Goods are physical
Something is bought, held somewhere, and moved to someone. Stock is a real number about real objects, and it is wrong more often than anyone admits.
Industries
Built for businesses that make and move goods.
Twelve industries, one shape of problem. In every one of them an order has to cross purchasing, stock, documentation, dispatch and finance — and in most of them it is re-entered at each border.
The twelve
Where each one is actually difficult.
Ordered by operating model first, then by what the goods themselves demand.
Trading
Margin decided at the moment of buying, on a stock position that has to be right. Get the position wrong and you buy what you already have.
Distribution
Repeat orders from dealers on their own terms and prices, dispatched daily. The difficulty is volume of small decisions, not complexity of big ones.
Import & export
Long lead times and cost that lands in instalments. Pricing a sale correctly means knowing the landed cost before the last invoice arrives.
Lighting & electrical
Thousands of variants separated by a specification, and project supply where a partial delivery blocks a site.
Appliances & electronics
Every unit individually identified, because warranty and service depend on knowing which one went to which customer.
Auto parts & spares
One part with four manufacturer codes, stocked at six branches. Finding it is the job; selling it is the easy part.
Industrial supplies
A very long tail of low-value items sold in mixed units. Reorder points matter more here than anywhere else, because nobody can watch them all.
Heavy equipment
High-value serial-tracked machines whose spare parts and service history have to stay attached to the machine for years.
Building materials
Sold by weight and volume, delivered to sites rather than addresses, with freight a real part of the cost rather than a rounding error.
Pharma & medical supplies
Batch and expiry are not optional fields. A recall has to be answerable in hours, down to which customer received which batch.
FMCG
Stock turning over in days, so an inventory figure that is a day old is not a figure at all. Speed of the record is the whole requirement.
Manufacturing & assembly
Raw material and finished goods on one stock ledger, so what was consumed and what was produced are two sides of the same movement.
Where the differences are
Five axes, not twelve industries.
What actually separates these businesses is not the sector on their letterhead. It is where they sit on five questions — and two industries can be neighbours on four of them and opposites on the fifth.
How deep is the catalogue?
Fifty items or fifty thousand, and how many attributes it takes to tell two of them apart. Auto parts and industrial supplies live at the far end of this.
How far must a unit be traceable?
Not at all, by batch, or by individual serial. Pharma and heavy equipment need the answer years later; FMCG rarely needs it at all.
How is it measured and moved?
Pieces, cartons, tonnes or metres — and whether freight is a small cost or a decisive one. Building materials sit at one end, electronics at the other.
Does it cross a border?
Once a border is involved, documentation, compliance, currency and landed cost stop being administration and start being the business.
How fast does stock turn?
Days or quarters. Fast turnover means the record has to be live; slow turnover means ageing and obsolescence are the thing to watch.
Which is why it is configured, not rebuilt
All five are settings on items, warehouses and workflows in the Core OS. Two businesses in different sectors can share a configuration; two in the same sector often should not.
How it fits
Configuration, not a separate edition.
There is no pharma version and no auto-parts version of OrbitWix. There is one platform, and these are the settings that make it fit.
Item attributes and variants
The fields that separate one item from another are yours to define, so a specification-heavy catalogue stays searchable.
Units of measure
Buy in tonnes, stock in bags, sell in pieces. Conversions are held on the item rather than done in someone’s head.
Batch, serial or neither
Set per item, so the same account can hold serial-tracked machines and untracked consumables without a compromise for either.
Price lists and terms
Dealer, project, export and branch pricing all live as price lists on the customer rather than as separate ways of selling.
Workflows and approvals
Which steps need sign-off, and from whom, is a rule you set — including the inspections a regulated business has to pass.
Documents that travel
Delivery notes, gate passes, certificates and customs paperwork are attached to the record that produced them.
Where most start
Four apps cover most of the twelve.
Whatever the sector, the first configuration is usually the same: know the stock, sell against it, get it out of the door, and know what that cost.
Inventory
Real-time stock across warehouses, batches and serial numbers.
Sales
Quotations, price lists and the order everything downstream reads.
Dispatch
Planning, picking, loading and proof of what actually left.
Logistics
Trips, carriers and freight cost allocated to what moved.
Trading and distribution businesses usually add purchase and warehouse; importers add Trade. See the solutions for how they are arranged.
FAQ
Questions about industry fit.
Our industry is not on the list. Does that rule us out?
Not necessarily. The twelve are where we have seen the shape most often, not a supported-industry list. What matters is whether you buy, hold and move physical goods, and whether an order in your business crosses several teams on its way out. If it does, the fit is worth a conversation.
Is there an industry-specific version of OrbitWix?
No, and that is deliberate. Industry editions tend to mean a fork that falls behind the main product. What changes between industries here is configuration — item attributes, units of measure, tracking, price lists and workflow — on the same platform everyone else is running.
We operate in two of these at once. Is that a problem?
It is the normal case — a distributor that also imports, or a manufacturer that also trades bought-in goods. Because tracking, units and workflows are set per item and per workflow rather than per account, one configuration can hold both.
Do you have a customer in our industry we can speak to?
Ask us on the call and we will tell you honestly what we have and have not done in your sector. We would rather say so than describe an implementation that does not resemble yours.
Have a different question? Talk to us.
Describe your goods. We will tell you the fit.
What you stock, how it is measured, how far it has to be traceable and whether it crosses a border is usually enough for an honest answer.