Pre-order software for food importers

Importing has always meant committing money early and finding out later whether you were right. What's changed is the size of that gap. Post-Brexit border controls under the Border Target Operating Model add health certification and physical inspection to sanitary and phytosanitary goods — estimated to add 3–5% to landed costs and 5–8 days to lead times.

Both numbers push in the same direction: your forecast has to be made further ahead, and being wrong is more expensive than it used to be.

Sell the consignment before you commit to it

The alternative to forecasting is simply asking. Publish an arriving consignment as a slot with an ordering deadline — your trade customers order against it, and at the cut-off you have a firm order book for stock that hasn't landed yet.

• A slot per consignment or arrival date, with a deadline you set.
• Case and pallet pricing, ordered the way you actually sell it.
• Minimum order values per account, enforced at checkout.
• One consolidated picking list once ordering closes — what goes to whom, in one sheet.
• Product import from CSV or Excel, so an existing price list comes straight in.

Short shelf life is where it hurts most

Continental cheese, charcuterie and chilled lines are ordered several times a week precisely because the clock is short — and under current arrangements that clock starts before the goods reach your warehouse. Days lost at the border are days removed from the sellable window.

For those lines especially, arriving with stock already allocated to named customers is the difference between a margin and a markdown. Pre-orders turn the shelf-life problem from a forecasting exercise into a scheduling one.

Consolidated lists for a fragmented delivery picture

Border requirements have made destination-level detail matter more, not less — goods heading to different UK addresses can require separate certification even when they share a supplier, a batch and a vehicle. Whatever the paperwork demands, knowing the per-customer breakdown before the consignment arrives makes planning the onward legs considerably easier than discovering it afterwards.

It sits in front of your existing systems

OrderSlots is an ordering layer, not a customs platform or an ERP. It doesn't file declarations or manage certification — it replaces the emails, calls and spreadsheets where trade orders currently arrive, and hands you a clean order book and picking list to work from.