The Distributor's Guide to Ecommerce: How to Grow Through Ecommerce Without Selling Direct

Will the next 20 years of ecommerce go through your warehouse, or around it?

Wholesale distribution has gone flat. US manufacturing and wholesale sales grew just 1.8% from 2022 through 2025, combined, well behind inflation. Meanwhile, the growth moved online, and your vendors are being pulled there with it. Brands are learning to sell direct, and a new wave of online sellers needs inventory exactly like yours.

The Distributor's Guide to Ecommerce shows distribution leaders how to capture that growth without becoming a retailer. Online sellers and brands become wholesale customers: you sell them product, ship their orders from the warehouse you already run, and never become the seller the consumer buys from.

Written for owners, CEOs and the sales, operations and finance leaders of wholesale distributors, this plain-talk playbook covers:

• Your new customers: online retailers, marketplace sellers, and the brands you already buy from
• Turning vendors into customers: fulfilling brands' direct orders instead of watching them build around you
• Six commercial decisions to make before the first order ships: channel conflict, pricing, fees, customers, credit and protecting yourself
• Drop-ship pricing: working back from the price a product actually sells for online
• Your pick, pack and ship fee: building it from cost and handling volume discounts with progressive tiers
• The business case: what it costs, what each order earns, and the numbers your CFO will ask for
• What changes in the warehouse: shipping single orders while keeping the bulk pick you already run
• Running the program: vetting sellers, setting service levels, handling exceptions and planning for peaks

It also includes a pricing worksheet, a business-case worksheet, a seller-vetting checklist, a service-level checklist and a ten-minute readiness scorecard for your leadership team.

About the author: Michael Anderson is CEO and co-founder of Etail Solutions. He has spent more than 25 years in ERP and ecommerce software, helping brands, distributors, 3PLs and online sellers connect their inventory, orders and fulfillment.