Trade counter software for Linnworks: an honest buyer’s guide
If you take trade orders at a counter, over the phone or out on the road and you run on Linnworks, most "POS" software is built for the wrong job. Here's how to tell what actually fits.
Retail till vs trade counter — they're not the same
Most point-of-sale software is designed for a high-street shop: one-off customers, card taps, a cash drawer. A trade counter is a different animal — named account customers, agreed pricing per customer, delivery-to-site, orders that need to land in your existing system rather than a separate till. If a tool can't do account pricing and can't write the order back into Linnworks, it's a retail till wearing a hi-vis.
The questions that matter
- Does it write orders straight into Linnworks? Not a CSV export — a real order in your open-orders list, so the warehouse picks it like any other.
- Does it know your customers? Good trade software builds a customer database from your order history, so the rep isn't retyping addresses.
- Can it price per customer? Trade accounts don't pay retail. You need per-line overrides at minimum, tier pricing ideally.
- Does it work on a tablet at the counter? And with a USB barcode scanner, if you scan.
- What does it cost, honestly? Watch for per-seat pricing that balloons, or "call us" pricing that means enterprise money.
How we approached it
We built Trade Order POS for our own Linnworks warehouse because nothing on the market answered those five questions. It scans, it auto-fills customers from three years of Linnworks history, it does per-line and tier pricing, it runs on a tablet, and it pushes the order straight into Linnworks. £29.99/mo for a single user, £79.99/mo for a five-seat team. 14-day free trial, no card to start.
Whether you pick ours or someone else's, run the five questions past it first. Most trade counters have been sold a retail till at some point — don't be one of them.
Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.