Wholesale brands adopt dual-platform approach to cater to diverse buying behaviours

For many enterprise wholesale brands, the real challenge is not whether to digitise their trade business, but how to avoid forcing every account into a single buying model that was never meant to serve them all.

That issue is becoming sharper as brands split their wholesale business between large retail partners with formal EDI requirements and a much broader specialty channel built around reps, buying appointments, trade shows and self-serve ordering. A department store, natio...

nal chain or big-box account often needs a highly structured workflow, with purchase orders, advance shipment notices and invoices moving cleanly through a procurement system. NuORDER by Lightspeed says its platform is built for that world, with real-time inventory visibility, user-specific pricing, integrations and support for EDI transactions. Elastic Suite positions itself in a similar part of the market, offering digital catalogues, online ordering, merchandising tools and analytics for wholesale operations.

But the buying behaviour of an independent specialty retailer or a green grass golf pro shop is different. These buyers are usually balancing retail operations with service responsibilities, lessons, event planning or club management. They are not looking to fit their purchasing into a corporate procurement workflow. They want to browse, revisit an order across several sessions, work with a representative when needed and finalise a purchase at a time that suits the pace of their business.

That distinction is why some brands are settling on a dual-platform approach: NuORDER or Elastic Suite for EDI-led accounts, and RepSpark for specialty retail and golf. The argument is not that one system is universally better than another, but that each is strongest in the segment it was built to serve.

RepSpark’s case rests on a different set of functions. The platform’s Always-On Cart is designed for buyers who begin an order on one day and return to it later, rather than submitting everything in one structured transaction. Its order intelligence tools are intended to help sales teams spot inactive accounts before a pre-book window closes. Its event microsite capability caters to a particularly valuable part of the golf business, allowing brands to create curated, event-specific digital storefronts tied to tournaments and other occasions. RepSpark says it powered 1,582 event microsites in 2025, generating $13.9 million in revenue, or an average of $8,800 per site.

The platform also promotes a buyer discovery network through RepSpark Community, which it says has more than 100,000 active wholesale buyers. According to the company, 94% of buyer requests submitted through the network in 2025 were approved, and requests rose 65% year on year. That gives brands a continuous inbound channel for specialty and golf accounts, rather than relying solely on rep-led outreach.

In practice, the integration question is less complicated than it first appears. Brands that run two front-end systems generally use the ERP as the common backbone for product data, pricing, inventory and order history. RepSpark says it supports more than 20 ERP integrations, including NetSuite, SAP, ApparelMagic, Full Circle and Microsoft Dynamics. In that model, orders from different platforms still land in the same operational environment, with the ERP acting as the system of record.

The main work, then, is not technological but organisational: deciding which account belongs where. The simplest rule is to place any account with formal EDI requirements into the EDI platform, regardless of size or relationship history. Specialty retailers, boutique accounts, regional golf chains and green grass facilities without such requirements are a better fit for RepSpark, particularly where the relationship is rep-led and the buying process is more collaborative than procedural. Ambiguous cases, such as regional chains with some EDI capability but a strong preference for self-serve buying, require a judgement call based on how the customer actually wants to trade.

Several brands are already taking that route. 5.11 Tactical uses RepSpark to manage more than 1,600 B2B buyers across North America, EMEA, Australia and Hong Kong, with the company expanding after what it described as strong dealer adoption. Catapult Brand Group, whose portfolio includes Cole Haan, Bombas, Richardson and Fair Harbor, chose RepSpark as its exclusive wholesale platform for golf and lifestyle specialty accounts and later added multi-brand microsites for tournament and event commerce. The company said the format would be a significant development for the tournament and event market. Nexbelt has also highlighted the operational gains from moving to self-serve digital ordering, saying its deployment cut order processing time by 80%.

The strategic risk of trying to push both channel types through one system is not always visible in software costs. It appears instead in buyer frustration, more rep dependency and lower order completion rates during pre-book periods. In golf, it can also mean missing sales at the point of highest intent: the tournament, the club event or the in-person buying moment when a QR code and a tailored microsite could turn interest into an order.

For brands with both EDI accounts and a large specialty or golf retail business, the logic is increasingly straightforward. Use the platform built for structured retail relationships where EDI is required. Use the platform built for relationship-led, self-serve specialty commerce where flexibility and discovery matter more. For brands operating only in specialty retail and golf, RepSpark can cover the full wholesale workflow on its own.

The broader lesson is that wholesale is not one buying behaviour. It is several. And the brands that accept that distinction are building systems that fit their customers, rather than asking their customers to fit the system.

Source: Noah Wire Services