Automating a B2B supplier’s conversations is a different problem from automating a
shop’s, and the difference is one sentence: the price depends on who is asking.

A retail store has one price per item. A supplier has a list price, three tiers of trade
pricing, a handful of negotiated accounts, and a rule about what happens below minimum
order quantity. The question “how much are these” has no answer until the system knows
which customer is in the conversation.

That makes identity, not the catalogue, the thing to get right first.

What arrives

  • “what’s the trade price on 200 units”
  • “got stock for 500 pcs? lead time?”
  • “can you quote for the attached list”
  • “same as my last order please”
  • “send me the spec sheet and the cert”
  • “when is my PO shipping”
  • “can we do 60 days instead of 30”

Six of those seven are answerable without a person, and all six require knowing who is
asking. The seventh, credit terms, is a commercial negotiation and should never be
automated.

Identity before price

The workflow has to establish which account the person belongs to before it quotes
anything. Matching on the phone number or email they are messaging from handles most of
it. The awkward cases are real and need deciding in advance.

A buyer messaging from their personal phone. A new person at an existing account. A
procurement agent asking on behalf of someone else. An existing customer asking about a
product on a different account’s price list. Each of those needs a defined behaviour, and
the safe default is to give list price or no price and route to a person.

The mistake to avoid is quoting trade price to an unverified contact. That leaks your
margin structure to competitors, and it is a one-line configuration error.

AeroChat verifies the customer’s email or phone before returning their details. The
tier logic on top of that is yours to define, and it should be enforced by the system
rather than described to the AI. See AI agent.

Stock and lead time, which are two questions

“Do you have 500” is a stock question. “When can I have 500” is a lead time question,
and a buyer asking the first almost always needs the second.

Answering both means reading current stock, incoming purchase orders and your supplier
lead times. That is a genuine integration, and it is where the value is, because this is
the question that currently goes to a salesperson who looks it up and replies an hour
later. In the meantime the buyer has asked two other suppliers.

Two rules worth setting. Never quote a lead time you have not confirmed with the
upstream supplier, and never show a stock figure without saying whether it is allocated.
A buyer who orders against stock that was already committed will not order again.

Quotes and purchase orders

A quote request with a list of items is the highest-value message a supplier gets and
the slowest to answer. Automating the mechanical part, pricing each line at the right tier,
checking availability, applying minimum order quantity rules and assembling the document,
turns a half-day into minutes.

What should not be automated is the decision. Whether to sharpen a price to win a
contract, whether to accept a part shipment, whether to extend terms. Those come to a
person with the mechanical work already done.

Repeat orders are the easiest win and the most neglected. “Same as last time” is a
lookup, a confirmation and an order. Done well it takes two messages and no staff time,
and it is the main reason a buyer stays with a supplier who is not cheapest.

Payments and terms

B2B splits here, and the split needs to be explicit in your workflows.

Accounts on credit terms are invoiced, and the conversation should never ask them to
pay a link. Prepay accounts, new customers and small orders can pay in the chat with a
payment link, with the money settling into your own
account. Getting this the wrong way round, asking a 30-day account to pay upfront, is the
kind of error that gets escalated to your sales director.

So the account’s payment status has to be part of what the system reads about them, not
an assumption.

Documents

Spec sheets, safety data sheets, certificates of analysis, conformity declarations.
Suppliers send these constantly and they are always the same files. A workflow that
identifies the product and sends the current document removes a surprising amount of work,
and it fixes a quiet compliance risk: staff sending whichever version is in their email.

Keep one current set, and let the system send from it.

Channels

WhatsApp has become the default for trade buyers across Southeast Asia, which catches
some suppliers off guard because their systems assume email. The buyer messages from a
site or a warehouse, with one hand, and will not open a portal.

Email still carries the formal documents, so both need to land in the same place.
Otherwise the quote is discussed on WhatsApp and the purchase order arrives by email with
nobody connecting them. See shared inbox.

Web chat on a supplier site is mostly new customers, and the right workflow there is
qualification: what they need, what volume, which account type, then route to the right
salesperson with that captured.

Where to start

  1. Identify the account before quoting anything, with a safe default when you cannot.
  2. Answer stock and lead time together, from live data.
  3. Automate repeat orders from history.
  4. Send product documents from one current set.
  5. Route credit terms, price negotiation and part shipments to a person.

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