Wholesale and distribution
We will not rebuild inventory. We will build the part that does not fit.
Multi-warehouse stock, landed costs and the accounting integrations are genuinely hard, and any developer promising to rebuild all of it for the price of a small car has not scoped it.
But almost every wholesaler has four or five processes their inventory system has no shape for. Consignment. Contract pricing per customer. Freight allocation. Samples. Those are the spreadsheets beside the system, and they are exactly what a build is for.
The honest split
Keep the hard part. Build the specific part.
Cin7, Unleashed and their peers have spent years on stock accuracy, and Cin7 Core starts at US$349 a month for good reasons. If your inventory is genuinely complex, that money is buying something real.
What it is not buying is your business’s own logic. The customer who gets contract pricing on eleven lines. The consignment stock sitting in a retailer’s store that is still yours. The freight cost that has to be allocated across an order before you know the margin. That is where the spreadsheets are.
The other meter
Users, order volume and integrations, all counted separately.
Inventory platforms meter three things at once, and growth trips whichever one you were not watching. A good quarter pushes you past the order ceiling. A new sales rep pushes you past the user count. A new sales channel pushes you past the integration limit. Each step is roughly a doubling.
A build has no ceilings. That does not make it automatically cheaper, and the sum above will tell you whether it is for your business.
The scope
What gets built, and what we leave alone.
What we build for a wholesaler
- Customer contract pricing, including the customer with eleven negotiated lines
- Consignment stock, so what is sitting in a retailer's store is still visibly yours
- Freight allocation across an order, so the margin you see is the margin you get
- Sample and demo stock tracking, with who has it and when it is due back
- Sales rep territories, targets and commission
- Customer ordering portal, so the phone stops being the order channel
- Backorder and allocation rules that match how you actually decide who gets stock
- Integration with your existing inventory system and accounting
What we will not build
- A full inventory management system, unless the project is scoped and priced as one. This is a Complex build, not a Basic one
- Warehouse management with barcode and pick-path optimisation, which is a specialist category
- Accounting, tax or BAS lodgement
- EDI translation, where the standards and the certification are the product
The question that decides the scope. Is your stock complexity genuinely the problem, or is the problem everything your stock system has no field for? Most wholesalers answer the second, and that is a far smaller and better project.
The sum
Every platform fee, times sixty.
Do it on your own number
Count the inventory platform, the extra users you bought, the integration add-ons and the ecommerce connectors. Then add the plan step you are heading towards.
Common questions
Answered plainly.
Should we replace Cin7 with a custom build?
Rarely all of it. Inventory is genuinely hard and Cin7 does it well. What is usually worth building is the layer around it holding the processes Cin7 has no shape for, which is a much smaller project with a much better return.
What does Cin7 cost over five years?
At published prices held flat, Standard is US$20,940, Pro is US$35,940 and Advanced is US$71,940 over sixty months. Those figures exclude tax, exclude extra users and move with the exchange rate.
Can a custom system handle contract pricing per customer?
Yes, and it is one of the clearest wins. Customer-specific pricing is where generic products force compromises, and where wholesalers most often end up maintaining a parallel spreadsheet that somebody has to remember to update.
Do you build customer ordering portals?
Yes. For a wholesaler taking orders by phone and email, a portal is often the single highest-return part of the build, because it removes re-keying and the errors that come with it.
How much would a full inventory build cost?
That is a Complex project from $18,000, and we would scope it properly rather than quote a fixed price we cannot stand behind. For most wholesalers the layered approach is both cheaper and lower risk.
Where to next
Bring the spreadsheet beside the inventory system.
That spreadsheet is the brief. Twenty minutes on a call with it open usually shows exactly which layer is worth building and which part you should keep paying for.