OutletIQ vs Pepperi for distributors

Be clear about what you are buying. Pepperi publishes a much wider product than OutletIQ, and for some distributors that breadth is the whole point.

• A buyer portal. Pepperi sells a self service B2B eCommerce storefront where trade customers can reorder without a rep. OutletIQ has nothing equivalent.
• Route accounting and direct store delivery. Pepperi lists these as a solution area. If your drivers invoice and collect at the drop, check Pepperi’s depth here.
• Trade promotions management. Pepperi has a dedicated trade promotions module. OutletIQ records promotional lines and free stock against the visit, but it is not a trade promotion planning tool.
• iOS as well as Android. If your reps carry iPhones, Pepperi supports them. OutletIQ does not.
• Planogram tooling. Pepperi describes barcode based planogram positioning on shelves and stands. OutletIQ captures audit photos but does not manage planograms.
• Scale and references. Pepperi publishes large named customers and a presence in 65+ countries. OutletIQ is a smaller, more focused product.

Pepperi is also built to sell across industries. Its site names eyewear, jewelry, health and beauty and home and gift alongside food, beverage and FMCG. A distributor that carries several of those categories through one sales team may value a single platform that already understands each of them. OutletIQ is shaped around drinks and FMCG outlets only, and it does not pretend otherwise.

If three or more of those are on your requirements list, shortlist Pepperi. The honest answer is that OutletIQ is not trying to be that platform.

A commerce platform answers the question “how do my customers and reps place orders”. A distributor running its own field team has a harder question sitting underneath it: can I trust that the visit behind this order happened, at the price on my list, and who signed off on the stock that went out.

That is the question OutletIQ was built to answer, and it is why the product is narrow.

What that looks like in OutletIQ

• Visits you can defend. Geofence, dwell time, mock GPS detection and location fix density are checked on every visit, not sampled.
• A review queue, not a report. Flagged visits arrive with the reason and the photo evidence, ready to approve or reject.
• Prices the handset cannot change. Totals come from the server price book. A weak connection cannot create a duplicate order.
• Free stock and promotion compliance. Promotional lines and free stock are recorded against the outlet and the visit.
• Approvals through to PDF. Expenses, leave, stock requests and Local Purchase Orders run configurable multi stage chains.
• Phones reps already own. Bring your own device on everyday Android, light on data and storage.

How to choose between them

Write down the three things that went wrong in your field operation last quarter. If they were about customers struggling to reorder, or promotions planned badly, Pepperi’s breadth speaks to that. If they were about reps claiming visits they did not make, orders at the wrong price, or free stock that nobody can account for, bring those exact cases to an OutletIQ demo and ask us to show you where each one would have been caught.

Whichever you trial, ask both vendors the same questions: how is a visit verified, who can change a price, what happens to an order taken with no signal, and what does the full price look like for your team size.