If you’re a footwear brand trying to scale in 2026, there’s no denying the impact that selling into specialty retail and wholesale plays in that growth formula.. That means you need a wholesale B2B platform that can handle the specific requirements of your brand— but not all platforms are built to handle the realities of footwear.
There’s an operational complexity in footwear that doesn’t exist in a lot of other verticals. A single product can have a multitude of SKU’s across styles, colors, widths, and sizes. Add in product variations and account requirements across retailer groups or regions, and the load on a brand’s wholesale infrastructure increases. And if your technology isn’t built for footwear the result is friction for buyers, manual work for your sales teams, and reporting gaps for leadership.
So when it comes time to implement a B2B, or upgrade your existing one, you need to know how to build a B2B e-commerce RFP that covers not only where you’re at today, but the growth you want tomorrow.
We’re going to outline the core B2B platform requirements footwear brands should use when evaluating platforms as part of their B2B e-commerce RFP process. This is a clear view into the requirements that larger, complex footwear organizations have for their technology, and how to ensure it scales with their business.
Grab the complete Footwear B2B e-Commerce RFP Requirements Spreadsheet (Google Sheets)
Footwear wholesale is structurally different from most other categories.
A single footwear style can represent dozens of SKUs once colorways, half sizes, widths, and extended size runs are accounted for. Add seasonal pre-book cycles, multiple ship windows, and customer-specific pricing, and the margin for error shrinks quickly.
For footwear brands, B2B e-commerce isn’t just about placing orders — it’s about supporting how footwear is actually sold, across their entire tech stack. Platforms that lack footwear-specific logic often force teams into workarounds that slow growth and increase operational risk.
Strong B2B e-commerce for footwear brands starts with product data that reflects real-world complexity.
Platforms should support true style–color–size matrices, allowing teams to manage parent styles while maintaining control at the size and width level. Widths (D, EE, 2E, 4E, and beyond) must be treated as structured SKU attributes — not text fields or notes.
Multiple sizing systems are equally important. Footwear brands often sell across men’s, women’s, and youth categories, while supporting US, EU, and UK conversions that may vary by customer or region. Half sizes, extended sizes, and size-restricted availability should all be native capabilities.
Beyond sizing, footwear variants often carry meaningful technical attributes like materials, drop, waterproof rating, or bespoke technologies. These details matter to buyers and should be surfaced directly in the ordering experience.
From a merchandising perspective, platforms should support seasonal assortments, digital line sheets, and product imagery or other visual assets, enabling brands to tell clear product stories without relying on disconnected tools.
Wholesale footwear buyers prioritize speed, clarity, and confidence when ordering.
Effective B2B e-commerce platforms for footwear brands support grid-based ordering, allowing buyers to place orders across a full size run from a single screen. Standard prepacks should be easy to order and adjust, without breaking underlying pack rules.
Clear separation between at-once inventory and pre-book assortments is essential. Buyers need to understand what ships immediately versus later in the season without confusion or manual clarification.
Fit guidance and size conversion information should be visible during the buying process, reducing sizing errors and back-and-forth with sales reps. Advanced search and filtering — by size range, width, category, or technical feature — further improves buyer efficiency.
For established retailers, saved carts, favorites, and reordering from order history are critical. And for your retailer buyers representing multiple locations, the ability to place orders for multiple doors in a single session is a baseline expectation.
As footwear brands grow, manual order enforcement becomes a bottleneck.
A modern footwear B2B e-commerce platform should automatically enforce minimum order quantities, size run requirements, pack multiples, and customer-specific assortment rules at the time of ordering. Buyers should receive clear guidance when adjustments are needed, reducing rework for sales and operations teams.
Flexibility is key. Some products or accounts may require strict size runs, while others allow open sizing. Some retailers may have contractual assortment restrictions by region or channel. These rules should be configurable without custom development. Generic, off-the-shelf wholesale B2B platforms aren’t going to offer the tools your brand needs to support a growing wholesale channel.
Order-level and line-level notes also play an important role, allowing teams to capture special packing instructions, embellishments, or contextual details that matter downstream.
Think it might be time to move to a wholesale platform that's built specifically for your brand?
Check out 7 Signs Your Footwear Brand Has Outgrown Your Current B2B System for more.
Pre-book workflows are foundational to footwear wholesale — and a common failure point for B2B e-commerce platforms.
Footwear brands need support for future ship dates, multiple delivery windows, and split shipments within a single order. Buyers should be able to make edits within defined rules, while brands retain control through season close dates and approval workflows.
Equally important is the transition from browsing a seasonal assortment to placing an order. The path from digital line sheet to size-grid ordering should be seamless, minimizing friction during key selling moments.
Pricing in footwear wholesale is rarely uniform.
Enterprise footwear brands often manage multiple price lists across dealers, distributors, and key accounts, sometimes spanning multiple currencies. B2B e-commerce platforms must support customer-specific pricing and discounts at both the account and location level.
Many brands also require MAP-related handling, extended seasonal dating programs, early-pay discounts, and scheduled promotional pricing windows. These programs should be time-bound, visible, and enforced consistently across orders.
Footwear brands don’t just sell to “a customer.” They sell to retail networks. A single account might include a corporate buying office, dozens (or hundreds) of storefronts, different ship-to locations, and sometimes multiple banners operating under the same ownership. Your B2B platform needs to reflect that real-world structure.
The right system lets you manage the relationship at the top (credit limits, terms, reporting, account ownership), while still seeing what’s happening at the store level. You can roll performance up to understand how the entire retail group is buying, and then drill down to see which individual locations are thriving, which ones are under performing, and where assortment adjustments make sense.
This structure matters because retail decisions are increasingly data-driven. Buyers want to understand sell-through by store. Brands want to allocate inventory intelligently. Sales teams need visibility into territories and credit exposure. When your platform mirrors how large retailers are actually organized, reporting becomes clearer, buying gets smarter, and the ordering experience stays simple for the people placing the orders.
Speaking of data, Inventory visibility is a must, and needs to operate at the size level, not just the product level. Buyers expect accurate available-to-promise information by size, warehouse, and region. Back orders, partial fills, and allocations should be supported transparently, particularly during pre-book fulfillment.
Once orders are placed, both internal users and retailers need clear visibility into the full order lifecycle — from draft and submission through allocation, shipment, and invoicing.
Strong footwear brands rely on data to make merchandising and inventory decisions.
Size-level reporting is essential for understanding sell-through and refining future assortments. Prebook and at-once sales should be reported distinctly, with the ability to analyze performance by season, ship window, and customer category .
On the operational side, platforms should offer flexible ERP integration options, clean data exports, role-based security, and clear expectations around implementation, training, and ongoing support. Scalability during peak seasonal demand — especially prebook — should be explicitly addressed during evaluation.
For footwear brands, a B2B platform is more than an ordering portal— it is core wholesale infrastructure, and the literal key to adding more retail doors to your wholesale channel. The brands are going to need a B2B platform built specifically for the challenges that footwear faces. And that platform needs be supported in an MSaaS model to keep it future proof.
The most successful brands evaluate platforms against footwear-specific requirements, not generic e-commerce feature lists. A clear, shared checklist helps teams align internally, avoid costly surprises, and select technology that supports long-term growth.
Check out the complete B2B e-Commerce RFP Template Checklist (Google Spreadsheet)