A wholesaler's tools, and the gap between them
A trading business usually runs on an ERP or order management system for stock, orders and invoices, an accounting package, sometimes a CRM, and a lot of spreadsheets. Supplier price lists, meanwhile, arrive by e-mail and WhatsApp, in every format, every week. They end up in a folder, in an inbox, and in the buyer's head.
The ERP knows the price you paid. It does not know the offers you did not take, nor the ones that land on a phone every week. Yet that is where the next negotiation is prepared: in what one supplier offered three months ago, and in what another offers today.
What Merconto does
- It reads price lists as they come: Excel, CSV, or a message pasted from WhatsApp or an e-mail. Nothing to impose on your suppliers.
- It keeps every offer dated, supplier by supplier, and matches references from one supplier to the next.
- It works out the landed cost of every line, with your exchange rates, fees and freight classes, and gives a verdict per line against the public price, read automatically on Pro and Business, or entered by hand.
- It flags anomalies: missing currency, wrong barcode, copied price, sales restriction… never correcting anything in silence.
- It shows what moved: increases, decreases, dropped references, and who sells the same reference for less.
- It prepares the negotiation: the amount at stake per unit, an e-mail draft to copy, a PDF, and a monthly report when you ask.
- It matches your customers' requests against your catalogue: in your catalogue, seen in an earlier offer, or at no supplier.
- Its agent answers with your own numbers, and proposes every change as a card, done only when you confirm.
What Merconto does not do
- No stock, no orders, no invoicing: all that stays in your ERP. Merconto adds to your tools, it replaces none of them; the supplier view exports to Excel.
- It never contacts your suppliers, and sends nothing to anyone without your click.
- It does not keep your files: every file is read, then deleted; only the lines read remain, in your workspace, never shared.
- It deletes nothing: what you remove waits to be restored, in one click.
Who it is for
For trading companies, wholesalers and B2B distributors who buy from several suppliers, receive price lists regularly, often in several currencies, and sell on to resellers. Merconto was built on consumer electronics price lists, audio, storage, accessories: its freight classes and checks come from there. Any product sold by reference and barcode reads in it, and the calculation rules are set in your workspace.
| Plan | For | A month, excl. VAT |
|---|---|---|
| Essentiel | one buyer and a handful of suppliers: 10 uploads, 1 user, agent | €49.99 |
| Pro | a buying team: 30 uploads, 3 users, public prices | €99.99 |
| Business | a larger team: 100 uploads, 10 users | €149.99 |
| Enterprise | beyond that, with your price lists onboarded | on quote |
Every trial lasts seven days, with no card, and the Business features. The details are on the Pricing page.
How to choose buying-side software
Whatever the tool, five questions settle it quickly:
- Does it read your lists as they arrive? A tool that imposes a file template on your suppliers will not be used: they will not fill it in.
- Does every figure trace back to its source? The file, the row, the rate applied. A figure you cannot check is no use in a negotiation.
- Are the calculation rules yours? Exchange rates, freight, duty, margin: adjustable, and visible line by line.
- Where does your data go? Hosting, file retention, sharing. At Merconto: application and database in Frankfurt, files deleted after reading, nothing shared.
- Can you try it on your own lists? A demo on hand-picked data says nothing about your files.