If your reps still take orders in a notebook or a paper order pad, every visit ends the same way: drive back, decipher the handwriting, rekey the lines into Linnworks, and hope nothing sold out in the meantime. A field sales order app for Linnworks changes the shape of the whole visit — live stock in front of the customer, trade pricing applied on the spot, and the order sitting in Linnworks before the rep is back in the van.
Why the notebook ritual costs more than it looks
The traditional field sales loop has three quiet failure points. First, the stock question: the rep quotes from memory or a printed sheet, the customer commits, and then the warehouse discovers two of the eight lines are out of stock. Now someone has to ring the customer back, which is an awkward call and a worse impression than never promising the item at all.
Second, the pricing question. Trade customers rarely pay list price, and reps carry the pricing in their heads or in a laminated sheet that was accurate in March. Every "I'll confirm that price when I'm back at the office" is a delay, and every misremembered price is either lost margin or an invoice dispute.
Third, the rekeying itself. An order captured on paper gets typed in later — sometimes hours later, sometimes the next morning. That delay pushes the order down the picking queue, and manual entry is where SKU typos and quantity slips creep in. We covered the same problem for phone orders in taking phone orders without rekeying; field sales is the same disease with added mileage.
What the visit looks like with a tablet and live data
Run Trade Order POS on a tablet (it works on phone, tablet and desktop, and runs standalone in a browser — no need to be inside Linnworks itself) and the visit becomes a working session rather than a note-taking exercise.
Live stock, in front of the client
SKU search returns real-time stock levels from Linnworks. When the customer asks for forty of something and you only have twenty-six, you both see it immediately and can decide together: take the twenty-six now, split the order, or substitute. No callback, no broken promise.
Their pricing, not a guess
Customer lookup auto-fills details from up to three years of processed Linnworks orders, and per-customer price memory recalls what each account last paid for each SKU. If today's conversation lands on a different number, per-line price overrides and an order-level discount percentage handle it on the spot. The rep never says "I'll confirm when I'm back."
Quote or order — the customer's choice
Not every visit ends in a purchase order. If the buyer wants to think about it, generate a tier-priced quotation PDF without creating an order at all. If they commit, the order is submitted to Linnworks there and then, with payment status (Unpaid, Paid or Pending) recorded against it — useful for accounts on credit terms versus those paying on the day.
The order lands before you leave the car park
Because the order goes straight into Linnworks on submit, the warehouse can start picking while the rep is still saying goodbye. There is no evening data-entry session and no morning backlog. The order also carries proper metadata — the customer's PO number, an internal reference, delivery notes, and a "Placed by" field — so credit control and the warehouse both know exactly where it came from without asking.
Optional auto-email confirmation sends the customer a branded PDF the moment the order is placed. The buyer has written confirmation of lines, prices and totals in their inbox before the rep has left the premises, which kills the classic "that's not what we agreed" dispute weeks later.
Repeat visits get faster still
Most field sales calls are to existing accounts buying broadly the same things. One-click reorder pulls up a previous order as the starting point — adjust the quantities, add the new lines, done in a couple of minutes. Drafts cover the interrupted visit: if the buyer gets called away mid-order, save the draft and finish it in the car or on the next visit.
For a team of reps, the Team plan gives five seats with a per-member default location, so each rep's orders draw stock from and are attributed to the right warehouse or region. Everyone works from the same live catalogue and the same customer history, so a colleague covering someone's round sees the same prices the account always gets.
What to check before you roll it out
- Connectivity: a tablet with a SIM or a phone hotspot is enough — the app is lightweight, but it does need a connection for live stock.
- Pricing discipline: decide how much override freedom reps get. Price memory shows what the account paid last time, which keeps ad-hoc discounting honest.
- Payment status conventions: agree what Unpaid, Paid and Pending mean for account customers versus pro-forma ones, so credit control can trust the field data.
- VAT display: the cart is VAT-aware and can show ex-VAT or inc-VAT — trade buyers almost always want ex-VAT, so set the convention once.
If you also run a counter, the same tool covers that too — see our guide to choosing a trade counter POS for Linnworks. One system for counter, phone and field means one order format, one customer history and one place to look.
Trade Order POS is live now on the Linnworks Application Store, from £28.79/month with a 14-day free trial. Put live stock and real trade pricing in your reps' hands at trade-pos.mcp-g.com.