Pipes & Fittings

Pipes and fittings have the largest routine SKU count in building materials. Multiply material by diameter by pressure class by fitting type and you are into the thousands before you have added a single variant — and unlike most catalogues, the items have rules about which ones work together.

What makes this segment hard

Compatibility is a rule, not a suggestion. Diameter, pressure class, material and joining method all have to agree. A quotation that pairs incompatible items is not a minor error — it arrives on site and stops work.

Project sales run on a bill of materials. A plumbing contractor does not shop, they submit a specification. Turning that into a quotation means resolving hundreds of line items, checking availability across all of them, and pricing at project rates rather than list. Doing it by hand takes a day and contains errors.

The plumber drives pull-through. The specifier is often the installer, and their loyalty is bought with schemes, points and training. Tracking that properly — who claimed what, whether it was paid, and whether it changed anything — separates a scheme that works from one that leaks money.

Nobody can navigate the catalogue. With thousands of items, browsing is useless. Finding a product means filtering by the attributes that matter, and most catalogue software is not built to filter on four technical dimensions at once.

What we build for it

• Attribute-driven catalogues that stay usable at several thousand SKUs.
• Compatibility rules enforced at quotation, so invalid combinations cannot be sent out.
• Bill of materials import and bulk quotation against project pricing.
• Plumber and contractor loyalty schemes with claim tracking and settlement.
• Dealer and distributor management through Sales360.
• Technical data sheets and installation guidance where the installer will actually look for them.

Where implementations usually fail

The catalogue is built as a flat product list because that is what the export from the old system looked like. Six months later nobody can find anything, and the sales team goes back to the printed price list.

And bulk quotation gets built to handle twenty lines, then meets a real project with four hundred and times out.

If this sounds like your business

Tell us what you are trying to fix. You will not spend the first meeting explaining pipes and fittings to us, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

See also: building materials overview · what we have built · what we build