In this month’s Retail Insight, Bharat Sharma, Founder and CEO of Apex, speaks about how wholesale is no longer operational plumbing, it is strategic infrastructure and the retailers who understand this early will build more resilient businesses for the decade ahead.
Working closely with wholesalers and distributors over the last decade, one thing has become very clear to me: retail performance is often judged at the storefront, but it is decided upstream. Retail’s next competitive advantage will not be built in store design studios or marketing departments, it will sit in wholesale.
For many years, digital investment in retail has focused heavily on the consumer experience. Omni-channel journeys, mobile apps, loyalty programmes and front-end optimisation have received all the attention and the majority of budgets. Recent figures reveal that 75 per cent of B2B organisations will complete their highest revenue deals via digital channels. However, behind every strong retail brand sits a wholesale and distribution network that determines speed, availability, margin and ultimately, resilience.
In my experience delivering large-scale B2B commerce programmes, I have rarely seen retailers held back by a lack of ambition at the front end. More often, the constraint sits deeper in the supply chain, specifically in inefficient, manual and fragmented wholesale processes. This means that the inefficiency is no longer just operational, but rather strategic.
The B2B Commerce Landscape
B2B commerce is fundamentally different from consumer e-commerce. It does not operate on simple add-to-cart and checkout logic. It runs on repetitive, time-critical, high-volume, low-margin transactions. Pricing is rarely fixed. It is governed by negotiated contracts, customer-specific agreements, rebates, volume tiers and credit terms.
One customer account may involve multiple buyers, layered approval processes and strict financial controls. Even different branches of the same customer can have different pricing structures depending on location and commercial agreements.
This complexity has always existed, but expectations have changed at a rapid pace. Projected to make up roughly two-thirds of the labour force within the next few years, Millennials and Generation Z are now moving into mid- and senior-level procurement and commercial roles. They are digital-first, comfortable with AI and used to real-time transparency in their personal lives. As a result, they expect the same clarity and efficiency in their professional buying experience.
However, many wholesale and distribution businesses are still heavily dependent on legacy ERP, PIM, CRM and logistics systems. These systems are reliable and mission-critical, but they were never designed for seamless digital trade across multiple channels. This means that a significant portion of B2B commerce still happens offline.
Orders frequently arrive through email attachments, spreadsheets, PDFs, messaging apps and sometimes even voicemail and fax. Sales teams manually re-enter orders into ERP systems, apply contract pricing rules, verify credit limits, chase approvals and correct preventable errors.
I have seen highly capable sales teams spend a large portion of their day managing administration instead of building strategic relationships. What should be automated becomes repetitive human effort, repeated thousands of times every day across the sector.
This goes beyond inconvenience, revealing a structural inefficiency embedded in the retail supply chain.
Digital Maturity
In today’s environment of margin pressure, cost volatility and tighter capital discipline, these inefficiencies compound quickly. Limited visibility into stock and pricing reduces forecasting accuracy. Manual processes delay replenishment. Errors increase disputes and slow down cash flow.
From the outside, the system appears to function. But resilience requires more than functionality, it needs transparency, automation and real-time data across trading relationships.
The industry often speaks about agility, but, in practice, agility cannot exist without digital maturity in wholesale trade.
The solution is not to replicate consumer e-commerce with a better storefront design. Wholesale requires purpose-built digital infrastructure that understands its commercial complexity. The objective is to remove friction, automate pricing and approvals and integrate cleanly with existing core systems without disrupting them.
Modern AI-enabled B2B commerce platforms can centralise multi-channel ordering, automate contract pricing, manage approval hierarchies and credit controls and synchronise with ERP and supply chain systems. When implemented correctly, this does not replace the sales function. It elevates it.
More importantly, digital B2B infrastructure creates scalable growth where upsell and cross-sell become data-driven and demand patterns become visible earlier. Operational capacity expands without proportional increases in headcount.
For landlords, developers and retail asset managers, this shift should not be viewed as back-office modernisation. Tenant stability increasingly depends on upstream efficiency and retailers supported by digitally mature wholesale partners are better positioned to manage volatility, protect margins and maintain long-term stability.
Retail will (and should) continue to innovate at the front end. However, in my view, the next decisive competitive advantage will not come from the storefront. It will come from fixing the systems that power trade behind it.
