Getting trade and emailed orders into Linnworks properly
Linnworks already handles your marketplace orders. We build the missing piece: a platform that reads emailed B2B purchase orders, applies your trade rules and creates them in Linnworks.
- Linnworks
- Microsoft 365
- Shopify
- OpenAI
For businesses that sell through marketplaces and also supply trade customers, Zestcode Automation builds a platform that reads emailed B2B purchase orders, checks them against your stock and trade pricing, and creates approved orders in Linnworks so they ship through the processes you already run. It sits beside Linnworks; it doesn’t replace any part of it.
What Linnworks already covers
We wouldn’t suggest rebuilding anything Linnworks does well. Its channel integrations pull in orders from marketplaces and web shops, its rules can route and tag those orders, and its shipping integrations print labels with a wide range of carriers. If every order you received came through a connected channel, you would probably have little use for us.
| Order source | Usually handled by | Where a bespoke layer helps |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon, eBay, Shopify and similar channels | Linnworks channel integrations | Rarely needed |
| Labels and carrier booking for channel orders | Linnworks shipping integrations | Rarely needed |
| Purchase orders emailed as PDF or Excel | Someone keying them in | Reading, checking and creating the order |
| Trade orders with account pricing or credit terms | Manual checks | Price and account checks before the order exists |
| Phone orders taken by the sales team | Manual entry | One queue with the same checks |
The orders that arrive outside a channel
Trade customers don’t place orders through Amazon. A garden centre buyer sends a spreadsheet, a hospitality group’s purchasing system generates a PDF, and a regular customer types six lines into an email on a Sunday night. Each of these has to be opened, understood and entered as a direct order by someone in the office, usually while the channel orders flow past on their own.
Our platform watches the trade order inbox and reads the email body and every attachment together, whether that’s a typed PDF, a scan, an Excel or CSV file or a Word document. Every field it extracts carries a confidence score out of 10, and anything below 7 is flagged. When a detail isn’t in the order, the field is left empty for your team rather than filled with a guess.
Which B2B rules are hard to set up in Linnworks?
Linnworks’ rules work on orders that already exist inside it. The checks that matter for trade business mostly need to happen before the order is created, and they often depend on information held somewhere else:
- Is this sender a known trade account, and which one?
- Does the price on the PO match the price agreed with that customer, rather than the retail price on your channels?
- Has this PO number already been received, perhaps as a forwarded copy?
- Is a minimum order value or a carton quantity met?
- Does the order need a second person to sign it off because of its value or the customer’s credit position?
- Should part of the order wait for stock rather than ship short?
Each of these becomes a visible warning in the review queue, next to the line it relates to. A person approves every trade order by default, and the order review page shows how that queue works in practice.
How an approved trade order joins the Linnworks flow
Once approved, the order is created in Linnworks with the customer’s PO number as the reference, against the right customer details and delivery address. From then on, Linnworks treats it like any other open order. Your existing pick, pack and label routine picks it up, so the warehouse has nothing new to learn.
We connect through the Linnworks API. The exact way a direct order is created (which source and subsource it carries, which stock location it draws from, which identifiers are stored) is confirmed with you during specification, because Linnworks setups differ a great deal from one business to the next.
Ownership, cost and running it
Everything we build for you belongs to your business. It runs on hosting registered to your company, nobody is charged per user, and after launch you decide whether you want a maintenance plan at all.
A trade order platform like this typically sits in the £8k–£12k ex VAT range and takes about six weeks to build and test on your real orders. Day to day, hosting and AI together usually cost less than £50 a month for a few hundred orders. We begin with a free discovery call, write up a specification, and then fix the price.
Common questions
Straight answers to what people ask us about this before a call.
Will this interfere with our marketplace orders in Linnworks?
No. The platform only handles orders that arrive outside your connected channels, such as emailed trade POs and phone orders. Channel orders keep flowing into Linnworks through its own integrations, and your existing rules, views and shipping setup are left exactly as they are.
Can trade orders use different prices from our channels?
Yes. Checking the PO price against the price agreed with that trade customer is one of the main reasons for the build. Where those prices live, whether in Linnworks, a separate price list or your accounts package, is something we establish during specification. Mismatches are shown to the reviewer.
Do we still print labels from Linnworks?
That’s your call. Most businesses already happy with Linnworks shipping keep it, and trade orders created by the platform simply join that flow. If pallet deliveries or a carrier you can’t book through Linnworks are part of the picture, we can look at a separate shipping stage.
What if a trade customer orders using their own part numbers?
Those lines are flagged rather than matched by guesswork. Your reviewer chooses the right SKU, and if a customer sends their own codes regularly we can store a mapping so that customer’s next order comes through already matched to your Linnworks stock items.
Is this an app from the Linnworks marketplace?
No. It’s a bespoke platform built for your business and owned by you, connecting to Linnworks through its API. We aren’t a Linnworks partner and don’t sell a packaged app. We build the workflow around how your trade orders actually arrive and the rules you apply to them.