Order management software for seafood distributors

How orders typically arrive

• Email (body text and PDF attachments)
• Spreadsheets attached to email
• Phone and texted orders, added by your team in one click as manual entries

Common pain points in this vertical

• The spec is the order — species, form, count size, fresh versus frozen — and a misread 16/20 becomes 21/25 on a banquet
• Nearly everything sells by the pound at variable weight
• What you can promise changes with the boats, so substitution is a daily judgment call
• Shelf life is a day or two against some of the highest per-pound costs you carry — a wrong order is a same-day loss
• A regular's species-and-count list lives in one person's head

Use cases we hear about

• Capture species, form, and count size intact. '2 boxes 16/20 shrimp, U-10 scallops, 20 lb salmon fillet, fresh' is matched to your catalog by every part of the spec, and a bare 'salmon, 30 lb' is flagged instead of shipped on a guess.
• Handle by-the-pound lines as catch-weight. Catch-weight is the norm in seafood: the requested amount goes on the order, and the final weight-based total settles at pack-out, in the systems you use for weighing and invoicing.
• Flag catch-driven substitutions for your team. 'Whatever white fish is best today' and 'halibut if you have it' are captured and flagged — the call against today's catch stays with the person who saw what landed.

Why is a seafood order hard to capture?

Seafood is order capture at its most unforgiving. What you can sell today depends on what came off the boat, almost everything is catch-weight, the specs are precise and they matter, and shelf life is a day or two against some of the highest per-pound costs you carry. In seafood the order isn't "two of those" — it's 16/20 shrimp, U-10 scallops, 20 lb salmon fillet, fresh not frozen, and a wrong spec is a wrong, expensive, perishable product on the truck. PeasyOrders — order capture built for small and mid-sized US wholesale distributors on QuickBooks Online — captures the spec intact, matches each line to your catalog, applies the account's price, and flags what only your team can decide.

How does PeasyOrders capture seafood orders?

Two lanes, honestly stated.

Written orders are captured on arrival. A forwarding rule sends your order emails in, and PeasyOrders reads the email body and the PDF and spreadsheet attachments. Each becomes a structured draft: lines matched by species, form, and count size, catch-weight lines captured by the pound, the account's price applied with its rule shown, and judgment calls flagged. An emailed order that lands at 10 p.m. is structured at 10 p.m. and waits in the queue for review against the morning's catch.

Phone and texted orders get a one-click lane. Seafood ordering leans on the phone before dawn, and PeasyOrders doesn't capture calls, texts, or voicemails. Your office adds those orders in one click as manual entries: same editor, same per-account pricing, same review and export, with "manual" recorded as the origin. The queue stays the single list of the morning's orders, however each one arrived.

It also doesn't read photos, scans, or handwriting; a PDF needs a text layer to be parsed automatically. An attachment it can't parse stays on the order, worked inside PeasyOrders in a side-by-side view.

What happens when the spec is missing?

"Salmon, 30 lb" is flagged: fresh or frozen, fillet or portion? "Shrimp, 2 boxes" with no count size is flagged: 16/20 or 21/25? Each flag waits for a person to resolve it in the draft — the system suggests, the operator validates, and unresolved lines block confirmation. That's what keeps a misread count size from wrecking a banquet order: the spec is read against your catalog, not skimmed off a screen at 5 a.m. And when only the chef can settle it — 16/20 or 21/25? — your operator can ask by email from the draft, with the reply linked straight back to the order.

How do catch-driven substitutions work?

They stay human, on purpose. "Whatever white fish is best today" and "no halibut? sub your best flatfish" are judgments about what actually landed — so PeasyOrders captures the request, attaches it to the order, and flags it for your team to decide against the catch. Nothing is guessed, and nothing is lost on a note by the phone. Your team's early hours go to working the catch, not reconstructing requests.

Common seafood orders PeasyOrders handles

Does it recognize a regular's standing list?

Yes. On setup, PeasyOrders reads your past QuickBooks Online invoices once, so each account's buying history is there from day one. From then on it learns each account's shorthand from the corrections your team confirms — after a few orders, "the usual" resolves to that account's species and counts. The standing list comes up as a draft anyone can review against availability, so it doesn't wait on the one person who had it memorized.

What stays with your other systems?

PeasyOrders owns capture, matching, pricing, and review, then hands off a clean order. Reviewed orders export to QuickBooks Online as an Estimate by default (configurable), or to Google Sheets or CSV. Lot traceability, country-of-origin and wild-versus-farmed labeling, catch-weight invoicing, and the weighing itself stay in your seafood system — PeasyOrders feeds it clean order data; it doesn't replace it.

What does it cost?

Plans run $99, $199, and $349 per month by confirmed order volume, with a 30-day money-back guarantee — details on the pricing page.

The bottom line

Your buyers will keep ordering fresh fillet, U-10 scallops, and whatever's best off the boat — by the pound, by the count, early. PeasyOrders captures the emailed orders with their specs intact, gives your office one click for the phoned ones, prices every line for the account, and flags the calls only your team can make — so the early hours go to deciding what to send, not deciphering what was asked. For the wider picture, see how to automate wholesale order processing.