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Commerce & Distribution

Where the catalogue and the channel decide everything

Commerce is not one problem. A brand selling direct, a chain running showrooms, and a distribution house moving other people’s goods want very different systems. But they fail in the same two places: the catalogue, and the channel sitting between them and the customer.

Much of what we know about this we learned in building materials, wrestling with catalogues that run thousands of SKUs deep across sizes, finishes, grades and batches. That transfers directly to any business with a serious product hierarchy and a dealer network in between — which is most businesses that sell anything physical at scale.

What breaks here

Six problems, and we meet them in some combination almost every time.

  1. The catalogue has real depth

    Variants across size, finish, grade and batch, in a hierarchy that standard platforms flatten into a list of products. The moment a customer needs to compare two finishes of the same item in three sizes, a generic store stops being usable — and the people who maintain it start keeping the real catalogue in a spreadsheet.

  2. There is never one price

    Dealer slabs, project rates, regional variation, scheme-linked discounts, and a quotation that has to hold until the order actually lands. Pricing logic is where most commerce projects in this space quietly go over budget, because it is discovered rather than specified.

  3. The order is not finished at checkout

    It has to be allocated against stock that may be in three places, part-dispatched when it is not all available, set against a credit limit, and sometimes returned because it arrived broken. A platform that treats checkout as the end of the transaction is solving the easy half.

  4. The goods are awkward

    Heavy, fragile, or sold by area rather than by unit. Freight that costs more than the margin on a small order, minimum loads, breakage in transit, and a delivery promise you can actually keep. None of this is modelled by a platform designed for shipping a T-shirt.

  5. Samples are a process nobody has built

    Requested, dispatched, chased, and converted into an order weeks later — or not. Almost every business in this position tracks samples on paper or not at all, and almost none can say what proportion of them turn into anything.

  6. The channel decides adoption

    A dealer portal nobody opens is not a dealer portal. Whether a system is used is settled by the person in the middle, who has his own way of working and no particular reason to change it. Build for the brand that commissioned it and you get a system the brand loves and the channel ignores.

Where the segments differ

eCommerce & D2C. Selling directly, usually alongside an existing dealer network that is watching carefully. The hard question is rarely the storefront — it is how you sell direct without the channel deciding you have become a competitor. Pricing, territory and fulfilment all have to answer that before the first order.

Retail & showroom chains. Several locations, shared stock, and a customer who visits one branch and buys at another. The gap is usually between what the floor staff can see and what head office can see — and a stock figure the salesperson does not trust is a stock figure he will phone the warehouse about instead.

Distributors & dealers. Moving somebody else’s goods on thin margins, with credit on both sides and schemes that settle months later. Orders, claims and secondary sales reporting matter more here than any storefront, and the business runs on relationships that no system captures unless it is built to.

What we build for it

  • Commerce platforms, on Shopify or custom-built, with the decision made on catalogue complexity rather than on preference
  • Catalogue systems for deep hierarchies — variants, attributes, media, and the import routes to keep them current
  • Dealer and distributor portals with role-based pricing, order history and credit visibility
  • Order management connected to the ERP you already run, covering allocation, part dispatch, credit and returns
  • Field sales and showroom tools that work on a phone, in a showroom, in front of a customer
  • Secondary sales visibility — what happened to the goods after they left your invoice
  • Customer and channel messaging on WhatsApp, for order updates, quotations and payment reminders

What this means for your project

You get the Shopify-or-custom recommendation in writing before any build starts, and we have no commercial incentive either way. The deciding factors are almost always catalogue complexity and what the order has to do after checkout — not which platform is fashionable.

We will ask about your dealers early. Not out of politeness — because channel adoption is the single most common reason systems in this sector go unused, and it is cheaper to design for it than to discover it after launch.

Pricing and the post-checkout flow get scoped properly. They are where budgets are lost, so we would rather spend the time on them at the start, with you, than quote around them and come back later.

We have built dealer management, catalogue, estimation and exhibition capture products of our own for exactly this kind of business, and we have the same problems our clients do. See what we have built →

The other industries we work in

Tell us what you are building

Describe the catalogue and the channel, and we will tell you how we would approach it — including when the answer is something simpler than you expected.

Start a conversation

Tell us what you are building

We will tell you how we would approach it, and whether we are the right fit.

Start a conversation