Stewy: wholesale reordering by text message

Every wholesale buyer I've talked to reorders the same way. They text the rep. "Same as last time, plus two more cases of the 12 oz." The rep reads it, opens the order system, finds the last order, edits it, and keys it in. Ten minutes of a salesperson's day, twenty times a day, spent moving information from one screen to another.

Stewy is my attempt to remove the retyping and leave the text message alone.

What it does

A buyer sends a message over SMS, Telegram, Discord, or a web chat box, whichever they already use. Stewy reads it against that buyer's order history, current inventory, and their contract pricing, and drafts an order. The buyer sees the draft, confirms or corrects it, and the order gets created in the seller's system: Shopify, QuickBooks, or Square.

Nothing to install on the buyer's side. No portal login to forget. The buyer keeps doing what they were doing. The rep stops retyping.

Why there's a confirm step

The tempting version of this product is fully automatic: message in, order out. I didn't build that, and I wouldn't trust it if someone else had.

"Same as last time" is ambiguous when the last two orders were different. "The 12 oz" might match three SKUs. Contract pricing changes mid-quarter. A model that guesses and commits will guess wrong some percentage of the time, and a wrong wholesale order is pallets on a truck.

So the model drafts and the buyer confirms. The draft shows up as line items with quantities and prices, in the same channel the message came from. Confirming is one reply. Correcting is one more. That step is what makes it safe to use on real money, and it's where most of the build time went.

What's underneath

The hard parts turned out to be the order-history lookup and the SKU matching, not the language model. A buyer's history is the best context for what "the usual" means, and it already lives in the seller's order system. Stewy reads it from there instead of asking anyone to maintain a second copy.

Inventory and contract pricing get pulled at draft time so the buyer sees a number that's true right now. If something is out of stock the draft says so before the order exists, which beats a backorder email.

Who it's for

Small distributors and producers with a repeat-buyer base: food and beverage, packaging, parts, anything where the same accounts order weekly or monthly and each order is mostly a variation on the last one. If your buyers already text your reps, this fits. If they order through a big procurement platform, it doesn't.

Disclosure

I own Stewy. bestAIpacks, which I also run, has a review of it marked as first-party, with the cons listed next to the pros. Read that one if you want the critical take. This is the builder's take.

If you run wholesale and want to try it, stewy.shop has the details.