Web Hosting for Wholesalers

The login is the design

Most trades can put their whole website in public and lose nothing. You cannot. Your price to a dealer who buys ten pallets a month is not the price you would ever want a walk-in to see, and it is certainly not something you want a competitor pulling up on a phone in a customer's office.

So the question that shapes the entire site is not which host you use. It is where the wall goes, and what is on each side of it.

What goes wrong most often

The wall gets built out of a shared password. One login, one password, handed to every account, printed on the bottom of an invoice, forwarded around by email for six years. Staff leave and take it with them. Customers pass it to their brother-in-law. By the time you notice, half your industry can read your price list, and one of your retail customers has worked out they were paying double.

The damage is not only the margin on that one sale. It is that you now cannot change pricing without every buyer seeing the change at the same time, and you cannot tell who saw what.

• A shared password cannot be revoked for one account. You either change it for everybody or you live with it.
• It gives you no record of who looked at what, so you cannot tell a customer's activity from a competitor's.
• It usually ends up cached in browsers, saved in shared inboxes and posted in forums.
• Search engines find it more often than people expect, because somebody publishes it somewhere well meaning.

If your trade pricing is behind a single password today, treat that password as public. Plan on the assumption that everyone already has it, because in practice they usually do.

Applications, approvals and the accounts nobody closes

Wholesale accounts are not sign-ups. Somebody applies, you check them, you decide. That process is worth building properly on the site, because the alternative is a form that emails you and then sits in an inbox for a week while the buyer goes elsewhere.

1. Take the application on your own site

   A short form that asks for the business name, the resale or tax registration details you require, and who they buy for now. Keep it on a page you control rather than on a third-party form service, and keep it on an encrypted connection, because you are collecting business tax details.

2. Review it like a credit decision, because it is one

   Someone has to look. A wholesale login is access to your pricing, so the approval step is the security control. Automating it away is how competitors end up with accounts under a made-up shop name.

3. Issue an individual login

   One account, one login, tied to a named person at the business. Not a company-wide password. This is the whole point, and it is the step people skip.

4. Close accounts when they go quiet

   Buyers change jobs and businesses close, and the login outlives both. Look through the list once or twice a year and switch off anything that has not ordered in a long time. You can always turn it back on.

Keep the applications themselves somewhere sensible. Tax registration numbers and trade references are business records worth protecting, and an unprotected folder of submitted forms sitting on the web server is a quiet liability. The website security page covers the general shape of that.

Who should not build this at all

If you sell to the public as well as the trade, you are running a shop with a trade counter, not a wholesale operation. That is a different website and usually a simpler one. Build the retail store properly, then add a trade discount on top of it for approved accounts. Trying to run a two-tier private catalogue when most of your revenue walks through the door is work you will not get back.

Some other cases where the answer is to spend less, not more.

• You have a dozen accounts and you have had the same dozen for years. A website that lists what you carry and a phone number is enough. The login solves a problem you do not have.
• Your pricing is genuinely public and always has been, because you compete on service or delivery rather than on price. Then the wall is pure cost and no benefit.
• You sell one line, in one size, to a closed group. A catalogue is overkill.
• Somebody is selling you a large plan because you have thousands of products. Ask what the plan is doing. A catalogue is text and images, and text is small.

Where the money is genuinely worth spending: real per-account logins instead of a shared one, a live link to your stock system if buyers rely on availability, and a proper backup routine because a catalogue rebuilt by hand is weeks of somebody's life. That last one is the least exciting and the most likely to save you. The website backups page explains what to actually ask for.