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As the eWholesale Collective returned for its Leeds event, wholesalers and industry experts shared their advice on how the sector can improve and enhance the customer online experience
Photography: Roy Kilcullen
Three months on from the eWholesale Collective’s July gathering at London’s Museum of Brands, wholesale’s e-commerce experts reconvened at Leeds United Football Club for the second instalment. With the backdrop of the pristine, evergreen pitch, the event broached the same underlying question: how can wholesale e-commerce platforms be improved for the benefit of time-pressured retail and hospitality customers?
Following positive feedback from the London event, the morning session shared the latest data, insight and customer experience, followed by breakout sessions that discussed the reality from the depot floor and identified areas of friction.
SETTING THE SCENE
Nic Mynott, Lumina Intelligence’s Commercial Lead, shared the four fundamentals for e-commerce success: optimising the shopper journey; timing disruption to land at the right moment; adapting messaging to a B2B tone; and using display advertising effectively.
He revealed that retailer frustration with online ordering is on the increase, up 4% year on year, with the home page remaining the single biggest point of exit from wholesale sites. Tablets, rather than mobiles, are proving the most ‘sticky’ device, with the longest average session length and the highest basket retention, which may serve as a reminder that ordering often happens on shared, multi-staff devices rather than personal ones.
Stephanie Holland, Hush Research & Strategy Founder, then built her session around the three key tensions she sees as holding wholesale platforms back. The headline statistic drew a noticeable reaction in the room – across more than 200 interviews during store visits in the UK and Europe, not a single wholesale platform scored below 7 or above 8 out of 10. She also revealed that four out of the last five foodservice businesses interviewed had lost between 5% and 30% of profit in the past year, proving that every order, and every price, is being checked harder than ever on platforms that are rarely built with that scrutiny in mind.
Holland’s core message was distilled into one line: “don’t add disruption, add value”.
Real trust with a customer, she argued, comes from understanding their business well enough to know what not to offer them, which is a distinction most wholesale platforms still don’t make. She urged wholesalers to remember that the vast majority of orders are actually reorders, where time and ease are of the essence.
“Coming together with everyone across the industry is really beneficial. We discuss what challenges others are facing and share what we’re facing. We learn from each other how we’re adapting to meet the changing needs of customers”
Callum Atkinson, Category Manager, Unitas
THE ROLE OF AI
Sydney Bron, B2B E-commerce Specialist at Red Bull, chaired the AI panel session, discussing AI’s role in the path to purchase, welcoming delegate engagement to prompt experts’ insights. ProConnect’s Rob Mannion and Bharat Sharma, Apex Consulting, shared their insight regarding AI’s potential, including automated cart-building and WhatsApp-based menu suggestions, while Holland, offering a customer perspective, stated that AI automation that isn’t introduced carefully won’t save customers’ time, instead it adds yet another thing for an already-sceptical operator to check for errors.
The three sessions left wholesalers with a clear brief: fix friction before adding the latest bells and whistles, and treat any new technology, AI included, as something to test with customers before trusting it to work in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
For delegates, the reality is this is harder in practice than it sounds, proving that the true value of eWholesale Collective events lies in the discussion between individuals, sharing best practice and discovering the struggles they face are actually felt universally.
“Path to purchase is so important for wholesalers to get right because, ultimately, it’s about maximising sales. It’s about capitalising on what the customer wants and giving it to them at the right time. It’s about making their job, and ours, as simple as possible”
Kelly Clayton, Director of Purchasing, Forrest Fresh Foods
BALANCING FRICTIONS
When in breakout sessions, a key focus was on points of friction within the path to purchase itself. One wholesaler admitted to deliberately keeping a small amount of friction in their reorder journey, arguing that a smooth, seamless customer experience could result in the same basket value being repeated time after time, rather than the customer being open to expanding it further.
The group’s consensus was that most on-platform disruption, such as advertising banners, pop-ups and upsell pages, is simply advertising space dressed up as growth strategy and converted demand that would have existed anyway rather than creating new opportunities. Other delegates used their own experience as a cautionary tale: where pushing pre-checkout upsell pages from two to three triggered a spike in customer complaints rather than the sales expected.
The more promising approaches discussed were quieter, but more effective. One wholesaler suggested surfacing a customer’s last five order quantities directly next to the reorder button, so repeat purchases could be completed in just one click, and only nudging towards an alternative, subtly, when the usual product is out of stock. Another group returned more than once to an untested idea, recording how top sales representatives sell over the phone, then grouping the pattern and building a mocked-up digital journey rather than starting from a banner template. They viewed this as a low-risk, high-curiosity experiment that could be
a valuable test to run with customers to judge response.
Within all discussions, wholesalers shared frustration about internal buy-in and sign-off of the platform’s development. Many delegates had experienced leadership teams opting for the latest technology because competitors were using it, rather than relying on evidence that their customer base would benefit from the enhancement.
Often, without the data to argue against it, teams’ instincts are to keep adding more rather than less, which can risk adding complexity and perceived ‘added value’ when the reality is that customers want a simple, streamlined process, rather than additional functionality.
“Today has been amazing and made me realise I need to go back to my own business and look at how we can do things differently to make path to purchase spot on. Sometimes you need that wake-up call”
Chris Gregson, Commercial Manager, Harlech Foodservice
BEYOND THE CHECKOUT
Delegates also discussed how the ordering experience doesn’t start or end on the platform itself, aligning closely with Holland’s framing of the platform as only “the last three yards” of a much longer purchasing journey.
Cut-off times came up repeatedly as a shared pain point, particularly within foodservice, where guaranteeing Monday delivery might mean ordering by Friday
afternoon – a rule that regular customers routinely break. The identified fix isn’t complicated, as attendees voiced the need for clearer, better-timed warnings before the deadline hits, rather than after, yet it remains a challenge for many.
Much of this friction also linked back to what happens behind the scenes, referencing platforms that appear polished with modern-looking pages but actually sit on an ageing back-end system where flexibility on timings, substitution or reporting simply isn’t possible without a costly rebuild.
Beyond the practical fixes, several discussions centred on visibility, pushing on the unresolved elements of platform messaging: how to sell value on an unbranded ingredient with no obvious price hook, or how category-level insight, taken for granted in grocery, might be replicated in a sector where customer data is split across multiple wholesalers and/or suppliers.
One exchange questioned whether AI-built, auto-approved shopping carts, created entirely from purchase history, may be worth testing. Holland’s answer doubled as a summary of the day: “It hasn’t been tested yet and no one should assume the answer because what works will differ business to business. Test it, don’t guess it”.
“I’m really glad I came to this – it’s refreshing to know I’m not on my own and we’re all facing the same issues here. The event’s been fantastic; it’s given me a lot of food for thought”
Stephen McCarton, Head of Development, Rayburn Trading
FIXING THE FUNDAMENTALS
As in London, the key takeaway from the day was that fixing the basics must come before chasing the latest AI-powered innovation. The day’s discussions demonstrated that in practice, a seamless path to purchase is farless about a single fix and more a negotiation between commercial pressure and customer experience, tested with one small decision at a time, a friction point kept deliberately, a pop-up dialled back from three pages to two, or a cut-off-time warning added.
All of these alterations, delegates agreed, is really where the ‘7-to-8-out-of-10’ ceiling can be surpassed and the path to purchase can be truly perfected.
You can also read here about the London eWholesale Collective event – From Cart to Customer: exploring the path to purchase
ecommerce event eWholesale Collective Nic Mynott Stephanie Holland Sydney Bron video