Show HN: OrderCircle – Wholesale ordering software for small businesses

I have looked a lot at this space and there is a surprising lack of software to handle this that doesn't start to bleed into complex ERP or that isn't a poorly integrated "wholesale" feature for a traditional e-commerce app.

We use a SaaS called NowCommerce to handle this. It is designed with a bridge to our Quickbooks company file and it works really well though with limited functionality.

One key takeaway I've had looking at how orders are placed/processed/fulfilled in my business is that wholesale purchasing practices are VERY ingrained. Typically there is one person responsible for accounts payables and material purchasing in a small business. That person will most often place orders via Purchase Order (if the business is setup on credit terms). In my experience that AP person will simply enter their PO directly into Quickbooks and email it directly to the supplier- whose email contact is already setup in QB. For them to use your portal they would need to separately login to your application and duplicate their PO there by entering the info again.

The Purchase Order is critical for handling the payment of your invoice and for receiving items into inventory when they come in- so not having a PO in Quickbooks is not an option.

A small but growing segment of my customers use our wholesale order portal but you may find that when your customers have the capability right in front of them in QB it might be a trickier adoption curve than you think.

BTW if I had a magic wand I would create an email parsing application that can READ that emailed PDF purchase order and auto-populate an order form or Quickbooks invoice on the portal.

Best of luck from a fellow bootstrapper- please get in touch if I can be of any help!

There are hundreds of solo entrepreneurs who own ecommerce properties. Some dropship, some carry inventory.... but all order from wholesale at some point. This is definitely a good market to get into.

In your site you have "Bill sells to Joe" as an example. My advice is that you market to both Bill and Joe, regardless of who pays you. It sounds like both Bill and Joe benefit, so you really only need one of them to convince the other.

To target the buy-side of wholesale ordering, I would recommend posting to marketing forums (Wickedfire comes to mind, maybe also forums around 4hourworkweek, millionaire fast lane type "lifestyle" businesses). You'll find very specific clientele there who will definitely use your software.

The first - and biggest - issue that came to mind is integration with warehousing, inventory management, ERP, etc. You have an API which is awesome, but you may want to look into building connectors to some more popular systems - it'll make setting it up much easier/cheaper and help sell it.

Another related question is the realtime inventory tracking - how will you handle this in companies who sell both retail and wholesale? Like above, integrations with POS and/or ecommerce systems will be helpful/necessary.

For both cases, one system has to be canonical - it may be OrderCircle, but it may not.

(Feel free to contact me if you want to chat - I've worked with your potential customers for many years.)

Who made your explainer video? They did a great job.

What's your sales and marketing plan? Direct sales?