What Trade Counter does

One workflow

There is exactly one: the wholesale order desk. It is a single continuing conversation with a retailer — price and availability, then a purchase order, then a confirmation, then “where is it”, then a copy of the invoice, then the follow-up. The conversation is what completes, not a file: Trade Counter is not a purchase-order-to-draft-order converter, and a thread it handles ends with the retailer having an answer.

Of that arc, the last two steps are not yet the desk’s. A message asking for a copy of an invoice is classified honestly and handed to a person; nothing produces the invoice.

Who it is for

• You sell wholesale to retailers
• Shopify B2B, or Zoho Inventory + Books, with companies and price lists set up
• Orders arrive on a shared address

If your retailers order through a portal rather than by email, this has nothing to do. The precondition is the one worth checking first: your system of record has to have companies and price lists set up, because every price the desk quotes comes from that system’s own calculation for that purchasing company.

Your system of record

Two are accepted, and one workspace uses one of them, fixed by the first connection. Shopify B2B is available today — the public app is in App Store review, and installs open when Shopify approves it. Zoho Inventory + Books is a private beta, switched on per workspace by us; the Japanese editions are the ones verified end to end so far, and if that is your setup, write to me.

Prices come from your own system’s calculation for the purchasing company — their price list, their quantity rules, in their currency — never from a copy we keep and never inferred from a past order. On Shopify that calculation is a read. On Zoho there is no such read, so the desk creates a draft Estimate or Sales Order to obtain the authoritative total and deletes it again, proving it gone; you are told that before you connect, and what you see in your own organisation is a consumed document number and a line in the activity log. Zoho is never asked to email anyone. If a company location cannot be priced, that becomes an exception naming the reason rather than a number nobody can account for.

Your mailbox

You forward your wholesale address to an intake address minted for your workspace. Nothing is installed on the mailbox, and nothing in it is moved, labelled or deleted. Replies go from your own domain, which is what the DNS records in Setup are for.

What it does with a message

Every message is put into one class, and the classes are a closed set. Four are the desk’s work: quote, availability, order and status. Four more are handled without being work: an acknowledgement closes quietly, a dispute and a change request go straight to a person, and anything else that is still retailer mail is handed to a person as a non-routine message, with nothing prepared. Mail that is not a retailer’s at all becomes Other mail — visible, never an exception, never answered.

How far it is allowed to go

Watch is where every class starts. It interprets the message, resolves it against your records and issues a predicted receipt: what it would have sent, and the total it would have sent. It sends nothing and finalizes nothing; on Shopify it writes nothing at all, and on Zoho it creates the draft it needs to read your own total and deletes it again. You can press “Run this one” on any prediction, which is counted as your action and still waits out its window.

Bounded Run is per class, and it runs inside the limits you ratified. Licensed Run — a third mode with looser limits, unlocked by a class’s own adjudicated evidence — is not available yet. How the limits and the cancel window work.

It has run

On 31 August a retailer’s email came in, was priced against live Shopify records at 552.24 USD, waited out its hold, and the reply went out. On 3 September the same loop ran against a real Zoho organisation and placed a real Sales Order on its own totals — on a test organisation, so that one answered nobody.

Both of those are worth reading precisely. In the Shopify run a person chose between two possible delivery locations before the quote went out — the desk stopped and asked, which is the product working rather than a caveat. The Zoho run was on a test organisation whose buyer address is a placeholder, so the reply was rendered and keyed by the real executor and went to nobody.

What it costs

Per workspace, per month, in USD. A job counts when the desk resolved it end to end — it answered, or it created the order, and nothing came back to you. Anything it handed back does not count, and neither does anything it only predicted in Watch. The working-day figures divide the allowance by 21, the working days in an average month; they are there to size the plan, not to cap a day.

There is a 14-day trial. Billing runs through Shopify App Pricing, on your existing Shopify invoice; the Zoho private beta has no Shopify subscription to charge against and is not billed through it.

Somebody will try to talk it into something

A retailer’s email is untrusted text, and text can carry instructions. So the part that reads a message can neither send nor write — that is structural, not a setting. The gate that attacks it is run before every release: 59 adversarial cases and 10 ordinary ones, run once against each of the 2 systems of record. None of the adversarial cases got what it asked for, and all 10 ordinary messages were handled normally — the gate fails if either half stops being true. It is our own gate, run against a stand-in for a store, and it is a count of a fixed set of cases rather than a rate. What was tried, and what the numbers do not say.