Comparison

Wholesale ordering software for coffee roasters.

Eight ways roasters take wholesale orders, from a spreadsheet to a roasting platform, with what each one costs and where each one stops. We make one of them, and we say so on every row.

The decisions that actually differ

Checked against each vendor's own pricing page, feature page or help centre on 24 September 2026. Sources are listed at the bottom, and if we have something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

  effizient RoasterTools Shopify B2B Shopify appsSparkLayer, Wholesale Gorilla Flexnet BlueCart
Buyer ordering portal Yes, on your own subdomain Yes Yes, inside your store Yes, inside your store In beta: “Storefront is currently available in Beta!” Yes, plus a buyer app
A different price per café Yes, per location, with dated overrides Yes Up to 3 catalogs, assigned by market. Unlimited catalogs, and assigning one to a company or location, need Plus Yes, from the entry plan Yes Yes
Phone and email orders entered by your team Yes, in the same list as portal orders Yes Draft orders in admin Yes Yes Yes, plus a rep app
The week laid out by delivery day Yes, a planning board per delivery day Production days with a delivery offset No No Cutoffs and lead times Delivery routes: “set routes and schedules by driver”
Invoices into QuickBooks or Xero Yes, one invoice per fulfilled order Yes. Xero is a $29/mo add-on, listed as “coming soon”; QuickBooks Desktop $99/mo Through a third-party connector SparkLayer, on its two top plans. Wholesale Gorilla lists no accounting integration QuickBooks, Xero, Business Central, Sage Intacct Not published
When an order changes after it was invoiced Yes. It updates, and stops if someone edited it in QuickBooks No: “Syncing the order again will not update an invoice that already exists in your accounting platform.” Not published SparkLayer: “Invoice creation is one-way”, with payment status syncing back Not published Not published
Orders that repeat on a schedule No. Reorder and “your usual” presets, but nothing places an order for you In beta, from the $499 plan up Not offered Not published Not published Yes: “Buyers can set up standing orders for products they need on a recurring basis”
Collecting the money Online, by bank transfer or card, through your own Stripe account RoasterPay: cards “3.0% + $0.30/ea”, bank “1% + $0.25, ($20 max/ transaction)”, plus a 0.5% application fee on the two lowest plans Vaulted cards and ACH (US) Shopify's payment methods Stripe, Square and PayPal Their own payments product
Telling you what to roast Demand by week, broken down through recipes. No roast plan Yes, the strongest here No No Yes, with a bill of materials No
Published starting price From $153 a month, by wholesale locations $99, $199, $499, $999 or $2,300 a month, by pounds roasted Included in your Shopify plan. Plus “Starts at $2,300 USD/mo” Free to $299 by monthly order count, Enterprise “From $499”. Wholesale Gorilla $34.95 to $149.95 “Pricing starts at $405 USD per month”, by pounds roasted Not published: demo only

Our own price ladder lives on the pricing section rather than here, so there is only one place for it to go out of date.

What roasters actually choose between

Almost nobody weighs all of these at once. Which shortlist you are on depends on where your orders come from today, and how many accounts are on the other end.

Keeping it by hand: email, text and your accounting

Orders arrive however the café wants to send them, someone types them up, and the invoice is written in QuickBooks or Xero. It costs nothing, nothing breaks, and the accounting is already the book of record.

Stay here if you have a handful of accounts, or your orders are steady enough that nobody is chasing them. Plenty of roasters run twenty accounts this way without strain.

It stops working when the person doing it becomes the only person who knows what was agreed: which café is on which price, who ordered late, what was promised on the phone. That is usually somewhere past thirty or forty accounts, and it shows up as errors rather than as hours.

Shopify B2B, the one built into the store you already have

If you sell coffee online, you are already paying for Shopify, and its B2B features cost nothing extra. Companies, locations, buyer logins, net terms and a wholesale storefront inside the theme you already run.

Pick it if retail is the bigger half of your business, your wholesale prices fall into a few tiers rather than one per café, and your accounts are shipped rather than delivered on a route.

A Shopify wholesale app

SparkLayer, Wholesale Gorilla and the others add wholesale pricing and ordering to the store you already run, usually inside your existing theme.

Pick one if Shopify's own B2B nearly fits and you need one thing it doesn't do. They are the cheapest way to get per-customer prices on a storefront.

RoasterTools, the roaster-native incumbent

Built for coffee since 2015: a wholesale portal, roast planning that tells you how much to roast and what to blend, green inventory, and payments.

Pick it if the roast plan is the thing you need software for. Nothing else on this page turns next week's orders into a production day as directly.

Cropster, for the roast itself

The category leader for roast profiling, green inventory and quality control, with an ordering and production layer on top.

Pick it if roast profiles and green traceability are the point. It is not competing for your order desk, and a roaster can reasonably run Cropster alongside anything else here.

BlueCart, if you run like a distributor

Wholesale ordering for food and beverage suppliers: a buyer app, reps in the field, delivery routes and recurring orders.

Pick it if your week looks like routes and standing deliveries more than it looks like roasting, and your buyers would use an app.

effizient, the one we make

Wholesale ordering with the books attached. Accounts order from their own portal at their own prices, phone and email orders are entered in the same list, the week lays out by delivery day, and each fulfilled order becomes an invoice in QuickBooks or Xero that keeps matching the order after it changes.

Pick it if your accounts have outgrown manual order taking, your prices differ per café, and your accounting is where the arguments happen. We set it up and bring your order history across, and there is no minimum term.

Where effizient is the wrong answer

Four cases where one of the others is simply the better buy, and we would rather say so here than in the second demo.

  • You want roast profiling or green traceability. That is Cropster, and we do not compete with it. effizient stops before the roast on purpose.
  • You sell only direct to consumers. Nothing here helps. Shopify already does that job.
  • You want one system for manufacturing, purchasing and stock. Katana goes deeper into that than we do.
  • Your accounts order the same thing every week and you want that placed automatically. We do not do standing orders. BlueCart does, and RoasterTools has them in beta on its higher plans.
  • You want the software to find you new accounts. A marketplace like Faire does that. We work with the accounts you already have.

How this was checked

Every figure and quotation comes from the vendor's own pricing page, feature page, help centre, changelog or app-store listing, read on 24 September 2026. No review sites, no listicles, no summaries. Where a vendor publishes nothing on a point, the table says so instead of guessing, and where a claim reflects badly on a competitor, it is their own wording rather than ours.

Software changes weekly and we will not always notice first. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it, including when the correction is in a competitor's favour.

Sources

Still not sure which of these you need?

Twenty minutes on how your wholesale runs today: where the orders come from, what your team retypes, and what your books argue with. If one of the others is the better fit, we will say so.

Book a 20-minute call See how effizient works