The problem, in one paragraph
PromTradeLviv is a 22-person FMCG distributor moving roughly $4M of beverages, packaged dry goods, and household consumables per quarter across western Ukraine and into eastern Poland. When we first sat down with them in February 2025, they were running the entire operation on a stack that consisted of: WhatsApp for orders, six spreadsheets for inventory and pricing (one per supplier), 1C for accounting, and a paper logbook for proof of delivery. Order-to-invoice latency was four days on average, and the founder estimated reconciliation alone absorbed two full-time-equivalents.
The wedge: catalog first
We started with the catalog. We didn't try to replace WhatsApp. We didn't try to replace 1C. We did one thing: we got every SKU, every per-buyer pricebook, and every MOQ into a single source of truth that the sales reps could open on their phones during a customer visit. Deployment took three weeks. Adoption was 100% by week six because the alternative was — literally — carrying a printed binder.
Within a month of the catalog being live, customers started asking the sales reps if they could place orders themselves rather than calling. That was the pull we waited for to ship Orders.
Orders + invoicing
We turned on customer-facing ordering in April 2025. Three weeks later, 60% of repeat orders were coming in self-serve. By September the number was 84%. The sales reps did not lose their jobs — they moved up the value chain, doing sample-and-spec calls and bringing on new buyers rather than re-keying the same SKUs into 1C every morning.
Invoices generate automatically the moment an order is confirmed by both sides. The 1C integration writes back the line items. Reconciliation dropped from two FTEs to roughly six hours per week for one person. Order-to-invoice latency, the founder's single most-watched metric, fell from four days to nine hours.
Credit (the unlock)
With six months of clean order data, we underwrote PromTradeLviv's buyers for embedded 30/60-day terms in October 2025. The platform extends credit; PromTradeLviv keeps the relationship. The default rate after six months is below 1%, which we attribute mostly to underwriting against actual order history rather than against trade references and intuition.
Credit drove the biggest single line on revenue growth. Buyers who had been ordering twice a month started ordering weekly. Average order size rose 22%. GMV is up 38% year over year, in a category that's growing low single digits.
What didn't work
We tried to launch the returns module in February 2026 and got the adoption wrong. We assumed PromTradeLviv would want photographic proof of return condition in the same flow as proof of delivery. They didn't — their margins are thin enough that any friction on returns means delays, and delays cost them more than disputed returns do. We pulled the photo-required step in April and adoption normalized within two weeks.
Lesson: the right amount of friction on a returns flow varies wildly by margin profile. Don't default to “more proof.”
What the customer said
From a March 2026 interview with the founder, lightly edited:
“Before Faktorist, half my morning was opening spreadsheets and the other half was on WhatsApp telling the warehouse what was actually in stock versus what people wanted to order. Now I open one screen, and the screen knows. The big change isn't the technology — it's that I can stop being the bottleneck. We grew 38% this year without hiring. That's not a software story. That's a freedom story.”
The numbers, twelve months in
GMV +38%. Order-to-invoice from 4 days to 9 hours. Two full-time-equivalents released from reconciliation, redeployed to sales. Active SKUs grew from 1,650 to 2,400. Eleven sales reps, up from nine. Default rate on embedded credit below 1%. Customer-facing ordering 84% of repeat volume. Net retention on the customer side north of 90%.