Wholesale ordering portal for small product brands
Wholesale ordering portal for small product brands is a SaaS idea for small food, beauty and gift brands selling to independent shops, priced to test at $49 a month per brand. Wholesale orders arrive by email, phone and PDF order forms with old prices. With it, small brands give their stockists a sign-in to see wholesale prices, place repeat orders and download invoices.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Wholesale orders arrive by email, phone and PDF order forms with old prices. The brand retypes each order, misses minimums, and shops can’t see what is in stock.
Why now: Brands that started online now add wholesale to reach high-street shops, and shop buyers expect to reorder online.
What do they use today?
Small brands usually send a price list as an attachment, take orders by whatever channel the shop prefers, and enter them by hand into their accounts. Stockists ring or email to ask what is in stock.
How does it work?
A new shop applies for a stockist account, and the brand approves it and attaches that shop’s own price list and order minimums. When the buyer signs in, they see the catalogue with wholesale prices and pack sizes, and can reorder from a past order in one click. The order is emailed to the brand with an invoice to pay later.
What goes in the first version?
- Stockist sign-in with their own price list and minimums
- Product catalogue with wholesale prices and pack sizes
- Orders emailed to the brand with an invoice to pay later
- Reorder from past orders in one click
- Stockist applications the brand approves or declines
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Small food, beauty and gift brands selling to independent shops
- Price to test
- $49 a month per brand
Wholesale is often an extra line of business for a brand that began online. One flat monthly price per brand is easier to accept than fees that grow with every stockist or order.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five small brands how wholesale orders arrive today and how long each one takes to process.
- 2Ask three of one brand’s stockists whether they would reorder from a portal.
- 3Set up a simple order form for one brand’s stockists this week and count orders placed through it.
Where to find the first customers
- Maker and small-brand groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
- Wholesale trade show exhibitors, contacted after the show
- Sales agents who represent several small brands to shops
What are the risks?
- Online store platforms offer wholesale add-ons, so keep the stockist experience much simpler.
- Stock levels must stay in sync with the online store, or orders oversell.
How to build it on shipanysaas
6 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Sign-in
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Admin panel
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Stockist price lists and minimum order rules
- Order flow with invoice PDFs
- Stock sync with one store platform
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Wholesale ordering portal for small product brands. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Small brands give their stockists a sign-in to see wholesale prices, place repeat orders and download invoices. - Who pays: Small food, beauty and gift brands selling to independent shops - Their problem: Wholesale orders arrive by email, phone and PDF order forms with old prices. The brand retypes each order, misses minimums, and shops can’t see what is in stock. - Price to test: $49 a month per brand (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Stockist sign-in with their own price list and minimums 2. Product catalogue with wholesale prices and pack sizes 3. Orders emailed to the brand with an invoice to pay later 4. Reorder from past orders in one click 5. Stockist applications the brand approves or declines ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Sign-in: email and password or Google, plus magic links and passkeys you can switch on - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Admin panel: a super-admin panel that needs two-step sign-in - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Stockist price lists and minimum order rules - Order flow with invoice PDFs - Stock sync with one store platform ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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