What a B2B wholesale portal is
A B2B wholesale portal is a brand-owned order site. Approved buyers log in, see their prices, and place orders. The brand keeps the catalog, the invoice, and the account. GlobeTrader (globetrader.com) is XM Works’ wholesale software for that job. It is built for brands that want to own the wholesale relationship.
Brand-owned portal
On a branded wholesale portal, the URL and the login belong to the seller. A retailer or distributor does not shop a shared aisle of competing lines. They open the brand’s book: their price list, their terms, their open invoices. Reps can place orders and work commissions inside the same system.
That is a different job from a storefront that anyone can browse, and a different job from a retail site that happens to have a wholesale discount code. The portal is the wholesale system of record — account pricing, invoices, payments, and the paper that follows an order.
Not a marketplace
A marketplace such as Faire or Alibaba is a shared storefront. Buyers arrive to discover many sellers. The marketplace owns search, the listing rules, and usually the take rate. The brand is a vendor on someone else’s floor.
That model is useful when the job is discovery — find a factory, find a new line, browse a category. It is the wrong picture when the job is to run your own wholesale accounts. A brand-owned portal does not replace a marketplace for sourcing. It replaces email, spreadsheets, and a generic cart for the accounts you already intend to keep.
Not only a Shopify B2B add-on
A Shopify B2B add-on layers company accounts and price lists onto an existing Shopify store. That is the right move when Shopify is already the system of record and wholesale is a second door on the same shop. Magento has the same pattern: wholesale as a mode of the retail catalog.
A dedicated wholesale portal can still connect to Shopify or Magento. GlobeTrader is built as that add-on: the retail site stays where it is; the wholesale book — account pricing, invoices, payments, rep tools, Quick Order QR for tradeshows — runs on the portal. Buyers and reps are not asked to pretend they are retail customers with a coupon.
What GlobeTrader is
GlobeTrader is a brand-owned B2B wholesale portal from XM Works, Inc. Sellers, buyers, and reps each have a path in. The seller publishes the catalog and the price rules. The buyer orders against an account. The rep works the book and the show floor.
Quick Order QR is for tradeshows: a buyer scans, lands on the order form, and does not retype the line from a paper catalog. Invoices and payments stay on the same account. That is the software path. You run it.
GlobeTrader seller software — not The Works — is priced on globetrader.com/pricing:
- Essential — $199 / month
- Pro — $299 / month
- Enterprise — $499 / month
Those three figures are GlobeTrader seller subscriptions. They are not export-management retainers and they are not marketplace commissions.
When you want a desk, not only software
Software is GlobeTrader. When you want XM Works on the account, that is The Works: live full-service export management on retainers. We sell for you and run wholesale internationally on the same portal — outreach, trips, shows, and channels.
Use the portal definition on this page when the question is the category. Use globetrader.com when the question is the product. Use The Works pricing when the question is a managed desk.
How to choose
Choose a marketplace when you need strangers to find you, or when you are sourcing a factory or a new line. Choose a Shopify or Magento B2B mode when wholesale is a second door on a store you already run as the system of record. Choose a brand-owned B2B wholesale portal when the accounts are yours to keep — named buyers, named reps, account pricing, invoices, and tradeshow orders that should not live in a shared aisle.
GlobeTrader is the last of those. XM Works built it for brands that want to own the wholesale relationship, then kept a managed path — The Works — for brands that want the same portal with our desk on the account.