Should I set up a wholesale portal on Shopify or stick with draft orders?

[AddisonP]

I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the effort to set up a separate wholesale portal on my Shopify store for my small group of retail stockists. The built-in draft order process feels clunky for them, and I’m not sure if a dedicated portal would actually streamline things or just create more complexity for me to manage.

[Kenneth81]

We tried a separate wholesale portal for a handful of stockists last quarter. It did reduce back-and-forth on order specs and payment terms, but the setup took longer than we expected and reporting was still messy.

[Joshua12]

I started to wonder if the real issue isn't the portal at all but how we present terms and the ordering flow; the bottleneck showed up in emails, not in the system.

[Riley.R]

One compromise that helped was using password protected collections and a simple wholesale login instead of a full blown portal; it cut a few emails but not everything.

[Nathan_J]

Do you think the time spent on building the portal would pay off if you only have a few stockists?