What is a wholesale distributor?

Most physical goods you interact with day to day sat in a wholesaler's warehouse at some point. For example, when you go to the supermarket to buy milk, it was most likely delivered this morning from a wholesaler.

A wholesaler's priorities

• Wholesalers hold a lot of stock in a warehouse. Our customers typically hold $10M+ worth of stock. The main benefit of selling from a warehouse over drop-shipping is that their local customers get items a lot faster than if they were to purchase from suppliers directly (which can take weeks to get things delivered).
• Managing an efficient inventory is very difficult. Wholesalers are selling thousands of SKUs and they need to forecast how much will be sold before they make the sales. Today, this is a very manual and tedious process to review inventory line by line. Buyers at wholesale businesses are trading off two things: 1) buy too much stock and you overstock: you hold too much cash in inventory, and goods expire; 2) buy too little stock and you lose sales, customers will find other wholesalers with better lead time.
• Wholesalers are speaking to customers and suppliers all the time. Wholesalers sit at the node between suppliers and end buyers, and as a result a large part of their effort goes to communicating with them, usually via email. On the customer's side, they are often answering customer service queries (e.g. when is my order arriving?) and helping customers decide "which one should I buy?". On the supplier side, they are communicating with them to place the orders and making sure they get delivered on time.
• Wholesalers have a lot of domain knowledge about their products. Sales and customer service staff all have deep industry knowledge about the goods they sell, and they are able to help with customers' questions and select the right goods to sell.

How Whitespace is helping wholesale distributors

• We are building a visibility layer across their entire business. Wholesalers make decisions based on numbers, and they have a lot of them. Most businesses have been running for 20+ years, they have tons of historical data and they track everything. These data often sit in legacy ERPs, and disperse systems across CRMs (customer relationship management), WMS (warehouse management system), PIM (product information management). Whitespace connects to all of these systems, makes sense of the data with AI agents, and provides a single point of entry to do work on top of it.
• We are building the world's first agentic inventory management system. Many of our customers have begun to use Whitespace to manage their inventory end-to-end, supervising an AI agent that's making orders on 90%+ of the goods in their warehouse.
• We are building customer service agents. Many of the customers' questions are routine, e.g. where's my order, when is it arriving. Whitespace is helping wholesalers automate a lot of these queries. We see a world where this autonomous communication expands more upstream and downstream, where the whole supply chain operates with agent-to-agent communication.
• This is just the start. There is still so much more potential and so many more things to build, and we need your help.