Email, WhatsApp and Excel
Move B2B ordering beyond email, WhatsApp and Excel
For wholesalers, manufacturers and distributors where regular customers' orders arrive by email, WhatsApp, spreadsheet or phone. At a handful of orders a month, that works fine. Once it becomes the standard way dozens of customers order, retyping, double-checking and correcting starts eating more and more time. Ordanta gives your customers their own portal to order themselves — with their prices and their assortment — so the order reaches you already structured.
Where it starts to strain
When email, WhatsApp and Excel stop scaling with you.
At a handful of orders a month, this is rarely an issue. As the number of regular customers and the size of orders grows, a few things can start to strain at once.
Signs worth recognising, for example:
- Orders arrive in different formats — an email, a message, an attachment — that you have to sort through before you can process them
- Product names or SKUs differ per customer and need to be matched to the right code
- Quantities or packaging units need interpreting before an order adds up
- It isn't always obvious whether a customer used the latest price or the current assortment
- Customer-specific terms get harder to apply consistently when someone has to check them manually every time
- A standing order from last month still gets entered again from scratch
- Order history ends up scattered across inboxes, chat threads and files
- It's not immediately clear who processed an order when several employees handle incoming orders
Not the wrong tools
Email, WhatsApp and Excel aren't the problem.
These channels have worked well for years for communication and exceptions. It gets difficult once they become the primary structure for most of your recurring B2B orders.
Good for communication, quotes, and anything that needs explaining.
Useful for quick contact with a customer, especially for a question in between.
Excel
Useful as an internal tool for overview and your own record-keeping.
What changes
What a portal changes about the process.
Right now, your team usually works through a few steps to make an order usable. With a portal, the customer works through those steps themselves.
That's often what the process looks like today.
That's what it looks like with Ordanta.
Available today
What Ordanta already structures today.
- A private, secure portal per customer, with its own login
- Prices and assortment set per customer
- Order history, so a previous order can be placed again in a couple of clicks
- Minimum order quantities and fixed packaging increments where relevant
- CSV import for your product and pricing data
- Orders that arrive already structured, ready for further processing — not a message to retype
Hypothetical example
An example to make it concrete.
Say a wholesaler has forty recurring business customers. Some of them email through product names, others send a screenshot or a message, and a few still work from their own spreadsheet template. With a portal, all of those customers go through the same screen instead: they log in, see their own assortment and prices, and place the order themselves. What reaches the wholesaler is structured the same way for every customer — regardless of how that customer used to order.
This example is hypothetical and for illustration only. It isn't a performance claim and doesn't represent any specific existing customer.
Fit check
When an ordering portal probably isn't necessary.
An ordering portal isn't the right step for every business. It's probably not needed if:
- Only a handful of orders arrive each month
- Every order is specific enough that standardising it wouldn't gain much
- Customers rarely reorder the same products
- An existing ecommerce or ERP setup already handles ordering well enough
In those cases, retyping a few emails a month is probably faster than rolling out a new system. Weighing up ecommerce versus a portal instead? See the comparison between a B2B ordering portal and ecommerce.
Who operates Ordanta
Who's behind Ordanta.
Ordanta is developed and operated by WebResenje PR, a web design and SEO business in Pančevo, Serbia, focused on European B2B companies. More on who we are and how we work is on the About Ordanta page.
Pricing
What switching costs.
Plans start at €149 a month, with no commission on your sales and no extra per-user cost. The standard implementation fee doesn't apply during the Pilot Programme. See full pricing and plans.
Pilot Programme
The Pilot Programme.
Ordanta is currently onboarding up to three European Pilot Partners directly, with the standard implementation fee waived and every application reviewed personally. Read more about the Pilot Programme, or go straight to the application.
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