Taking US wholesale orders from a UK warehouse: the order-entry checklist

US wholesale accounts can be excellent business for a UK seller — larger orders, repeat patterns, less price sensitivity than the domestic market. The order entry just needs to stop being improvised.

The checklist

Quote in dollars. A US purchasing manager comparing suppliers is comparing dollar numbers. If your US trade is a dedicated operation, set the whole POS to $ and every quote, confirmation and PDF is in dollars — see pricing in the currency you sell in. Worth knowing: this is a single team-wide setting, so it suits a US-facing operation, not a counter mixing sterling and dollar orders on the same till.

Get the tax setting right, once. Whether sales tax belongs on your US orders is a question for a US tax adviser and the relevant state department of revenue, not for the person answering the phone. The POS then carries one flat rate and label of your choosing — the setting’s own US example is $ / 0% / Tax / United States, the usual shape for exempt wholesale. It is not state-by-state automatic calculation, and does not try to be.

Default the country to the United States. With the default country set, every new order starts as a US order instead of a UK assumption someone has to remember to correct.

Same pipeline as every other order. The order should land in Linnworks alongside the domestic ones — one queue, one picking process, no export spreadsheet on someone’s desktop.

Repeat business is the prize

US accounts that reorder are where the margin is, which makes price memory and customer auto-fill matter even more across an ocean: the second order should take seconds, not a correspondence.

Trade Order POS’s Locale setting covers all of it in four fields — currency symbol, tax rate, tax label and default country — applied across the POS, confirmations, PDFs and quotes for the whole team. Find out more →

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.