Google-Sheet Order Routing Template for Marketplace Startups

Over the last nine years, I’ve worked across three startup phases—Zero to One, One to Ten, and Ten to Hundred. And if there’s one tool that has stayed constant through all of them, it is Google Sheets.

So today, I’m sharing a Google Sheets template that I built with my good friend Surya. If you're planning to develop a managed marketplace or are in the -1 to 0 phase of getting one off the ground, this plug-and-play template can save you ~40+ hours of manual work.

Whether you’re launching an at-home dog spa, an online hardware store, or an imitation jewelry business, you’ll run into the same core problem: taking orders, routing them to vendors, and ensuring fulfillment.

The obvious fix is to build an order management system. But in the early-stages, you might not have a tech team or might want them to focus on something else.

That’s where this template comes in—it automates the order routing process, allowing you to focus on growth rather than manual operations.

Alright, let’s go into the details with an example (and see the template in action!)

Say you have zeroed in on building a hyperlocal hardware tools website or app that delivers the right tools to customers in 30 minutes.

Your approach to this could be:

1. Make a list of the top 50 hardware tools in the market

2. Onboard suppliers in a 10km radius

3. Create a website and a catalogue to take orders

4. Relay the orders to the closest supplier

5. Fulfill the order with the supplier’s manpower or from a part-time delivery partner.

From an order journey perspective, the five steps can be broken down into 3 segments

Receiving an order —> Mapping orders to the right supplier —> Picking the order from the supplier and delivering it to the customer

Receiving an order: You have a Shopify/Webflow website with product details and checkout options built in. The customer adds items to the cart and makes the payment. Then, you download the order summary.

Mapping the order: You download the order and upload it in the template(details in the next section), and it gives you the vendor list sorted by distance within a radius of your choice from the customer's location. Additionally, if you have item-level inventory information available, you can upload the details and get the filtered list of vendors with inventory available.

Fulfilling the order: You reach out to the vendor on call or WhatsApp, confirm inventory, and get it delivered via either the vendor’s or your internal manpower.

The templates we are going to cover will be effective in the “mapping the order” section.

Let’s look at how the two templates work.

Template 1: Vendor-level Order Routing Template

Vendor-level Order Routing Template is useful when you are building a marketplace in a space where the vendors are untrained and your current go-to flow is to receive the order and relay the information to them via WhatsApp or calls. If you are in this situation, it’s also likely that you don’t have the vendor inventory information available.

In this case, you would want to know the preferred vendor, sorted by distance - so that you can get in touch with the right vendor without wasting time.

That’s why I built a simple Order Routing Google Sheet—a no-code template that helps you match orders to the best vendors based on:

✅ Proximity (finds the closest vendor using latitude & longitude)
✅ Discount constraints (apply price preferences dynamically)

How it Works?

1️⃣ Drop in your vendor list – Name, location (latitude/longitude), and discount offers
2️⃣ Paste your orders – Each with a location
3️⃣ Set constraints – Define vendor selection criteria (range and min. discount %). Assuming early businesses would want to prioritize service over savings, I’ve made the template such that it prioritizes service (shortest distance) over time. However, if you are looking for a different use case, the template formulas are open. You can tweak them to meet your requirements
4️⃣ Get the best match – The sheet auto-assigns the ideal vendor for every order

When to Use: You want to identify vendor options within a radius and plan to take the availability and serviceability discussion on WhatsApp.

Step-by-Step

1. Upload the vendor details in the ‘Network Details’ tab

   

   Highlighting the tab to upload vendor details and the necessary columns of the template

2. Upload the order details in the Orders tab. (If you don’t have delivery lat lng but have address, you can use extensions like Geocode cells to automate this)

   

   Highlighting the tab to upload the necessary order details

3. In the routing tab, enter the search radius (in km), choose the min discount you would want to be applied on all orders. You can keep this 0% if you don’t want to optimize for this.

   

   Highlighting the radius and min. discount buttons

4. The vendor list sorted by distance will be shown in the cell

   

Availability-based Order Routing Template

The Availability-based Order Routing Template takes the same process up a notch. Your orders will have multiple SKUs. Continuing with the hardware marketplace example, if you have the inventory information from each of the vendors handy, this template takes the availability into account and gives you vendors sorted by distance who have inventory for all the SKUs of the order.

How it Works?

1️⃣ Drop in your vendor list – Name, location (latitude/longitude), and sku-level information
2️⃣ Paste your orders – Each row with Order x SKU details and the drop location
3️⃣ Get the best match – The sheet auto-assigns the vendor with sufficient stock and least distant from the delivery address for every order.

When to use: You have vendor-level availability with you and are willing to identify the closest vendor to fulfill the request.

Step-by-Step

1. Upload the vendor-level and SKU-level inventory in the Vendor Details tab

   

2. Update the list of SKU’s in the SKU List tab

   

3. Upload the order details in Orders list tab. The format here is important. If your data is in a different format, please change it to this format

   

4. The ideal vendor having sufficient stock and the least distance from the order, comes in the output file

   

Every early-stage marketplace runs into this challenge. This template helps you operate like you already have a system in place - without stealing the engineering bandwidth

If you’ve made something of your own for order routing, I’d love to hear about it. Let’s swap notes 😁 

Until next time!

Saurabh 👋