What’s the point in having a wholesale eCommerce store, exactly? We’re glad you asked.
We’ve worked with one business that has been in operation since the ’70s. And before they met us, they still did business like they were in the ’70s… the fashion since then sure has changed, and so has the sales approach.
Wholesale ECommerce works if you recognize any one of these time consuming tasks:
- Your wholesale orders sell through PDFs and line sheets. Emails, marked-up PDFs, spreadsheets, each one retyped before anything ships.
- Every account has its own prices, and keeping the right list in front of the right buyer means you could have multiple copies of the same PDF with different pricing.
- Your team’s evenings go to order entry during the weeks they should be selling.
- You sell on rush order / same-season purchasing.
- Your in-house graphic designer has to spend hours preparing PDFs and editing pictures.
- You manually calculate shipping and logistics: You currently count boxes, pack shirts, make sure they’re weighed properly, and have to do all that by hand.
- Buyers ask for repeats between appointments, and the answer depends on someone being free to reply.
- The catalogue changes mid-season, and orders keep coming in off last month’s PDF.
- Adding accounts means adding hours. Ten more buyers means ten more inboxes to watch, and eventually another person to process them.
If that’s your week, the store pays for itself in retyping alone, before it sells a single extra unit. Here’s what a wholesale eCommerce store includes.
People buy online these days. If your customers can’t, that’s costing you thousands of dollars in lost opportunity and revenue.
Every hour between a buyer deciding and you confirming is an hour they can spend ordering from someone else.
It also means your team is spending hours and weeks to complete tasks that could be done in 10 minutes.
So the question isn’t whether wholesale eCommerce works.
It’s whether the cost of using wholesale eCommerce is cheaper than the cost of not using it.
Granted, there are cases where a wholesaler / distributor / supplier think this might not work for them:
- “Our buyers won’t use it.”
- “We’re not technical.”
- “We’d be locked in.”
- “We’re too small for this.”
- “We don’t have enough buyers to justify it.”
- “We already use a wholesale platform.”
We’ve answered a lot of these questions on why wholesale eCommerce wouldn’t work for you our Book a call page. These are often pre-conceived notions about wholesale eCommerce, and we have to say, most of the times there is never a sound reason why you shouldn’t be making it easier for your customers to buy from you. Remember, it’s not about whether or not wholesale eCommerce works; it’s about whether the cost of using it is cheaper than the cost of not using it. People buy online these days. If your customers can’t, that’s costing you thousands of dollars in lost opportunity and revenue.
There are in fact very good reason why wholesale eCommerce would legitimately not work for your fashion / garment business. These are some of the reasons.
When wholesale eCommerce wouldn’t work for you:
- You want to keep your catalog a secret: If you don’t want people to be able to find your business online, then having a website is probably a bad idea.
- You sell to one or two large accounts and speak to the buyer anyway. The order is a formality at the end of a conversation, and software doesn’t improve a conversation.
- You want to handle exactly 0 wholesale orders in house: maybe you prefer to have your buyers / retail partners handle the complete process themselves. You make the clothes, they come to your showroom, take what they want and leave.
Any brand that recognises itself in this list should keep its money. We’d rather tell you now than three weeks into a build.
“We already sell wholesale through our ERP”
In RepSpark’s 2026 report on a 2025 survey of 26 lifestyle apparel brands, 19% called their wholesale platform and ERP fully integrated, 38% partially integrated, 19% manual syncs only, and 24% not integrated at all. Four brands in five are doing some part of this by hand. That’s a vendor’s survey of a small sample, but it’s the best public picture there is.
ERPs are generally not built to be eCommerce platforms. They’re built to be inventory management and order tools (among other things, in some cases). Oftentimes there is no customer-facing, frictionless way for wholesale buyers to serve themselves. In this case, you still have to personally handle every single sales opportunity.
Some ERPs do have customer login portals where your customers can see your inventory, catalog and make their purchases themselves. Oftentimes, that portal is a closed door: new customers can’t find your products or styles, inventory levels or offerings of any kind. That means the, “We already sell wholesale through our ERP” is just a “we want to keep our inventory secret” problem, ultimately: as mentioned above, this might something you might actually want and in that case, wholesale eCommerce is not for you.
Do you sell on rush?
At-once and rush orders are where this gets decided for most brands, because they’re no longer the exception. A buyer who needs stock this week can’t wait for a reply, and by the time someone answers Monday’s email, they’ve often ordered from whoever answered first. How many opportunities were missed out on because of that?
Where we sit
When it comes to wholesale eCommerce, Syndicate competes on two major angles: ownership and cost.
Ownership: compared to platforms like JOOR, Faire, FashionGo, etc…. Syndicate actually lets you own your store. It’s company property. With these platforms, yearly costs could exceed $10,000 USD. If any of those platforms decided they don’t like you, your page is shutdown, and probably never to be recovered.
Price: Here is something to keep in mind: Syndicate is not the only option for your wholesale eCommerce needs. In fact, you may already be using some of the platforms mentioned above, or even using something like Shopify. A lot of businesses with the potential to work with Syndicate already have retail operations set up with platforms like Shopify — which let’s face it, is quite synonymous with the word “eCommerce” today. Here’s the thing: Shopify Plus charges $2,300USD a month to sell wholesale and even worse — the store still doesn’t belong to you. Over 5 years, working with Syndicate is about 90% less expensive. And you own the store.
We build wholesale stores for fashion brands: product pages, a cart, a checkout, and the prices set for each wholesale account. It runs alongside your existing email and PDF ordering, so you invite buyers over at your pace rather than switching everyone at once. The store belongs to you, including the domain, the files and every login, with no subscription to us keeping it alive, and ongoing care is optional with no contract on monthly plans.
The fastest way to judge it is to watch someone use one for fifteen minutes and ask the five questions above while they do. Canadian team, based in Montreal, working with businesses since 2015.
Source: RepSpark, “The B2B & ERP Integration Benchmark for Wholesale Brands,” 2026, reporting a 2025 survey of 26 lifestyle apparel brands, and “Best B2B Wholesale eCommerce Platform,” August 2026, on total cost of ownership.
Five questions to ask any vendor, including us
- What happens in month 13 when I want my data out? Ask what exports, in what format, and whether the store still works if you stop paying.
- How many of your customers run my exact ERP? Ask for a reference on that stack, not a logo wall.
- What did a brand my size take to launch, in weeks? A range with no example behind it is a guess.
- What does year one cost in total? Subscription, setup, integration, data preparation and your own hours. RepSpark, which sells one of these platforms, notes the total often equals or exceeds the first year’s subscription.
- What happens to my linesheets and my buyers who aren’t ready? If the answer is that they stop, ask what the plan is for the accounts that pay your bills today.
