Distributor Order & Inventory Portal

Background

An industrial parts distributor took roughly 70% of its orders by phone and fax into a five-person internal sales desk. The desk spent most of its day on stock and price enquiries rather than selling, and transcription errors drove a persistent return rate that nobody had ever quantified.

The problem

What made it hard.

Trade pricing was genuinely complex — customer-specific contracts, volume breaks, and rebates that the ERP calculated at order entry and nowhere else, so the portal could not simply cache a price list. Customers ordered by their own part numbers, by manufacturer numbers, and frequently by description with a typo. And the older half of the customer base had made clear they would abandon a portal that felt harder than phoning someone they knew.

Approach

What we built.

Pricing is always resolved live against the ERP so a customer never sees a price that would not hold at checkout, with an aggressive Redis cache keyed on customer and SKU to keep that responsive. Search indexes manufacturer numbers, internal SKUs, descriptions and each customer's own part numbering, so people find parts using whatever vocabulary they already have. We kept the interface deliberately plain — reorder from history in two clicks, a visible stock position per branch, and no account creation wall for existing customers, who were pre-provisioned and simply given a link. The sales desk was reframed rather than reduced: enquiries the portal absorbs freed the desk for quoting and account work.