In order to accurately plan forecasts and replenishment when wholesale orders are involved, it is important to manage wholesale orders separately from regular orders. The wholesale planning feature in Inventory Planner allows merchants to:

Wholesale planning is not enabled by default, but you can switch it on if required.

Here's a simple example to demonstrate the importance of treating your regular and wholesale orders separately:

In this first scenario, historic regular and wholesale orders are combined to generate a forecast based on the summed past sales:

Note the spikes of activity every few months.

In this second scenario, past regular sales (blue) are separated from past wholesale orders (red).

In this scenario, the forecast is based on the past regular sales.

Future wholesale orders can be planned separately, in which case they will be added to Replenishment recommendations when the planning period includes the expected wholesale order dates.

Here's another example to demonstrate when Wholesale Planning would be useful:

George sells 100 shirts on average per month in his store. Every 3 months, a wholesale customer purchases 1,000 units from George. Without treating these sales orders separately, Inventory Planner recognizes that 1,300 units were sold during a 3 month period (433 units per month) and generates the forecast accordingly.

By enabling Wholesale Planning in Inventory Planner, George's forecast separates the past wholesale orders to generate a realistic forecast of 100 units per month instead. George can also plan for future wholesale orders to be sure that the requirement for his wholesale customer (1,000 units every 3 months) can be satisfied in addition to ordering enough supply to cover the forecasted regular sales.

Inventory Planner supports two modes depending on how you create your wholesale orders.

To enable Wholesale Planning in Inventory Planner, go to Account > Settings and enter the Wholesale tab.

Toggle the "Enable wholesale forecasting" switch to enable the ability to separate past wholesale orders from regular sales orders, and to plan for future wholesale orders.

Enabling this setting opens up a new icon on the left-hand navigation bar for "Wholesale", below "Stock orders".

Once you've enabled wholesale orders, you must configure your settings to ensure Inventory Planner treats your orders correctly.

This setting is enabled by default, allowing you to plan wholesale orders separately to retail orders, exclude past wholesale orders from the forecast and count future wholesale orders in the replenishment quantity.

Disabling this setting turns off the wholesale functionality, but allows you to view past wholesale metrics. You may want to use it if you have decided to manage your wholesale orders with your regular retail orders but still want to be able to view historic data.

Enable this setting to sync your wholesale orders from your connected platform. Enabling the setting opens up additional settings to automatically distinguish wholesale orders based on customer email addresses or full names, sales order statuses, channels, or warehouses.

When syncing wholesale orders, you must specify at least one field Inventory Planner can use to separate past wholesale orders from regular sales orders in your connected platform:

Define wholesale customers using their email addresses and full names to mark their associated orders as wholesale orders.

To do so, go to Wholesale > Wholesale customers using the left-hand menu. Click "+ New wholesale customer" to search for an existing customer.

If your wholesale customer doesn't already exist, you can create a new customer by clicking the "Create new" option when searching:

Click "Add" to create the new customer.

Alternatively, you can import wholesale customers using a CSV file by selecting the Import button at the bottom of the page.

Download the template, fill it in, and upload it. Click "Map columns" to move on to the next screen, and once your columns are mapped, import the file.

Learn more about importing data into Inventory Planner here.

Use the wholesale order status setting to define wholesale orders using specific sales order statuses synced from your connection. Pick one or more statuses for wholesale orders from the available options using the dropdown menu.

Define wholesale orders using a specific channel in the connected store. Select the wholesale channel from the available options using the dropdown menu.

Use this setting to define wholesale customers based on sales order tags synced from the connected store. Select the wholesale order tag from the available options using the dropdown menu.

Define wholesale orders using a specific location or warehouse from the integrated store(s). Select one or multiple wholesale warehouses from the available options using the dropdown menu.

After the wholesale sync configuration is saved, Inventory Planner will start a sync to separate out past and future wholesale orders, then update the replenishment recommendations.

Monitor the "Sync" button in the bottom left of Inventory Planner to see when the re-computation completes.

Once the sync is finished, navigate to Wholesale > Wholesale orders in the left-hand menu to see the newly classified wholesale orders.

In Replenishment, if you click the “i” button next to any product and look at the Replenishment & forecast tab, you'll see the past wholesale orders are separated from past regular sales in the "Forecast sales" chart, as well as in the Edit forecast table at the bottom (if toggled to "Past Sales" in the bottom right of the screen).

If wholesale orders cannot be synced from the connected store, or if wholesale orders are not being created anywhere else, users can create planned wholesale orders directly in Inventory Planner. These planned wholesale orders are used to influence the forecast and replenishment recommendations.

To create wholesale orders manually, go to Wholesale > Wholesale orders.

Then click "+ New wholesale order" at the bottom of the page.

Create a new wholesale order by adding or creating the wholesale customer, setting the Expected date, and clicking the "+ Add variants" button to add products to the planned wholesale order.

As variants are added to the planned order, edit the quantity and wholesale price information as needed.

To plan recurring wholesale orders, click "Settings" on the top right-hand side, and set the "Repeat every [X] [days, months, weeks, years]" field.

Once the planned order is saved, the forecasted wholesale quantity will appear in addition to the forecasted regular sales in the Edit forecast screen and in the detailed view per variant. As with wholesale orders synced from another channel, past wholesale orders from the same customer are automatically separated from past regular sales so that forecasts are always based on regular sales.

To create planned wholesale orders in bulk, you can also import wholesale orders using a CSV file by going to Wholesale > Wholesale orders and clicking "Import".

Download the template, fill it in, and upload it. Click "Map columns" to move on to the next screen, and once your columns are mapped, import the file.

Learn more about importing data into Inventory Planner here.