How Footwear Brands Can Automate Their B2B Operations

There are so many benefits your footwear brand can get from automating your B2B operations. 

Whether that’s the obvious time saving that comes from eliminating manual processes such as emailing purchase orders, manually updating inventory, chasing retailers for reorders, or quality of life improvements from being able to offload a lot of mental load, there are plenty of reasons why you want to automate your B2B business. 

You’ll become more efficient at scaling your brand, you will see fewer errors, and you’ll be able to devote more time to building and maintaining your retailer relationships. 

So let’s take a deeper dive into how automations will help you and how solutions like RepSpark are built to support your wholesale operations. 

Why Automate B2B Operations?

The easiest way to explain why you want to automate your B2B operations is by going over the pain points that automations help resolve: 

• Reducing manual errors and back-and-forth interactions: Mistakes in sizing, color availability, pricing, or inventory lead to chargebacks, cancellations, and bad retailer experiences.
• Increasing order frequency and revenue: Easier reorders and at-once restocking means less friction, which encourages retailers to place orders more often.
• Better demand forecasting and production planning: Especially in footwear, with many SKUs, seasonal trends, and size/color variations, knowing what will sell helps avoid over-production or stockouts.
• Scalability and expansion: As brands grow into new geographies, add more SKUs, or increase their retailer base, manual systems become bottlenecks. Automation enables scaling without needing to grow your headcount.
• Improved retailer experience and trust: Retailers want to see live stock, order easily, have accurate catalogs, and have consistent pricing. 

And we’re not just talking about hypothethicals, these are just two brands in footwear that we’ve already helped. 

• NAOT increased their independent retailer base significantly by enabling self-serve ordering and live inventory via RepSpark.
• OluKai used microsites for events, special order workflows or trunk shows, making such sales more profitable and reducing excess inventory burdens.

Steps to Implement Automation Successfully

There are best practices when it comes to aligning your teams, processes, and technology. This list could easily take up a whole blog on its own, but here let’s break it down into seven easily digestible steps. 

Step 1: Audit current workflows
Identify where manual work is occurring: inventory updates, order entry, reordering, forecasting, returns. Map out time sinks, error hotspots.

Step 2: Define automation priorities
Which processes will give you the biggest ROI (error reduction, time saved, sales increased)? It might be inventory visibility first, or order processing, depending on where the bottleneck is.

Step 3: Choose the right platform / tools
Evaluate features like ERPs (you want your wholesale platform to easily integrate), real-time inventory, reordering, self-serve ordering, custom catalogs, microsites, etc. RepSpark is one example of a platform built specifically for footwear, with many of these features.

Step 4: Get buy-in and cross-department alignment
Sales, operations, supply chain, finance all need to be involved. Rules (e.g. pricing, minimum order quantities) must be consistent across systems.

Step 5: Determine data cleanliness and standards
Automations fail if master data (SKUs, product attributes, size/color definitions, inventory) is messy. Ensure data governance, unique SKUs, consistent size scales, etc.

Step 6: Phased rollout and testing
Start small (e.g. one region, one retailer group or product line) to test integrations, workflows, and catch issues. Then scale.

Step 7: Monitor KPIs and iterate
Use dashboards to stay on top of metrics such as: order error rate, order processing time, order frequency, stockouts, retailer satisfaction, and revenue per retailer.

How RepSpark Can Automate Your Wholesale Brand

Because RepSpark is tailored for footwear and wholesale, it offers features that directly support the above best practices. Here are the ones you should make sure you’re using, or consider adopting if you’re a brand evaluating platforms:

• ERP Integration: Keeps inventory and pricing live, avoids manual syncing.
• Real-Time Inventory Visibility: For retailers to place orders confidently, avoid back orders or disappointments.
• Automated Order Entry and At-Once Reordering: Remove friction in reorders for fast-moving styles.
• Copy-Previous Orders and Template Order Flows: Especially useful for recurring seasonal orders or regular bulk orders.
• Microsites and Special Program Catalogs: For special events, trunk shows, or limited collections. Letting retailers order outside your main catalog or through curated shows.
• Custom Pricing and Account-Specific Catalogs: Different retailer tiers, territories or partners often need different pricing or assortments. RepSpark supports that.

Common Automation Challenges & How to Overcome Them

Internal teams or retailers may be comfortable with old spreadsheets, phone/fax orders. Overcome by training, piloting, and showing early wins.

ERPs, EDI, shipping systems can be hard to tie together so use platforms with strong API capabilities, build clean interfaces, and consider bringing in specialists.

As mentioned, bad or inconsistent data will make it harder to correctly automate processes so put things in place to ensure your data is clean from the start. 

Automation tools cost money. But measure ROI (time saved, fewer errors, more orders) and phase implementation to manage costs.

Lastly, you may be thinking that  some of your retailers have special terms, custom orders, and so forth that need a manual touch. But automation allows you to build rules and guardrails to accommodate these special requests. 

Platforms like RepSpark offer many of the tools you need for this. 

If you’re a footwear brand still relying heavily on manual processes, now is the time to evaluate where automation can move the needle. Start small, pick high-impact areas, lean on tools built for your industry, and iterate.

Reach out and we can walk you through what an automation process could look like for your brand.