The new duty changes going live on 1st August 2023 are likely to be top of mind for many of you at the moment. 

We're supporting you and your customers with a small but important update. At the time of writing, the legislation will introduce a new Draught Relief which will provide a reduced rate of duty for qualifying draught products. Please see gov.uk for further details on qualifying products.

Some businesses, however, are required to purchase draught products where full duty has been paid. Specifically, businesses that decant from these containers and sell for off-premises consumption. Again, please see gov.uk for the complete definition.

Upon placing an order, your customers will see an option to indicate if they require full duty paid on the kegs or casks in their order. You will also have the ability to set this option at the point of order confirmation; or when editing the order details before confirming the order.

This value will then be used when generating the invoice PDF we make available to your customers on Sellar. If 'full duty paid' has been requested and indicated on the order, the relevant invoice line items will display a caption of "Draught duty relief has not been applied".

You've had the ability to set percentage discounts on individual customers for a while now. This has been useful for handling those customers who may get X% of cans and Y% off kegs relative to a base price tier.

We've since updated the PDF VAT invoice that is accessible to your customers on Sellar to display these discounts against line items.

What's more, those of you integrated with Xero will see the same line item discounts appear on invoices for Sellar orders. We'll be working with our brewery management partners in the coming weeks to do the same.

We recently found average order value from trade buyers when placed through Sellar was 6% higher than those placed through traditional channels (phone, email). That's great. Helping you to grow sales is what we're here to do.

One strategy for increasing basket sizes is to upsell by offering volume discounts. And with this recent update, we're making your customers aware of these great deals that you offer, and when they are within reach!

When ordering via your storefronts, your customers will now see their progress towards any relevant volume discounts immediately after adding products to their basket. This timely information becomes super useful when a customer has, perhaps, added 2 kegs to their basket but adding another one would get them 5% off. 

In addition to this, any progress towards exceeding a free delivery threshold or meeting order requirements (minimum order quantity, minimum order value) will be displayed as a progress bar.

A benefit of using Sellar to power your trade sales is that you get a fully interactive availability list out of the box. Interactivity is something which we've focussed on and taken advantage of with this update. It's the kind of benefit which you can't (elegantly) get from a spreadsheet or PDF equivalent.

We believe these small yet helpful improvements are what deliver a better customer experience overall. So expect several more improvements to storefronts to be drip-fed over the coming weeks and months.

We've made a few improvements to the Xero integration to make order processing even more streamlined.

Settings

Configure how you'd like the integration to handle customer contact details on Xero when they differ from those stored on Sellar. You can do this from the Xero integration page.

Export customer contact IDs

Sellar identifies the correct customer in your Xero account via Xero's 'contact ID'. This was difficult to obtain from Xero directly so we've developed a handy customer export tool - which includes the contact ID. This is great if you're looking to import your customer list into Sellar. This is also available from the Xero integration page.

Pro-forma card payments

When you collect a pro-forma card payment from a customer, upon order confirmation in Sellar, we'll create the invoice in Xero with a status of 'Paid'. 

When listing products on your trade platform, we give you the option to declare allergens and dietary info. Specifically, you can mark a product as vegan, lactose-free or gluten-free. 

Up until now, this was defined at the product level. Today, you can now also define allergens and dietary info for each product item.

This is particularly handy when certain containers use different ingredients - such as the use of isinglass in cask beer. 

So whenever you add or edit a product item on Sellar, you'll have the option to customise the allergen and dietary info. For products which don't require this level of customisation, you can continue to define these characteristics at the top level.

Need to make an update to your products? Go to your product list and get started. 

With the introduction of direct delivery areas, it's now possible for your local customers to see their next available delivery date.

We know that managing customers spread across the UK can be complicated. For a start, the pub on your home turf may get access to returnable cask and keg products. Whereas the taproom at the other end of the country might be limited to single-use and packaged formats. And then there's pricing...

So with this update, we’re making delivery areas even more powerful by introducing local and nationwide default price tiers. Show any new customers the right products, in the right formats, at the right price.

And you can do this right now.

Get Started

🗺 1. Define your direct delivery areas (if applicable)

If you haven't set up your direct delivery areas yet, we strongly recommend you do this now to make full use of this update. It's how we can determine whether a new customer can be considered 'local' or 'nationwide'.

Don't provide direct delivery? Don't worry. You can still reach new customers on Sellar by configuring just your nationwide default price tier. More on this below 👇

⚙️ 2. Set your default price tiers and delivery notes

Head to the new Storefront -> Configure page. Here you'll see settings for both 'local' and 'nationwide' customers. Set a price tier and update delivery notes for each of these and we'll be sure the right customer sees the right products, pricing and delivery notes.

Thinking about how to manage delivery charges for nationwide customers? Now would be a great time to check out our best practice article before configuring your nationwide default price tier. 

🛒 3. And you're open for business

With that, thousands of venues across the UK can now place an order with you instantly; all while you have full control over the products, pricing and discounts they get access to. 

Set My Default Price Tiers

So you've set up your price tiers, assigned them to customers and configured the layout of your product lists. Wouldn't it be nice to see how your storefront looks from your customer's perspective?

The most recent update to Sellar allows you to preview your storefront configured for a particular price tier. Handy for some peace of mind to confirm the right customer will see the right products at the right price.

Head to Storefront -> Preview and you'll now see a dropdown menu at the top of the page. You can use this to select any price tier and the product list will update accordingly. This dropdown menu is only available to you in preview mode.

Get Started

Setting up your direct delivery areas is the best way to let your local customers know when you can next deliver to them. Even new customers who fall within your defined postcodes that find you through Sellar will see the relevant delivery schedule.

But what if you deliver to certain areas on an ad-hoc basis? No problem. Schedules and order cut-off times are now completely optional. If you wish to indicate to customers that you deliver to them directly, but don't have a fixed schedule, you can now simply enter the relevant postcode and hit save. 

We still recommend setting up a schedule if you have one. This provides the best customer experience and speeds up order processing.

Check out the walkthrough video below if you haven't gotten to grips with delivery areas yet.

Bringing trade sales online is about convenience. Convenience for you with tools and integrations. But also convenience for your customers.

Sellar set out to eliminate the unnecessary back and forth between you and your trade customers. Less time spent dealing with questions that could be easily answered with a purpose-built online trade store. More time spent building relationships and growing sales. 

One of these questions is typically: "when can you deliver my order by?"

Today, we aim to answer this question for your direct customers with the new delivery areas feature.

The system is built upon postcodes. With a complete set of delivery areas defined, Sellar will be able to present your customers with the next appropriate delivery day and order cut-off time based on their delivery address. This gets displayed on your storefront.

Delivery areas

The areas you define apply to your existing, direct customers plus all new customers who find you through Sellar and have a postcode which falls within one of your delivery areas.

We believe this is going enhance your customer's experience; reassuring them of when to expect delivery prior to ordering. In addition to this, we'll pre-fill the delivery date on the order when you're ready to confirm it. An extra little bit of convenience for you.

Let's take a look at an example from the perspective of a new customer.

I'm a bar manager and my venue is located in London, N4 postcode. It's Monday morning so I browse the discover page on Sellar. I see a local supplier who I haven't ordered from before and view their storefront. I'm presented with some delivery info and given a clear cut-off time of Monday by 16:00 if I wish for my order to be included in the Wednesday delivery run. I hit 'view info' to see the supplier's full schedule for my area along with their usual delivery notes. I see they also deliver to me on Fridays each week.

The supplier has a default price tier setup so I can go right ahead and place my order with confidence it'll be with me by Wednesday. 

Get started

Here's how our example supplier was able to make this possible; and how you can too:

First, head to your direct delivery tier page. 

From here, you'll see a new prompt to add your delivery areas. Delivery areas are flexible and you can create as many as you need. For each delivery area you can:

Define an area

Define a schedule

You can select one or more days of the week with a frequency of every 'N' weeks.

Define an order cut-off time

This update is great for direct customers, but don't worry, customers outside of your direct delivery areas will still get today's ordering experience. We'll indicate that you're able to deliver to them via courier or haulier.

Set up my delivery areas

As always, comment below or email me at neil@sellar.io if you have feedback and suggestions.

Your customers can access invoices for all their orders on Sellar. We've taken steps make this as convenient as possible. 

Sellar will pull the invoice number from the accountancy or BMS integration you have set up and display it on the downloadable PDF you and your customer can access. And popping in your bank details here will ensure your customers can see where to transfer payment. 

Rest assured, you can rely on Sellar to be the source of truth for your invoicing.

But we're not stopping there. We've made further updates to streamline the issuing of an invoice.

Invoice settings

Control when the invoice gets issued, and when the payment due date is calculated forward from. Choose from order confirmed, order dispatched or order delivered. Simply update the status of each of your customers' orders to automatically issue the invoice on Sellar. 

Your customers will be notified as usual and will be able to download the PDF from within the Sellar app. In addition to this, we'll send an email the PDF invoice attached to the invoice email address(es) on each customer account. 

Pro-forma payment and reminders

For some customers, you may wish to request payment upfront before confirming their order. You'll see a 'request pro-forma payment' button on all order requests. Choose this and the invoice will be issued to the customer before having to confirm the order. If you've processed pro-forma card payment orders on Sellar before, this will feel very familiar. 

Need to remind that customer to make payment? Just hit the 'send payment reminder' button and we'll notify your customer via email.

Payment terms

For accounts which you have assigned a number of days credit, we've added more control over how the payment due gets calculated. This can be one of three ways:

• From the invoice issue date - which is determined by your invoice settings mentioned above
• From the end of the current month 
• From the end of the following month

And, as expected, when processing a customer's order and you are about to issue the invoice - be that on order confirmed, dispatched or delivered - we'll pre-populate the payment due date field with the correct date.

We hope this is yet another step forward to make Sellar your tool for running trade sales with all your customers. Keen to see additional improvements to invoicing and payment terms? Comment below or email me at neil@sellar.io