What a sanitaryware dealer should do differently online

A sanitaryware business has three things a tile business does not: display sets that tie up serious money, an after-sales parts business that runs for years, and products bought in matching families rather than singly. Each changes what your online presence should do, and none of them is solved by a catalogue of photographs.

The advice that suits a tile showroom mostly transfers. These three do not.

Why does the display set change the economics?

Because you cannot show the range, and the customer assumes what you display is what you have.

A display set is expensive — real product, plumbed in, occupying floor space. No exclusive store can display everything, so most show a fraction of what they can supply. A customer who walks in, sees forty pieces and does not find what they want concludes you do not stock it, and leaves to try elsewhere.

The most valuable thing your website can do for a sanitaryware business is show the rest of the range in a way staff can pull up on a tablet in front of a customer standing in the store. That is not eCommerce. It is extending your showroom past what you could afford to plumb in.

It also means the catalogue needs to be genuinely usable on a phone, at speed, by your own staff — a use case most sanitaryware sites are not designed for.

Why do product families matter online?

Because what the customer buys is not what you stock as individual items.

A WC decision resolves into a pan, a cistern, a seat cover and a fitting kit, with rules about which combinations work. A customer choosing online sees a photograph of an assembled product and assumes it is one item. If your site lists the components separately with no relationship between them, they either order incorrectly or give up.

The same applies to matching. Someone buying a basin frequently wants the pedestal, the tap and the accessories in the same finish. Presenting those relationships increases the order and prevents the mismatch that arrives as a return.

This depends on the underlying product data holding families and compatibility as structure rather than as description — the same argument as in choosing software for a sanitaryware business.

What about the spares business?

It is the most under-exploited thing in the trade, and it is almost entirely an online problem.

Seals, hinges, flush mechanisms and cistern parts are needed years after the sale, often for ranges no longer made. The customer usually does not know the model name. They know what it looks like and roughly when they bought it.

A page that lets someone identify the part they need — from a photograph, a model number, or by browsing visually — captures a customer who would otherwise phone three shops and give up. Margins on spares are good, competition is minimal, and the person who finds the part remembers where they found it.

Most manufacturers handle this through a service desk and a spreadsheet held by one person. That is a business sitting unattended.

How does the buying cycle differ?

	Tile	Sanitaryware
Quantity	Must be calculated	Obvious — one basin
Decision driver	How it will look across a floor	Appearance, function and fit
Sample needed	Almost always	Rarely
Repeat contact	Ends with the project	Spares, years later
Who decides	Homeowner, heavily	Homeowner, with plumber input
What blocks the sale	Cannot picture the result	Cannot confirm it fits

That last row is the practical one. Rough-in dimensions, mounting type and plumbing compatibility decide whether a product can be installed, and publishing them prominently prevents the most common return. Most sanitaryware sites bury them in a downloadable sheet, or omit them.

What should a sanitaryware dealer do first?

1. Get the full range online, usable on a phone, so staff can show what is not on display.
2. Publish installation dimensions on the product page, not in a PDF.
3. Show families and matching items together rather than as unrelated products.
4. Build the spares lookup. Small project, unusually high return, no competition.
5. Record showroom visitors with consent, and follow up — the same discipline that works for tile.
6. Sell accessories online if you sell direct at all. Light, valuable and low risk — see bathroom accessories.

Items two and four are the ones nobody does, and both are cheap.

Common questions

Should we sell sanitaryware online or only display it?

Ceramic pieces break in transit often enough to make direct shipping unpredictable. Displaying the range and routing the order to a store is usually the better model, with accessories and spares as the parts genuinely worth shipping.

How do customers identify a part for an old product?

Visually, mostly. A page organised by what the part looks like and what it fits works better than one requiring a model number the customer never knew. Photographs of the parts themselves matter more than descriptions.

Is it worth tracking which dealers display which ranges?

For a manufacturer, yes — display investment is one of the largest discretionary costs in this segment and one of the least measured. Knowing who displays what tells you where support spend is converting.

Does the plumber influence the choice?

Frequently, on function and brand, while the homeowner decides on appearance. That means technical information has to be available for the plumber and visual presentation for the customer — the same product page serving two readers.

More on this: getting more customers into your showroom and choosing software for a sanitaryware business. For how we work with this segment, see sanitaryware.