Invoicing your customer without exposing your supplier
If you resell, there are two separate transactions and they need two separate documents. Confusing them is how a customer ends up knowing exactly what you paid.
Two transactions, not one
You buy from a supplier. You sell to a customer. These are distinct contracts at distinct prices, and each produces its own paperwork:
| Supplier → you | You → customer | |
|---|---|---|
| Document | Their receipt to you | Your invoice to them |
| Supplier shown | The merchant you bought from | You |
| Price shown | Your cost | Your selling price |
| Goes in | Your expenses | Your revenue |
Your customer has no business seeing the first one. It is not secrecy for its own sake — it is simply a different contract that they are not a party to.
What actually leaks
Three routes, in rough order of how often they happen:
- Forwarding the supplier's document. The fastest way to hand over your margin, your sourcing, and the merchant's store name in one attachment.
- The packing slip in the box. Most marketplace sellers will omit pricing on request; many will not omit their own branding. Check before you scale, not after.
- The tracking page. Carrier tracking frequently displays the shipper's name. There is no fixing this after the fact — it is a reason to think about which carriers and services you use.
The commercially expensive part is rarely the price itself. It is the supplier name. A customer who learns your cost may still buy from you; a customer who learns your source has no further need of you.
What your invoice has to carry
Because you are the seller of record, the document is a normal commercial invoice from your business:
- Your company name, address and registration details as the supplier
- Your VAT number, and VAT charged at your rate, if you are registered
- Your own sequential invoice number — not the marketplace's order ID
- Your customer as the recipient
- Your selling price, your shipping charge, your terms
The supplier's order number is useful to you as an internal reference for fulfilment and returns. It has no place on the customer's copy.
The tax side is not optional
Reselling means you are selling, which in most jurisdictions means registering once you pass a threshold, charging the right rate for where your customer is, and keeping both sides of the trade in your books. The purchase document matters as much as the sale one — it is what substantiates your cost of goods, and without it your margin is taxed as though it were revenue.
Cross-border adds import VAT and duty, which may be collected at the border, prepaid by the platform, or billed to your customer on delivery. Which of those happens changes who owes what, and it is worth knowing before the first parcel rather than after the first complaint.
Doing it without a manual step
OrderVault reads the supplier order page you already have open and produces a clean PDF with your company as the issuer, your logo, your VAT number and your own numbering. It has an option to omit the original marketplace seller entirely, so the document you send is yours rather than a reformatted version of theirs. Everything happens in your browser — no account, and your order data is never uploaded anywhere.