Walk into your warehouse on a busy morning. Watch what happens.
A picker stares at a handwritten order, trying to decode the scrawl. Is that a 6 or a 0? Is "blue widget lg" the same as "large blue widget"? They walk over to ask someone, wasting five minutes.
The team lead is on the phone with the office. An order came through email, but the customer's special instructions didn't get passed along. Now there's a partial shipment to sort out.
Three people are clustered around a shared inbox, looking for an order that should have arrived but didn't. The sales rep swears they sent it. It's probably in spam. Or maybe a different inbox. Or maybe it's still on someone's desk in the office.
Meanwhile, actual picking and packing—the work that gets products out the door—waits.
This isn't a warehouse problem. It's an ordering system problem.
The Hidden Tax of Manual Order Processing
Every minute your warehouse team spends not picking and packing is waste. It doesn't show up as a line item, but it costs you:
Labour costs for non-productive time. You're paying pickers to decipher, packers to verify, and supervisors to troubleshoot. That's expensive data entry masquerading as warehouse work.
Delayed shipments. Orders that require clarification ship late. Late shipments damage customer relationships. Damaged relationships cost orders.
Error compounding. An unclear order becomes a wrong pick. A wrong pick becomes a return. A return becomes a credit, a re-ship, and a frustrated customer. One unclear order can generate hours of rework.
Good people leaving. Warehouse work is physical enough without the mental burden of broken processes. Your best staff—the ones with options—will find employers who don't make their jobs unnecessarily hard.
Add it up across a year. The cost is staggering, but invisible because it's distributed across every order, every day.
Why Orders Arrive Broken
The problem starts before the order reaches the warehouse.
Phone orders introduce human error
A customer calls in. The rep writes down the order—maybe on paper, maybe in a system. They mishear something. They abbreviate. They use a product description instead of a SKU. The order gets transcribed again into the ERP, introducing another opportunity for error.
By the time it reaches the warehouse, the order has passed through multiple humans and multiple systems. Each handoff degrades accuracy.
Email orders lack structure
"Hey, can you send me 50 of the usual plus 20 of those things we got last time?"
Good luck picking that order.
Email orders rely on context that exists only in the sales rep's head. They lack product codes, exact quantities, delivery instructions, and anything else that would make the order executable without interpretation.
When interpretation is required, errors follow.
Spreadsheets and attachments get lost
Some customers send orders as spreadsheet attachments. These are better than freeform email—at least they're structured—but they create different problems.
Attachments get missed. Files don't open. Formats are incompatible. Someone has to manually transfer the data into your system anyway.
The spreadsheet looks efficient. The process around it isn't.
Data lives in multiple places
The order comes in through email. Customer details are in the CRM. Pricing is in the ERP. Special instructions are in a sticky note on someone's monitor.
Getting all that information to the warehouse requires manual assembly. Someone—usually multiple someones—has to compile the order from scattered sources.
Every time you compile manually, you risk missing something.
What Good Order Flow Looks Like
Now imagine a different morning in the warehouse.
A picker scans their device. The order is already there—complete, unambiguous, ready to work. Product codes match exactly what's in the warehouse. Quantities are confirmed. Special handling instructions appear on screen. The pick path is optimised.
No phone calls to the office. No squinting at handwriting. No digging through email threads.
The team lead monitors orders in real time. They can see what's queued, what's in progress, and what's shipped. When something is urgent, it's flagged automatically. When a customer has special requirements, they appear with the order.
The shared inbox? Eliminated. Orders come through a system, not through email. They're validated before they're accepted. They arrive complete, every time.
This is what a proper wholesale ordering system delivers.
How a B2B Ordering Portal Fixes This
A wholesale ordering system—specifically, a B2B ordering portal—solves the order quality problem at the source.
Customers enter orders directly
When customers use an ordering portal, they enter their own orders. They select products from your catalogue. They see their prices. They confirm quantities.
There's no intermediary to mishear or mistype. The order is correct because the customer made it correct.
The system validates in real time
A proper ordering system doesn't accept garbage orders. It validates:
- Product codes exist in your catalogue
- Quantities meet minimums you've configured
- Stock is available at time of order
- Credit limits aren't exceeded before order submission
- Delivery addresses are complete and properly formatted
Bad orders get rejected before they enter your system. The customer fixes the problem, not your warehouse team.
Orders arrive ready to pick
When an order comes through the portal, it's already in a format your warehouse system understands. No translation, no transcription, no interpretation.
The order hits the warehouse with:
- Exact SKUs matching your inventory
- Pick locations if your WMS supports them
- Customer-specific packing instructions
- Shipping preferences and carrier requirements
- Everything else needed to pick, pack, and ship
The picker's job becomes picking—not detective work.
Special instructions are captured systematically
Every customer has quirks. This one wants pallets wrapped a certain way. That one needs paperwork in the box. Another has a delivery window that must be respected.
In a manual process, these instructions live in tribal knowledge—sales reps' memories, sticky notes, spreadsheet comments.
In a proper wholesale ordering system, instructions attach to customer accounts or individual orders. They surface automatically when relevant. The warehouse team sees them without asking.
Integration eliminates re-keying
When your ordering portal integrates with your ERP and WMS, orders flow through without manual touchpoints.
Order placed → appears in ERP → generates pick list in WMS → updates inventory → creates shipping label → sends tracking to customer.
Every step where a human would re-enter data is a step where errors enter. Eliminate the re-keying, eliminate the errors.
The Warehouse Efficiency Math
Let's make this concrete.
Assume your warehouse processes 200 orders per day. Without a proper ordering system:
- 15% of orders require clarification: 30 orders × 10 minutes average = 300 minutes of investigation
- 5% of orders have errors discovered during picking: 10 orders × 20 minutes to resolve = 200 minutes of rework
- Administrative overhead (chasing emails, compiling orders): 120 minutes per day
That's 620 minutes—over 10 hours—of daily waste. At $30/hour loaded labour cost, you're burning $300+ per day on process friction. That's $78,000 per year, assuming no growth.
With a proper wholesale ordering system:
- Clarification calls drop 80%: 60 minutes instead of 300
- Picking errors drop 70%: 60 minutes instead of 200
- Administrative overhead drops 90%: 12 minutes instead of 120
New daily waste: 132 minutes. You've recovered over 8 hours per day.
The ordering system didn't make your warehouse team faster at picking. It let them actually pick instead of doing data cleanup.
"But Our Customers Won't Use a Portal"
You might think your customers prefer phone orders. Some do—usually because the alternative you've offered was terrible.
When customers experience a portal that's genuinely good:
- Faster than phone calls: No hold time, no phone tag, no "let me check on that"
- Available when they need it: 6am before they leave for job sites, 10pm after the day winds down
- Shows their prices: No guessing, no asking, no waiting for quotes
- Remembers their history: Reorder last week's order in seconds
- Confirms immediately: Order confirmed, delivery date shown, done
Customers don't love phone orders. They tolerate them because the alternative was worse. Give them a good alternative and watch adoption climb.
Within six months of launching a proper B2B portal, most wholesalers see 60–70% of orders shift to self-service. The remaining phone orders are genuinely complex—situations where human conversation adds value.
What About Complex Orders?
Some orders legitimately require discussion. Custom configurations. Unusual requests. Problem-solving.
Those orders should involve humans. That's where your sales and customer service teams add value.
But routine reorders? Standing orders from regular customers? Simple additions to existing orders?
These don't need human involvement. They need a system that handles them accurately and efficiently, freeing your humans for work that actually requires humans.
The goal isn't eliminating human contact. It's eliminating wasteful human contact—the kind where someone reads an email, types numbers into a system, and hopes they got it right.
Getting Started
You don't need to transform everything overnight. Start where the pain is worst.
Identify your problem orders
Which customers generate the most clarification calls? Which order types cause the most warehouse confusion? Where does rework concentrate?
Those are your first targets. A portal that handles even 30% of your orders—if it's the right 30%—can dramatically improve warehouse efficiency.
Focus on quick-win customers
Some customers will adopt immediately:
- High-volume customers tired of phone hold times
- Tech-comfortable buyers who expect online ordering
- Customers who order the same things repeatedly
Start with them. Build success stories. Expand from there.
Measure before and after
Track the metrics that matter:
- Orders requiring clarification (percentage and time)
- Pick errors attributable to order quality
- Time from order received to order shipped
- Warehouse team frustration (yes, measure it—ask them)
What gets measured gets improved.
Your Warehouse Team Deserves Better
Your pickers and packers didn't sign up to decode handwriting and chase emails. They signed up to move products efficiently.
Every minute they spend compensating for broken ordering processes is a minute of skilled labour wasted. It's frustrating for them, expensive for you, and completely preventable.
A proper wholesale ordering system isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure. It's the foundation that lets your warehouse team do their actual jobs instead of cleaning up upstream mess.
The warehouse shouldn't be where order problems get discovered. It should be where clean orders get executed.
Ready to stop your warehouse team waiting on emails? Book a call with our team. We'll assess your order flow and show you what a proper wholesale ordering system looks like.
