invoices. New accounts, seasonal accounts, and anyone who's ever paid you late belong here. The tradeoff is friction: some restaurants simply won't buy from a supplier who can't carry them for a few weeks.

Net terms — you deliver now and invoice later, typically net 30 or net 60. This is table stakes for winning established restaurant accounts, and it's also how distributors quietly go under. Every case you deliver on terms is money you've lent, and a portfolio of net-60 customers is a portfolio of loans you're funding out of your own cash.

The rules aren't complicated — holding to them is: extend terms deliberately, cap the exposure with a per-customer credit limit, and follow up on overdue invoices before they become write-offs. Software's job is to enforce the limit automatically so a customer can't quietly dig past it. We go deep on all of this in offering net terms to restaurant customers — when to extend, how to size a limit, and how to keep terms from eating your cash flow.

Per-customer pricing

Wholesale has no list price that everyone pays. Volume, tenure, and whatever it took to win the account all shape the number, and the deal you cut for a marquee restaurant is nobody else's business. Wholesale pricing is inherently per-relationship.

The trap is managing that in spreadsheets, where every negotiated deal spawns another copy of the truth. Within a season the price on the customer's sheet, the number on their invoice, and the figure your salesperson quoted have all drifted apart — and every gap is either an argument or a margin leak.

The clean way to run it: every product carries a single list price, and a negotiated deal lives as a deliberate exception on that one account — so the portal, the quote, and the invoice can only ever show the same number. That's the whole subject of per-customer wholesale pricing — why every relationship prices differently, why spreadsheets rot, and how override discipline keeps your numbers honest and your negotiated prices confidential.

Credit limits and order minimums

Two guardrails do most of the work of keeping a wholesale account healthy.

A credit limit caps how deep into an account you can be when something goes wrong. Restaurants close, and the limit is what decides whether that costs you a week of orders or a quarter's profit. The failure mode everyone knows: a customer already carrying a big open balance places another order, a driver delivers it, and now you're deeper into someone who wasn't paying the first invoice. The fix is that the limit has to bite at order time: an over-limit order gets held for your say-so instead of rolling onto tomorrow's truck.

An order minimum protects the economics of the delivery itself. Rolling a truck to drop two cases loses money once you count the driver, the fuel, and the time. A minimum order amount — say, you don't deliver under $250 — keeps every stop worth making. Online, the customer sees how far they are from the minimum while they build the cart, so they add the extra case themselves instead of you having to make an awkward phone call.

Case quantities and units

Wholesale sells by the case, the box, the flat, the bag — not the each. A restaurant orders "four cases of strawberries," and a case might be eight one-pound clamshells or twelve, depending on the pack. Get the unit wrong and you've either shorted a kitchen mid-service or sent three times what they wanted.

Selling produce also means selling things that don't hold a fixed weight — a "case" of loose kale or a box of catch-weight items varies. Your ordering system has to speak in the units you actually ship: the right case pack per product, sensible minimums and increments, and clear labeling so nobody guesses. When the portal enforces the pack, the order that reaches your pick list is already in the units your warehouse and your truck understand.

Invoicing and getting paid

The order isn't done when the truck pulls away — it's done when you're paid. For prepaid accounts that's immediate. For net-terms accounts, delivery starts a countdown: thirty or sixty days until the money is due, and someone has to be watching.

Watched by hand, past-due balances turn up whenever somebody remembers to check the spreadsheet — which is how good invoices quietly age past saving. When invoicing is wired to the same system that took the order and knows the customer's terms and limit, nothing depends on remembering: overdue accounts flag themselves, and the whole loop closes — order, deliver, invoice, track, get paid — with the credit limit updating as balances move.

Order status matters here too. A wholesale order moves through stages — pending, confirmed, out for delivery, delivered — and both you and your customer benefit from seeing where it is. A chef who can check that tomorrow's order is confirmed doesn't call your cell at 6 a.m., and a delivered status is the natural trigger for the invoice.

What a good portal actually changes

None of this replaces judgment. You still decide who to approve, what terms to extend, and what price to cut. What a wholesale ordering portal changes is that those decisions stop leaking:

Orders arrive typed, in the right units, already checked against limits and minimums — no transcribing voicemails.
Each customer sees their own private prices, and only theirs.
Credit limits enforce themselves at order time instead of after the truck's gone.
Invoices track their own due dates, so nothing ages out unnoticed.
Your team stops being the integration layer that holds it all together in their heads.

That's the whole pitch: fewer keystrokes, fewer arguments, fewer surprises on invoice day. Minori Midori gives each distributor a branded storefront and admin panel built for exactly this — wholesale accounts, approvals, per-customer price lists, credit limits, and invoices with automatic overdue tracking, starting on the Starter plan. If you want to see it against your own order book, the demo is the fastest way to tell whether it fits how you actually run.

Wholesale ordering is a system whether you designed it or not. The only question is whether the rules live in software that enforces them, or in the head of the one person who can't take a day off.