The spreadsheet that was running a wholesale business.

Every holiday season, Fiore Foods — a Canadian food distributor — sent their wholesale buyers an Excel file. Buyers filled in quantities, emailed it back. Someone at Fiore opened the file, added up the numbers, then manually entered each order into QuickBooks to create the sales record.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

As the business grew, so did the volume. More buyers. More SKUs. More emails. More chances for a number to be entered wrong, a file to get lost, a season to become a bottleneck instead of an opportunity.

The request that came to us was simple: make this less painful. We heard something else: this operation is ready to scale — if the infrastructure lets it.

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We didn’t build a website. We built a financial pipeline.

The solution wasn’t a generic e-commerce store. Wholesale B2B has its own logic — inventory validation rules, buyer-specific pricing, order thresholds — that off-the-shelf platforms don’t handle well. We needed something purpose-built.

The architecture:

The frontend was developed in Astro and deployed on Vercel — fast, secure, and invisible to search engines by design. Wholesale buyers log in, browse the seasonal catalog, and submit their pre-orders directly through the portal. No spreadsheets. No email attachments.

When an order is submitted, Make.com takes over. A webhook captures the order in real time and routes it to QuickBooks Online. If the buyer already exists in the system, the Sales Order is created under their profile. If they’re new, a draft contact is generated automatically. Both Fiore and the buyer receive a confirmation email with the full order details — generated and sent without anyone touching a keyboard.

Fiore’s team retains final control: they review weights and shipping costs before issuing the invoice. The automation handles everything else.

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The numbers tell the rest.