Choosing a platform

Most B2B ordering software was built for somebody else

Carrots is the ordering platform for independent food and beverage distributors: the ones whose real advantage is service, and whose real problem is that the orders still arrive by phone, email and text message. Here is what we do differently, and what we do not do at all.

The alternatives

There are two kinds of platform on the shortlist, and we are neither

Enterprise suites, priced and implemented for national wholesalers, that ask you to run a project for a year. And generic webshops, which are retail carts wearing a trade badge, and fall over the first time a customer has a contract rate. Carrots is one platform, built around how independents actually trade, sitting in front of the ERP you already run.

What is different

Seven things, and none of them are a feature

Who it is for

Built for the distributor with eighty accounts, not eight thousand

Enterprise platforms are not badly made. They are made for a different business: one with an IT department, a project sponsor and a year to give the rollout. Everything here assumes the opposite. You go live with a handful of friendly customers ordering for real, on their own prices and their own delivery days, while the rest of the business carries on exactly as it did yesterday.

You go live with a pilot, not a switch-over.

Your ERP

Your ERP keeps its job. We are not asking you to move house

Items, business partners and price lists are read out of the system you already run, which stays the master record. Nobody maintains a catalogue twice, and nobody is asked to migrate their accounting in order to buy an ordering screen. The SAP Business One connector does this today, with bulk import covering the initial load. The return leg, orders written back into the ERP, is committed and not yet built, and we would rather you read that here than discover it in week three.

Live today: SAP Business One, Shopify, Microsoft 365, Stripe.

Trade rules

Trade rules are the product, not a settings tab

This is where retail carts quietly break. Real wholesale is price books and contract agreements, quantity breaks, item groups, bonus stock, interval quantities (sold by the six, not the seven), maximum order quantities, order minimums per account, and a cut-off that moves for a public holiday. Carrots resolves all of it on the server, so the price on the tile, the price in the cart and the price on the invoice are the same number, reached the same way.

Every account sees its own price on every tile, before anything reaches a cart.

The buyer's screen

Your customer opens their own list, not your catalogue

A venue reordering on a Sunday night is not shopping. They are counting what is missing. So the first screen is their order guide, in as many named lists as they need (bar, kitchen, front of house), filled from what they actually buy. Reordering is one click, and a group ordering for three venues does it in a single pass. The portal installs to a phone from the browser, so the next order starts from an icon on the home screen rather than a bookmark nobody can find.

Multiple order guides per account, built out of purchase history.

Australian by default

GST, ABN and the payment methods venues actually use

Global platforms treat Australian trade as a configuration exercise and hand you the spanner. Here it is the baseline. GST is handled end to end with per-product treatment, prices held ex-GST and totals shown inclusive. Your ABN and your trading terms sit in business settings, and tax invoices render from your own template rather than ours. Payment covers card, PayTo and BECS direct debit, with Afterpay and Zip for the venues that want the terms.

One currency and one tax regime, done properly, rather than a localisation pack.

One system

One platform, not five subscriptions stitched together with spreadsheets

Storefront, back office, pricing and promotions, payments and finance, delivery and fulfilment, marketing and engagement: six parts of the job sharing one catalogue, one pricing engine and one customer record. An approved application becomes an account, becomes a price book, becomes an order, becomes an invoice, becomes a payment, and nobody exports a CSV in the middle. Your customer even gets their own numbers back, with spend over time, top products and category mix on their own account. Buyers who understand their spend place larger and more considered orders.

One record, from application through to payment.

Your name on it

It is your storefront, your domain and your database

Your customers never see ours. The portal runs on your own hostname, under your brand and your colours, and the native app in development carries the same. Underneath, every distributor runs as their own database on their own hostnames, so your catalogue, your prices and your customer list are not rows in a table you share with a competitor.

White-labelled throughout: your brand, your domain, your data, kept separate.

Side by side

The usual answer, and ours

Written to be argued with. If a line of this is unfair, tell us and we will change it.

	The usual answer	Carrots
Who it is built for	The usual answerEnterprise wholesalers, or retail carts adapted to trade.	CarrotsIndependent food and beverage distributors, from a few dozen accounts up.
Where the truth lives	The usual answerIn the platform, with your ERP demoted to a downstream copy.	CarrotsIn your ERP. We read from it and leave it as the system of record.
Pricing	The usual answerA discount field, with contract rates handled off to the side.	CarrotsPrice books, agreements, quantity breaks and item groups, resolved on the server.
The buyer's first screen	The usual answerA catalogue to browse.	CarrotsTheir own order guides, built from what they actually buy.
Australian trade	The usual answerA localisation setting.	CarrotsGST, ABN, tax invoices, PayTo and BECS in the baseline.
Knowing what you bought	The usual answerFeature detail arrives through the sales process.	CarrotsThe whole capability list, including the gaps, is published before you talk to anyone.
Who you talk to	The usual answerAn account manager, and a feature request queue.	CarrotsThe people who wrote it.

The honest part

What Carrots does not do

If one of these matters to your business, buy something else. We would rather say so on the first call than the fourth.

Route accounting, direct store delivery and retail execution

Not planned. If that is the job, buy a suite that does it.

A native app in the stores

In development, and not released. The portal installs to a phone from the browser in the meantime.

Offline ordering

A rep taking orders in a venue with no signal is not a job we do.

Multiple currencies

AUD only. Australian tax handled end to end is the trade we made.

Multiple languages

English.

EDI

Not built.

A twenty-person implementation team and a global support desk

You get a small Australian team instead, and direct access to it. That trade is real, and it will not suit everyone.

Every line of a standard evaluation matrix is answered on the feature checklist, including the ones we answer no.

The advantage independents have is service. The software should not undo it.

Carrots gives your customers a B2C-grade way to order, and gives you the back office to run the whole trading relationship, without asking you to replace the system your business already runs on. The detail is published rather than held back for a sales call.

Book a demo