B2B E-commerce for an Electrical Trade Supplier
Industry: Trade & Wholesale · Location: Sydney metro · Timeline: 12 weeks · Outcome: Online orders overtook phone orders within eight months.
The Problem
An electrical trade supplier sold to licensed electricians and contractors. Every customer had their own negotiated price list, credit terms and account limits. Their old website was a brochure site that showed retail prices and told visitors to "call for a quote". Younger tradians increasingly expected to order online, and the business was losing them to competitors who already had a proper B2B storefront.
What We Did
We built a custom B2B storefront on top of their existing accounting system. Each customer logs in and sees their own negotiated pricing, their available credit, their order history and their delivery schedules. The cart enforces credit limits automatically. Orders flow into the accounting system overnight, and the warehouse picks them from a printed docket.
We did not use an off-the-shelf B2B platform because none of them supported the supplier's complex customer-specific pricing tiers out of the box. Building custom was cheaper than fighting a SaaS platform for six months.
The Result
Within eight months of launch, online orders made up 35% of monthly revenue and overtook phone orders for the first time. The sales team now spends their time on high-value accounts rather than taking routine reorders. The business has since expanded online ordering to two more branches.
Why we did not use Shopify Plus
The client initially asked for a Shopify store. We wrote a short proof-of-concept to test whether Shopify's B2B features could handle their pricing model. They could not: the supplier had four pricing tiers per customer, volume discounts that depended on category, and credit-limit enforcement that changed based on payment history. Shopify's native B2B modules could not model that without custom plugins, which would have been more expensive than building from scratch.
We built a custom storefront on a standard web stack, connected directly to the accounting system. The advantage is that pricing logic lives in one place: when the supplier renegotiates a customer's terms, the change flows through to the storefront the next day. The warehouse sees orders in the system they already use. There is no third platform taking a cut of every transaction.
Need a B2B storefront with customer-specific pricing?
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Book a Free ConsultationFrequently Asked Questions
Shopify or a custom build for B2B?
It depends on your pricing complexity. If you have multiple pricing tiers, category-based volume discounts and credit limits that change with payment history, Shopify's native B2B modules often cannot model it — and a custom build ends up cheaper than stacking plugins.
How fast can online orders become a real channel?
In this project, online orders reached 35% of monthly revenue and overtook phone orders within eight months of launch. A custom storefront that mirrors your actual pricing and terms drives adoption quickly.
Can the storefront enforce our credit limits automatically?
Yes. Customer-specific pricing and credit limits are enforced at checkout, so a customer over their limit sees a clear message instead of placing an order your accounts team has to chase.