Can a wholesale distributor sell its data to AI companies?

Often, yes, for order, inventory and purchasing history: as of October 2026, ten providers name distribution or order and inventory records. Pricing is the condition: supplier costs, special pricing agreements and customer contract prices may be other companies’ confidential information.

What records does a distributor keep that AI buyers ask for?

The order-to-cash and procure-to-pay trail, and the email around it. Polyshares’ NetSuite export guide (September 2026) describes the core: “NetSuite runs order to cash and procure to pay in one system. A sales order links to its fulfillment, invoice and payment, so the full life of each transaction is recorded with dates and approvals.” For a distributor that means quotes, sales orders, backorders and substitutions, pick tickets and shipments, invoices, credits and returns; purchase orders, receipts and vendor returns; stock levels, transfers and cycle counts; and the price files behind every line.

Providers that name the trade or its records describe the same records. Sell My Business Data lists “Orders, invoices, fulfillment events, customer history, logistics data and supplier information” from “ERP, WMS, CRM, accounting, ticketing and project systems with years of operating history”. Mercor lists “Order records, inventory logs, listings” under Retail & E-commerce. Telegraph Lab describes operating records as “How orders move, problems get solved, and knowledge builds up over time”.

Picture a hypothetical electrical distributor. A contractor emails for 40 fixtures and the branch has 12. Inside sales offers another manufacturer’s equivalent, prices it under a special pricing agreement for that contractor’s project, ships 12 now and backorders the rest, raises a purchase order, and after shipment files a claim with the manufacturer for the agreed cost. The ERP holds each step as a transaction. The email holds why the substitute was acceptable and why the price was what it was. That second part makes it a record of decisions, and the pricing in it is the part to check before anything is licensed.

Which buyers say they want distribution records?

As of October 2026, ten providers name distribution, supply chain, or order, inventory and fulfillment records or systems on their own pages. Data Licensing Report applies the same test to every provider, Telegraph Lab included: its own pages must name the trade, its records or software specific to it. Avelence, Miro Advisory and Sell My Business Data are introducers, so any payment would come from the buyer they find.

Provider	Type	What its pages name
Avelence	Introducer	“Invoices, orders, and reconciliation history that connect transactions to the work behind them”
Defined.ai	Licensing agent	“stock information” and sales data among what operating businesses generate
FileYield	Listing marketplace; buys nothing itself	A “Logistics/Supply Chain” category including “warehouse inventory”
Mercor	Licenses directly	“Order records, inventory logs, listings” under Retail & E-commerce, and Logistics & Supply Chain among its industries
micro1	Licenses directly	“fulfillment workflows, inventory management” under Operations & logistics
Miro Advisory	Introducer	“TMS and WMS” and “e-commerce and fulfillment” among industry-specific systems (source)
Polyshares	Licenses directly	Sales orders, fulfillment and procure-to-pay records, in its NetSuite guide (guide)
Sell My Business Data	Introducer	Distribution among target industries, with orders, fulfillment events and supplier information (source)
Telegraph Lab (affiliated)	Licenses directly	“Logistics & distribution” among target industries, and records of “How orders move” (source)
Troveo	Licensing agent	“Inventory Management” among the systems of record it names (source), and “logistics/field service/supply chain” in its assessment (source)

Only Sell My Business Data and Telegraph Lab name distribution itself, and none names wholesale. Handshake AI and Nyne name NetSuite but no order, inventory or distribution records (Handshake AI, Nyne). Scale AI lists “Retail & Consumer” and “Freight Brokerage & 3PL” but not distribution (Scale AI). Providers that name only logistics are on the trucking page.

Our supplier costs and customer contract prices are confidential. Can pricing go in?

Sometimes, but pricing is where a distributor’s records carry other companies’ information. It comes from two directions:

• Supplier programs. ASD Market Week’s June 2026 explainer defines a special pricing agreement as “a targeted contract for a named end customer that allows a partner to sell below list price while the manufacturer funds the gap”, and ship and debit as the process in which “the distributor sells at the SPA price, submits a debit claim, then gets credited for the difference”. Each claim pairs a manufacturer’s funded cost with a named customer and a sell price. Your distribution agreement and the program terms say whether that is the manufacturer’s confidential information and what you may use it for.
• Customer agreements. National-account, project and contract pricing can sit under customer agreements with their own confidentiality terms.

Read what each document defines as confidential and what use it allows; is it legal to sell company records lists what to look for in a clause. If pricing is restricted, you can leave special-pricing claims and rebate files out, license older years only, or replace amounts: in the sample tool, turning off “Keep money amounts” replaces prices and totals with [AMOUNT]. What providers say about competitors seeing your prices is covered in what “anonymized” means. Whether a given clause allows a license is a question for your lawyer.

Could licensing our price files raise an antitrust question?

It can, where current prices could reach competitors. The FTC and the Justice Department withdrew their 2000 guidelines on collaborations among competitors in December 2024, and in February 2026 asked for public comment on new guidance, naming “algorithmic pricing, information and data sharing” among the topics. Until that guidance exists, the agreement is where you control the risk: what the buyer may do with current price files, and whether they could be combined with other distributors’ prices in a product your competitors use. Ask antitrust counsel before current price files go into scope.

What about customer credit files and contacts?

Treat credit files as a separate decision. If your credit applications carry personal guarantees and you pull the guarantors’ consumer credit reports, those reports fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which says a person “shall not use or obtain a consumer report for any purpose unless” the purpose is authorized and certified (15 U.S.C. §1681b(f)). Credit files are easier to leave out whole than to sort.

Customer records also name people: buyers, purchasing agents and site contacts, with emails and phone numbers. The sample tool handles these by column header, reading Customer, Bill To, Ship To, Contact, Vendor or Supplier columns in a CSV export as names, swapping them for labels, and replacing phone numbers and street addresses.

What could a distributor’s records be worth?

As of October 2026, none of the ten publishes a figure for distribution records. Seven publish program-wide figures or statements, each the provider’s own:

Provider	Published figure	What it is
Avelence	$160K to $500K at 20 employees (source); $375,000 to $1,000,000 at 100 (source), both with ten years of US records	Model outputs, each “not a buyer offer”
Defined.ai	“$600K+ Average partner revenue”	An average across its dataset marketplace
micro1	$100k+, $500k+ and $1M+ tiers (source)	Advertised tiers
Miro Advisory	$100K–$1M+ for operating datasets (source)	“Indicative potential licensing values”
Polyshares	“Deals typically land between $100K and $2M paid to the company”	Advertised deal size
Telegraph Lab (affiliated)	$100K to $4M, subject to data review and agreed terms (source)	Advertised range
Troveo	“AI labs and startups are actively paying six figures for company data exports”	Provider statement; the owner is paid a share of each sale

Mercor and Sell My Business Data publish no range, and FileYield’s per-record price tiers are generic. How much is my company’s data worth? compares every provider’s figures and conditions.

How does a distributor start?

With the ERP’s history and a decision about pricing, both before anything is exported.

1. Start with the ERP and what surrounds it. The ERP (orders, purchasing, inventory, price files), any warehouse management system, EDI history, CRM, email (inside sales, purchasing, customer service), and shared drives with price sheets and line cards.
2. Find the oldest record in each. Years stranded in an ERP you replaced count only if you can still open them. Record those dates in your data inventory.
3. Mark the pricing exclusions. Special-pricing claims, rebate files, credit files and customers whose agreements make their pricing confidential.
4. Export orders as CSV. In NetSuite, Polyshares’ guide describes counting transactions with a saved search and exporting the results as CSV; it notes that a Full CSV Export does not export all data and points to saved searches for each record type for complete transaction history (guide). In Business Central, a list such as “customers, sale orders, or invoices” exports to Excel (Microsoft Learn, updated March 9, 2026); save it as CSV. QuickBooks reports are covered on the QuickBooks Online page.
5. Check the export, then apply. Run it through the sample tool with amounts kept or replaced, depending on what your supplier and customer terms allow. Then send the application to our team for review.