Read your wholesale page the way a buyer's AI does. Note what it cannot find.

Deloitte's research on agentic AI in B2B buying reports that 38% of surveyed buyers already use it in purchasing. They use it to search for products, configure orders, review contracts and benchmark prices. On the supplier side, only 13% say their front-office and back-office sales systems are fully integrated.

Those two numbers meet on your product page. So try an exercise this week: read one wholesale page the way a buyer's software would, one line at a time, and write down what it finds.

What the agent reads first

It reads text. The title, the specification table, the price, the stock label. Whatever is written there becomes the buyer's shortlist.

If the title says "Classic Tote" and the case size appears only in a photo, the agent records a tote and no case size. If the page shows the retail price and the wholesale rate sits behind a login, it records the retail price. Nobody is being unfair to your store here. The software only reports what the page says.

What it cannot read

Now list what a buyer needs and the page does not hold. The price for this account. Whether forty cases can ship by the 15th. Whether the new model fits the rack the buyer bought last year.

Those answers live in your ERP, in a spreadsheet or in a rep's memory. Deloitte found that nearly nine in ten suppliers are before or in the middle of an ERP upgrade, so the connection between the page and the answer often does not exist yet. The agent returns "not found" or a general number.

The gap shows on both sides. Seventy-two percent of suppliers call their sales process mostly or highly automated, against 47% of buyers who say the same about their own purchasing. Buyers were also three times more likely to report difficulty doing business with specific suppliers.

Where a person steps in

The buyer does not stop at "not found". The buyer takes the shortlist and goes to find someone who knows. Our post on why buyers still check with a rep shows the same pattern in Gartner's data: the software summarizes, a person confirms.

That moment is the one to plan for. The buyer arrives on your page with a shortlist and one or two doubts. A short live conversation from that page puts someone there, and it works best when the person answering can see which product and which account are in question.

Read your own page this way

Copy the text of one top-selling wholesale page into a plain document, with no images and no login. Ask whether a stranger could place a correct order from it alone.

Then mark every gap. Move the three most common ones into the page text: case size, lead time, minimum order. Whatever is left is a question for a person, so check that the page offers a clear way to ask.

Deloitte's numbers say buyers will send software to read your store first. The exercise shows what it will bring back.