Resources
Plain definitions for the terms that come up when you automate B2B order intake.
01
The step where an order that exists as a document becomes an order that exists in your system. It sits before order management, and it is the part most wholesale stacks never automated.
02
An order created in Shopify that is not yet finalised. It can be reviewed, edited and sent for payment, which makes it the natural landing place for an order a machine read and a human should approve.
03
The document a buyer sends a seller to request goods. In wholesale it usually arrives as a PDF, a spreadsheet or text in an email body, in whatever layout the buyer's own system produces.
04
Electronic Data Interchange, a structured document standard used mainly by large retailers who mandate it. It works well for the partners it covers and is rarely worth onboarding for small accounts.
05
In Shopify, a price list attached to a company so that account sees the prices it negotiated. It is what makes contract pricing a system rule rather than something a person has to remember.
06
Resolving a line on a customer document to a product in your catalog. Hard when the customer wrote their own part number or a loose description rather than your SKU.
07
Stock keeping unit, your internal identifier for a sellable item. Customers frequently order without it, which is why description based matching matters more than it sounds.
08
A design where the system proposes and a person approves. Here it means every order lands as a draft with the source file attached, so nothing ships on the model's confidence alone.
09
Optical character recognition, turning an image of text into text. Necessary for scans, but on its own it does not tell you which product a line refers to or what that account should pay.
10
Extraction that maps fields by position for a known layout. Fast when the layout never changes, and the reason those projects run for months and break when a supplier redesigns a cover sheet.
11
The full cycle from receiving an order to being paid for it. Time lost at intake delays everything downstream, which is why an order sitting in an inbox is a cash problem, not just an admin one.
12
The many smaller customers who together represent real revenue but individually never justify an integration project. They are the accounts that keep emailing.
FAQ
Because the step has no owner in most stacks. Order management, ERP and accounting all assume the order is already in the system. The terms here describe what happens before that: how a document becomes a record, and who checks it.
Intake is the step where an order that exists as a document becomes an order that exists in your system. Management is everything after it: allocation, picking, fulfilment, invoicing. Most wholesale stacks automated the second and left the first to a person and an inbox.
No. OCR turns an image of text into text. It does not tell you which product a line refers to or what that account should pay. Matching each line to your catalog and applying the right price list is the part that decides whether the order is usable.
They solve different problems. EDI works well for the large retail partners who mandate it. It is rarely worth onboarding for the long tail of smaller accounts, and those are the accounts that keep emailing.
Every order lands in Shopify as a draft with the source file attached. A person reviews and approves it before anything is final, so nothing ships on the model's confidence alone.
The how it works page walks the same vocabulary through one order, from the email arriving to the draft order a person approves.
Book a short demo. Bring a real purchase order and we will run it live, so you judge the match and the pricing on your own data.
