Q2 packed in a lot. We launched a brand-new product, Price Management, and stacked deep releases on top of Storefront, Sales Hub, and Finance Hub. The thread running through all four: give distributors sharper ways to make money on every order, and to get that money in the door. Here's the recap.

Price Management: Getting Ahead of Margin Instead of Chasing It

Andrew opened with the headline of the quarter: a brand-new product joining the Pepper suite. Price Management gives reps, managers, and owners a proactive way to manage margin across the whole book of business, instead of pricing by feel one order at a time. It lives inside the new sales-rep-oriented portal that sits alongside the customer-facing Storefront app.

Cost changes

Cost changes are the anchor of the product, built around a weekly habit reps are already forming, where costs roll through the system toward the end of a week of purchasing. As an example, on a Friday afternoon when reps are writing fewer orders, they can now sit down to see what moved and get ahead of the week to come. 

The view lists every item whose cost changed, sorted by default to where the change does the most damage to gross profit. Click into an item and Pepper pulls up every account that buys it or has it on an order guide, complete with a peer range column showing where each customer's margin sits against similar customers - Reps work line by line or select a group and add a few points of margin in bulk.

Customer view

The same idea, but flipped. Start at the customer level, scan a scorecard of accounts, sort to find where margin is thinnest, then click into a customer to see every item they buy with the same inline and bulk editing.

The Pricing Agent

With the pricing agent, reps no longer have to look through every item and customer cost change - the agent can do it for them, and surface relevant recommendations to accept or reject in bulk. Every recommendation shows the customer, item, recommended margin, gross profit per unit, volume, and a plain-language rationale for the suggestion. The rep stays in control: accept, override, or reject, with rejection notes feeding back into the model so it sharpens over time.

Everything publishes as a draft first, gets a review screen, then pushes back to the ERP through Pepper's pricing integration, so the ERP stays the source of truth and non-Pepper orders still get the updated price. The Price Management poll ended in a three-way tie between cost changes, the customer view, and the Pricing Agent, which is about as clear a signal as you can get that the whole product lands.

Storefront: More Ways to Fulfill, Promote, and Capture the Order

David walked through a set of updates aimed at giving distributors more control over how they serve customers:

Second run delivery

Second run delivery is the star of the show and the feature the team expects to be adopted fastest. This new fulfillment type lets an operator place an order after the normal cutoff, giving independent distributors one more way to win on service. A bonus is that distributors attach a dedicated delivery fee for the second run and add a disclaimer that sets the expectation while they hustle to make it happen.

Holiday fulfillment override dates

Blocking a holiday is easy, but distributors often want to give customers one more chance to order around it. Now they can create an override date with its own cutoff time, label, and fulfillment type, targeted at all customers or a single customer group when only certain routes need adjusting.

Discount codes on promotions

Promotions now carry images and multiple discounts, plus a new discount-code option where an offer only unlocks when the customer enters a code. That ties a Storefront promotion directly to an email campaign or a trade show handout, with the same redemption limits distributors already control. This one pulled 27% of the Storefront poll.

Faster barcode scanning

With a Bluetooth scanner, a rep syncs the full catalog to the device once, including that operator's ordering rules, then scans to build a cart in seconds, with quantities incrementing on each scan or tap.

Sales Hub: One Place Built for the Rep

Alan opened with the problem Sales Hub set out to solve: Pepper has strong tools for reps (lost item alerts, items of interest, prospecting), but they used to live intertwined with the operator experience, a few too many clicks away. Q2 progress has finally pulled them into one place.

A dedicated sales rep portal

Reachable from a new button in the app, the portal brings order entry, For You content (lost items, overdue payments, charge risks), order tracking, notes, order guide editing, prospects, price quotes, and Copilot together and upfront. Newer reps find it more intuitive, and experienced reps reach everything in fewer clicks.

Web-based prospecting

Web-based prospecting is the marquee addition, bringing a workflow that used to be mobile-only onto the computer. A rep pulls up a map of nearby businesses they do not sell today, filters by business category or price range, and claims a prospect so no other rep doubles up. From the prospect's online menu, Pepper generates a set of dishes and matches catalog items against them to build an order guide.

Order guide to competitive price quote

That generated order guide flows straight into a price quote, with the full quoting experience now living inside the sales rep tools. Reps export a branded PDF, and can drop in a competitor's pricing to show line-by-line savings in a side-by-side competitive quote, all without leaving the tool or calling the manager.

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Also shipping: pinned and activity notes on each prospect (so the chef's birthday is always in view and managers can see field activity), manager visibility into how long a rep has held a prospect, and a new management-center dashboard for items of interest, products an operator is browsing but has not bought, with the ability to set a follow-up reminder for the rep.

Finance Hub: More Ways to Collect

James closed with arguably the most ‘fun’ product, since it’s how distributors get paid. Q2 added several features to finance hub, and our poll ended in a tie at the top between pay by check and autopay.

Customer-facing short pay

Distributors can now allow customers to pay a partial invoice - either as a flat short pay, or by tying it to credit requests so the customer has to specify which items they are short paying and why. Our recommendation? Turn it on only for customers who ask, to keep AR clean.

Pay by check

Customers now pay by check directly in the app, snapping a photo of the front and back the same way they would in a mobile banking app, in the office or in the field.

Require payment method before next order

Turn this on for a new or lower-trust account and the customer is blocked from checking out until they add a card or ACH to their wallet. It does not charge them, it just secures a method on file, similar to a pre-authorization without the charge.

Autopay auto-enrollment

Set a default autopay schedule, and any customer who adds a new payment method, whether at checkout or through a link, is enrolled automatically. It leaves existing custom schedules alone and only applies to new sign-ups. In sessions where distributors turned this on, the team has seen autopay adoption climb by a few percentage points, which is a few more points of reliably collected revenue.

Also shipping: invoice change email notifications (customers get an email when an invoice is added, comes due, or changes), payments-only mode that turns the app into a pure payment experience for finance-first customers, and a new payment-method filter on the unpaid invoices page paired with a bulk action to send pay-by-link emails to every account with a balance and no method on file.

If you couldn't make the live session and want a walkthrough of any of this in the context of your own operation, reach out to your CS rep or drop us a note. The next product release webinar is in 90 days. We'll see you there.

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