Use case
No new interface, no templates. Your team reviews Shopify draft orders instead of typing them. Corrections train it. This page is the buyer's view: what order entry software is, the five categories on the market, how to evaluate them, and where LevelOps fits.
Order entry software is the layer that turns a customer's order into a record in your system without a person retyping it. That is the whole job. Everything else a vendor puts in the brochure sits either side of it.
The reason the category exists is that B2B buyers do not check out. They send a purchase order, and they send it the way their own procurement process demands: a PDF from their ERP, a spreadsheet a buyer maintains by hand, a few lines in an email body, a scan of a signed form. Your catalogue is structured. Their document is not. Somebody has to bridge that, and for most wholesalers that somebody is a person on customer service with a Shopify tab open on one screen and a PDF on the other.
For a Shopify wholesaler, the practical definition narrows further. Good order entry software writes a Shopify draft order, matched to the right customer, priced from your catalogue rather than from the buyer's document, with a human approving before anything is committed. If it writes anywhere else, you have bought a second system of record and inherited a sync problem.
Before comparing products, price the thing you do today. This is the baseline every vendor is measured against, and it is more expensive than it looks.
Order entry is never someone's only job. It gets done in the gaps, which is why a 40 line order takes 10 minutes on a quiet morning and half a day during a peak week.
The buyer orders by their internal code or by a loose description. Your catalogue has neither. The clerk becomes a translation layer, and translation layers make mistakes.
When the price is copied from the buyer's document instead of pulled from your price list, you either ship at a stale price or spend the afternoon on a credit note.
Repetitive keying is the task people quit over. Each departure takes the accumulated knowledge of thirty customer formats with it, and training the replacement takes weeks.
A wrong SKU costs about $250 to unwind once you count the return shipping, the restock, the reissued order and the apology. The relationship cost is not in that number.
The honest version of the manual baseline is that it caps growth. New accounts get onboarded at the speed you can hire order entry clerks.
Every option on the market is one of these five. Knowing which category a vendor belongs to tells you more than the feature list does.
The order entry screen inside NetSuite, Business Central, Odoo, Katana or MRPeasy. Fast for a trained clerk and correct by construction, because it validates against your own master data.
Structured document exchange for the trading partners who mandate it. An EDI 850 arrives as data, so there is nothing to read and nothing to retype.
Generic extraction tools that read a document into fields. They give you structured text, and then you own everything that happens next.
Purpose built apps that read the inbound order and write a native Shopify draft order, matched and priced. LevelOps PDF to Order is one of these.
A pipeline your own team writes: extraction prompt, matching logic, Shopify API calls, error handling, retries, monitoring.
The same seven questions asked of each category. Nothing here is a knock on EDI or on ERP, they are simply built for different problems.
| Manual entry | ERP module | EDI | Standalone OCR | LevelOps | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads any PO format, no template | Yes, by hand | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Buyer changes nothing | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Matches loose descriptions to your SKUs | Yes, slowly | No | Not needed | No | Yes |
| Applies your Shopify price list | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Human approval step | Yes | Yes | Optional | N/A | Yes, always |
| Setup effort | None | Implementation project | Per partner mapping | Developer work | Under an hour |
| Cost to start | Salary | Licence plus services | Per partner fees | Per page plus build | Free for 5 orders, then $50 one time or $100 to $250 a month |
Ask these in a demo, with one of your own worst purchase orders on the screen. The answers separate the categories faster than any feature grid.
Same order, same customer, same inbox. What changes is who does the typing.
Forward the email to your LevelOps address, or upload the file inside Shopify. PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, a scan, or just text in the message body. Your buyer changes nothing and never learns a portal.
Line items, quantities, PO number and ship-to are pulled out. Each line is matched to your Shopify catalogue, including when the buyer uses their own part number or a loose description. Pricing comes from your price list for that account, never from the document.
A Shopify draft order appears with the source file attached and anything uncertain flagged. Your reviewer confirms, adjusts or rejects. Verifying is faster than typing, which is the entire economic argument.
Nothing is created or sent without a human approving it. That is a design decision, not a plan limitation.
LevelOps is the fourth category: a Shopify native order entry app. It fits when orders arrive as documents from buyers who will not change how they order, and when Shopify is where those orders need to end up. That covers the majority of wholesale intake for merchants on Shopify, including Shopify B2B catalogues and company specific price lists.
It is not an EDI gateway. If a large retailer mandates an EDI 850, use an EDI provider for that lane and let LevelOps handle the long tail of accounts who email PDFs. The two coexist cleanly because they touch different channels.
It is not an order management system either. It does not own allocation, credit control or returns. Once the draft order exists, Shopify, Shopify Flow and your ERP or accounting integration do their normal jobs. And it does not take the phone order out of your hands: a spoken order still needs a person, which is why the honest number is that six of the seven common B2B intake channels are automatable, not all seven.
Reviews and interviews from wholesalers running order entry through LevelOps.
An absolute timesaver. We have been manually entering B2B orders into Shopify for 6 years and I am convinced that I would be 3 years ahead if I found this app sooner. It is literally reading my PDF and uploading a 100+ item order in under 4 minutes. This just made us 10x more efficient.
Draft orders get entered by magic. Even when the PO contains a vague description and no SKU, this app can still match it. The AI is that good.
About 60% of our orders come to us as PDFs and other file types attached to emails. Before adopting LevelOps, our team spent considerable time manually processing orders by moving information from disparate customer files into Shopify.
Amazing team and product. Will save countless hours manually entering emailed B2B orders. Highly recommend to anybody selling wholesale.
Order entry software should cost less than the hours it removes. Start on your first 5 orders free and check the maths on your own files.
Free
Try it on your own order files before you pay anything.
$50one time
A block of credits for seasonal or occasional order volume.
$100/month
For a desk handling a steady trickle of emailed orders. $960 a year saves 20 percent.
$250/month
For teams where inbound orders are a daily job. $2,400 a year saves 20 percent.
Above 100 orders a month we quote, rather than publish a price. Prices are the live Shopify App Store plans and are billed by Shopify.
Order entry software is the layer that gets a customer's order into your system of record without a person retyping it. It captures the order from wherever it arrives, resolves the buyer and the line items against your own catalogue, applies your pricing, and writes the order into the system your team already works in. On Shopify that system of record is the order or draft order object, so good order entry software writes there rather than into a separate database.
Order entry is the intake step: getting the order in, correctly, once. Order management is everything after that: allocation, credit and terms, partial shipments, status, returns and reporting. A lot of vendors sell both under one name. If your bottleneck is people typing orders, you need entry. If your bottleneck is visibility after the order exists, you need management.
Usually yes. An ERP order entry module is a fast screen for a trained clerk, but it still assumes a human is reading the customer's document and typing what they see. The ERP does not open the PDF for you. Order entry automation sits upstream of the ERP screen and removes the typing, then hands the finished order to the ERP or to Shopify.
Five. ERP and MRP order entry modules, EDI and integration middleware, standalone OCR and document capture tools, Shopify order entry apps like LevelOps PDF to Order, and custom builds on a large language model API. Each solves a different slice, and most wholesalers end up running two of them together.
Not with LevelOps. Orders land as Shopify draft orders in the admin your team already uses every day. There is no separate order entry console to train people on, which is the reason adoption tends to be immediate rather than a rollout project.
No. Template based tools break the first time a buyer moves a column or changes a header, and every buyer eventually does. LevelOps reads the document as a document, so a new customer format works on the first try without anyone building a map for it.
It flags the line instead of guessing. The draft order still gets created, with the unresolved line marked for a person to confirm, and the source file attached so the reviewer can check against the original without hunting through the inbox.
When a reviewer corrects a match, that correction becomes part of what the system knows about your catalogue and your buyers' naming habits. A customer who has always called a product by their own part number stops being a problem after the first order.
LevelOps starts free: your first 5 successful orders cost nothing and never expire. After that it is $50 one time for 15 orders on Pay as You Go, $100 a month for 33 orders on Starter, or $250 a month for up to 100 orders on Growth, with 20 percent off annual billing. Above 100 orders a month we quote. That lets you price the saving against your own order files before committing.
Install from the Shopify App Store, wait 2 to 5 minutes for the catalogue to sync, and forward a real order. Most teams are processing live orders in their first week without a data project or a configuration phase.
Same problem space, deliberately different questions.
The product view: how the app reads a PO and builds the draft order.
The channel view: seven ways wholesale orders arrive and what to do about each.
The operating model: roles, approvals, terms, price lists and the metrics to watch.
The buy side document, automated end to end.
The same document seen from the seller's side, with acknowledgements.
The direct comparison against the baseline you run today.
A longer evaluation framework with scoring criteria.
Send us the file your team dreads and we will show you the draft order it produces. If it cannot read it, we will tell you that instead of selling you something.
your first 5 orders free. free allowance of 5 orders. No credit card required.
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