The whole site is the search box, and yours comes back empty.
Distribution is a data business. Part-number search, cross-references, spec sheets and whether you have it on the shelf are the whole customer experience, and all of it lives in an ERP that was never meant to talk to a website. That gap is the project.
Somebody is searching a part number right now, and your site cannot find it.
Three things that make this trade its own problem
Part numbers and cross-references are the site
A customer types 6205-2RS or a competitor’s number. If the box does not return that item and the alternates you stock, he is on Grainger before you have finished loading.
The catalog is locked in the ERP
There is no clean export, so the website copy of the product data is either three years stale or was never built at all. Every distributor has this problem and almost nobody has solved it by retyping.
Minimum advertised price stops you publishing
On some lines you are contractually not allowed to show a number. Every product page turns into "call for price", conversion tracking dies with it, and nobody can tell whether the catalog is earning anything.
The first order is won at the counter, the tenth off the shelf
Distributors grow by taking a bigger share of one maintenance manager's basket, not by collecting new names. He buys a bearing on Tuesday because you had it. He buys the seal, the belt and the drive in March because you had all four, and putting them on one PO saves him an afternoon of paperwork. Stocked breadth is what turns a will-call regular into an account, and an account into a standing order nobody shops again.
Type your name in. Watch it become yours.
Switch the device. Change the theme. Type a business name below and the mini-site updates live — this is what it looks like for industrial distributors.
↑ Yours would use your name, your colors, on every phone, tablet and desktop.
Where we would start
- Website DevelopmentA catalog built around part-number and cross-reference search, spec sheets on the page where a buyer expects them, and an estimate list instead of a cart where prices cannot be shown.→
- Apps & Custom SystemsThe bridge from the ERP to the website, so the catalog updates itself and adding two hundred parts is two hundred records rather than two hundred pages of work.→
- Forms, Portals & AutomationsTrade account applications and reorder requests, plus a quote path that still works on a line where you are not allowed to advertise the price.→
- SEOBrand pages, part-family pages and cross-reference pages. People search the manufacturer and the region all day long, and almost no distributor has built the page for it.→
Local or national — where this one is actually decided
A national catalog sitting on a regional counter. Part-number searches come from anywhere; the will-call desk and the delivery truck have a radius. Two intents on one domain, and they have to be kept apart or each one weakens the other.
Where we have actually done this
Motors & Drives, Inc. — a belt, motor and pump distributor trading as Park Electric and Best Electric in New Jersey, in business since 1986 — had no page at all for most of the forty-plus brands they carry. We rebuilt the site as 41 pages with a proper catalog, built as an estimate list rather than a checkout, because Gene did not want parts sold without a person looking at the order first, and we produce their branded sales collateral. Gene Moir’s write-up is on our testimonials page.
Work the number out before you spend anything
What is the admin costing you?. Free, no sign-up, and the answer is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Open the tool
Tell us what your customers search for
Describe the inquiries you want more of and the ones you would rather stop getting. You will get a straight read on what would actually move it, from the person who would do the work.