There’s a tension sitting at the heart of almost every wholesale brand in the UK.
It doesn’t get discussed at trade shows. It rarely makes it into industry publications. But if you run a brand that sells through a reseller network, you feel it every single day.
It goes something like this.
Your marketing is working. Traffic to your website is up. Customers are finding you, researching your products, and arriving at your site ready to buy. And then — nothing. Because you can’t sell direct without upsetting the retailers who’ve stocked your brand for years.
So you do what most brands do. You point them at a stockist finder. You hope they follow through. You lose the sale, the data, and any chance of ever marketing to that customer again.
Meanwhile, somewhere across the country, a competitor retargeting ad is already chasing them down.
The Ecommerce Trap
For years, wholesale brands avoided ecommerce entirely. The logic was simple — if we sell direct, our retailers stop stocking us. And without our retailers, we lose the shelf presence, the local expertise, and the relationships that built this business in the first place.
So they held back. While DTC brands grew, wholesale brands watched from the sidelines, quietly losing customers to brands who had no such reservations.
Then something changed. Consumers started going directly to brand websites first. Not to buy — just to research, to verify, to decide. And brands realised that even if they didn’t want to sell direct, they needed to show up online. They needed a website worth visiting. They needed ecommerce capability.
But the moment they launched it, the tension got worse. Now retailers weren’t just worried about the future — they could see the brand selling direct right now. Relationships started to fray. Stocking decisions became more cautious. The very thing brands built to grow their business was quietly damaging it.
The Data Nobody Captures
Here’s what makes this problem even more painful.
Every time a customer visits a brand website and gets redirected to a stockist, that customer disappears. The brand has no idea whether they bought, where they bought, or whether they ever came back. The marketing spend that drove them there is impossible to attribute. The demand that exists is invisible.
And the retailers? They’re making stocking decisions based on gut feel and historical sales data. They don’t know what customers are searching for on the brand’s website. They don’t know which sizes are being requested. They don’t know which products are generating demand that nobody is capturing.
There is demand. There is stock. They are simply not connected.
The Moment of Intent
The window between a customer deciding they want something and actually buying it is incredibly short.
The moment they leave your site without purchasing, the internet works against you. Cookies fire. Algorithms kick in. Competitor retargeting ads begin appearing in their feed, on their social media, across every website they visit. What started as your customer becomes someone else’s sale — often within minutes.
This is why capturing demand at the point of intent isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential. Every redirect to a stockist finder is a gamble. And the odds get worse every year as retargeting becomes more sophisticated.
There Is a Third Option
Most brands think they have two choices. Sell direct and damage retailer relationships. Or don’t sell direct and leave money on the table.
Relay Orders is the third option.
It’s an order routing platform that sits between a brand’s website and their reseller network. When a customer places an order on the brand’s site, Relay Orders broadcasts that order to the brand’s resellers in real time. The first reseller to confirm they have the stock claims the order and fulfils it from their own inventory.
The brand captures the sale at the point of intent. The brand retains the customer data and the relationship. The reseller fulfils the order and earns the margin. Nobody loses.
For resellers, this changes everything. Instead of competing against the brand’s website, they’re benefiting from it. Every pound the brand spends on marketing potentially drives an order to their door. Stocking more products, broader size ranges and faster response times all increase their chance of winning fulfilment. The incentive to hold deeper stock has never been clearer.
For brands, the channel conflict disappears. They can invest in ecommerce, drive traffic, build their online presence — and know that every sale completed through their website strengthens their retailer relationships rather than damaging them.
Built for the Brands That Built Britain
Relay Orders was built for wholesale-first brands. The cycling brands whose products sit in every independent bike shop. The equestrian brands stocked by every riding centre. The tool manufacturers whose products fill the shelves of every trade counter in the country.
These are brands with heritage, with loyal retailer networks, and with customers who actively seek them out. They deserve an ecommerce solution that respects those relationships rather than destroying them.
We’re currently looking for founding brands to pilot Relay Orders completely free for six months. If you run a wholesale brand and you’ve ever felt the tension between growing online and protecting your retailer relationships — we’d love to talk.
The demand is already there. Relay Orders makes sure it doesn’t go to waste.