Free resource
A supplement, athleisure or performance brand loses the most hours to wholesale order entry, creator and affiliate payouts, and returns and disputes. All three grow with the brand rather than staying flat, so the back office falls further behind with every good quarter.
Brands that sell wholesale, direct and through creators at the same time end up running three businesses with one back office. Each channel has its own order format, its own payment terms and its own way of asking a question, and the person who understands all of them is also the person answering the phone. The work is not difficult. There is simply more of it each time the brand grows.
In this order, because the cost of leaving each one manual is not the same.
Orders arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets, portal logins and the occasional text message. Every one gets retyped into the shop system by hand, and the errors surface weeks later as chargebacks or short shipments. Nothing about the format is under your control, which is exactly why the step keeps existing.
Discount codes, commission tracking and DM negotiation live in different places, so nobody can say what a given creator actually earned or what they actually cost. Payouts go out on trust and the numbers are rebuilt from memory at month end, which is when the disputes start.
A return can arrive by email, DM or carrier portal. Refunds get issued without always matching the original order, disputes get answered after the deadline, and the same customer gets different answers depending on who opens the message first.
Loaded cost of an admin hour is set at $35 in the example below. Change it to your own rate and the arithmetic still holds.
| Workflow | Time it takes | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wholesale and retail order entry | 4 to 7 hrs/wk | $193 | $9,264 |
| Creator and affiliate payouts | 3 to 6 hrs/wk | $158 | $7,584 |
| Returns, exchanges and disputes | 3 to 5 hrs/wk | $140 | $6,720 |
| Total annual cost of leaving all three manual | $23,568 | ||
Assumes 48 working weeks. Rows marked in lost jobs or lapsed policies are not included in the total, because those losses are revenue rather than hours and would need your own numbers to price.
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For supplement, athleisure, performance apparel and other consumer brands selling wholesale, direct and through creators at the same time.
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