Why B2B orders still arrive as messages
Every distributor has tried to move customers onto a portal. Most have quietly given up. Here is why that keeps happening, and what to do instead.
Ask any distributor how customers should place orders and you will hear about the portal. Ask how they actually place orders and you will hear about WhatsApp.
The portal is optimised for the wrong person
A portal is efficient for the supplier. It produces clean, structured data at zero cost to the person receiving it. But the person placing the order is a chef at the end of a shift, or a store manager between deliveries. For them, the portal is a login, a search, a cart, and a checkout. The message is three lines of text.
When one route costs the customer thirty seconds and the other costs five minutes, the customer picks the fast one. They are not being difficult. They are being rational.
Adoption pressure has a ceiling
Most suppliers respond by pushing harder: training, incentives, eventually threats to stop accepting email. This works on the accounts that were nearly compliant anyway. It does not work on your largest customers, because they have leverage and they know it. Nobody drops a major account over the order channel.
So you end up running both. The portal handles a slice of the volume, the order desk handles the rest, and you have added a system without removing any work.
The alternative: stop fighting the channel
The other approach is to accept the order in whatever form it arrives, and put the automation on your side of the fence instead of theirs. The customer keeps their thirty-second message. You still get a structured sales order in your ERP.
This is a strictly easier problem than changing customer behaviour, because it does not require anyone outside your business to do anything differently. It is also the only version that works on your biggest accounts.
What this actually requires
- Reading orders from the channels customers already use, not the one you wish they used
- Matching what they call your products to what you call your products
- Applying your rules — minimums, cutoffs, pricing — without a human remembering them
- Writing to the ERP, and being loud when that fails
- Keeping the original message attached, so disputes are settled by looking
None of this stops you offering a portal. It just means the portal no longer has to win for your order desk to stop retyping.
Ask any distributor how customers should place orders and you will hear about the portal. Ask how they actually place orders and you will hear about WhatsApp.
The portal is optimised for the wrong person
A portal is efficient for the supplier. It produces clean, structured data at zero cost to the person receiving it. But the person placing the order is a chef at the end of a shift, or a store manager between deliveries. For them, the portal is a login, a search, a cart, and a checkout. The message is three lines of text.
When one route costs the customer thirty seconds and the other costs five minutes, the customer picks the fast one. They are not being difficult. They are being rational.
Adoption pressure has a ceiling
Most suppliers respond by pushing harder: training, incentives, eventually threats to stop accepting email. This works on the accounts that were nearly compliant anyway. It does not work on your largest customers, because they have leverage and they know it. Nobody drops a major account over the order channel.
So you end up running both. The portal handles a slice of the volume, the order desk handles the rest, and you have added a system without removing any work.
The alternative: stop fighting the channel
The other approach is to accept the order in whatever form it arrives, and put the automation on your side of the fence instead of theirs. The customer keeps their thirty-second message. You still get a structured sales order in your ERP.
This is a strictly easier problem than changing customer behaviour, because it does not require anyone outside your business to do anything differently. It is also the only version that works on your biggest accounts.
What this actually requires
- Reading orders from the channels customers already use, not the one you wish they used
- Matching what they call your products to what you call your products
- Applying your rules — minimums, cutoffs, pricing — without a human remembering them
- Writing to the ERP, and being loud when that fails
- Keeping the original message attached, so disputes are settled by looking
None of this stops you offering a portal. It just means the portal no longer has to win for your order desk to stop retyping.