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Trade counters · 6 May 2026 · 4 min read

Trade counter POS vs retail POS: why the difference costs you money

Plenty of wholesalers run their trade counter on software built for a high-street shop. It works — badly — and the cost hides in plain sight.

Different jobs, different tools

A retail till assumes anonymous customers paying full price, one transaction at a time. A trade counter assumes the opposite: named account customers, agreed pricing per account, part-payment and invoicing, delivery-to-site, and orders that must land in your back-office system, not a separate till roll.

Where the retail till leaks

Every gap gets bridged by a human. The rep looks up the trade price in a spreadsheet. The address gets retyped. The order gets re-keyed into Linnworks after the customer leaves. Each bridge is seconds per line and errors per week — and it compounds across every order, every day.

What trade-first looks like

Pick the customer and their pricing follows automatically. Scan or search live stock. Override a line when you need to. Submit, and the order is already in Linnworks open orders for the warehouse to pick. No bridges, no re-keying.

That is exactly what we built Trade Order POS to do — because we ran our own counter on the wrong tool for too long. From £29.99/mo with a 14-day free trial.

Related: the full trade counter software buyer's guide →

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