We built Mercantyl because we needed it.

Origin

We run Qstomize and MunchMakers — two custom-manufacturing businesses selling branded and decorated goods wholesale. Real orders, real minimums, real suppliers who need chasing.

The software never fit. Pricing lived in spreadsheets that were always one version behind. Quotes went out by email and came back as a thread nobody could reconstruct. Minimums were agreed in conversation and then quietly broken at checkout, because the storefront had no concept of a minimum. The person approving an order was never the person who placed it, and the system had no way to express that.

We tried to buy our way out. Shopify Plus B2B was built for DTC first and still charges per storefront. BigCommerce prices per store, which punishes exactly the multi-brand shape we have. Faire takes 15–25% of the revenue. NetSuite SuiteCommerce wanted a six-month implementation and a partner contract. None of them had been built for what we were actually doing.

So we started building it for ourselves. Mercantyl is that platform, and we are still its first user.

Why we kept going

Wholesale ecommerce is a $1.2 trillion market. The platforms serving it were almost all designed for someone else. Shopify and BigCommerce came up serving DTC and grew B2B as an addon. NetSuite came up serving enterprise ERP and bolted commerce on top. Faire is a marketplace pretending to be infrastructure.

Wholesale operators kept telling us a version of the same thing: the tools they used did not understand MOQs, NET terms, multi-user buyer accounts, RFQs, multi-brand catalogs, or any of the messy things their actual jobs revolved around. They were paying enterprise prices to make consumer software pretend.

We think that gap is real, and we are building against it with the unfair advantage of feeling it ourselves every week. Five further wholesale brands are being built on the platform now. If it does not work for them, it does not ship to you.