Free ConsultA supplier selling to the public and to the trade is really running two businesses on one website, and they cannot see the same prices. The answer is a second site behind a login — registration, approval, trade rates, order history and a dashboard worth using. It is the one build on this site we have already done.
Three things we see on nearly every site in this industry. None of them are about how the site looks.
Every trade customer rings for a price, and the answer depends on who picks up and what they remember about that account. It is slow for them, inconsistent for you, and impossible to scale past the person who knows.
"Do you have it in stock" is the most common call a supplier takes and the least valuable. The information exists; it is just not on the website where the customer is already looking.
Buyers search for the product — the timber, the tile, the fixing, the finish — not for "building supplies Melbourne". A five-page site about the company cannot rank for any of the things people actually type.
The signature build
This is the one on this site we have actually built. Square Flooring sells to the public and to the trade at different prices, and those two audiences cannot see the same website. The answer was a second site behind a login. The first three below are live; the fourth is the usual next step, and we would quote it.
A builder applies with their trade details. Square Flooring approves, declines or asks for more, and the approval stays with a person. Nobody gets trade pricing by guessing a URL.
An approved account sees wholesale pricing where the public sees retail, from the same catalogue.
Structured quote requests that capture what is needed to price a job, and one place to see what has come in, what has been answered, and which account applications are waiting. Every quote and registration fires an analytics event, so the search and ad spend is judged on enquiries rather than clicks.
The obvious next step for a supplier whose trade customers buy the same items every fortnight, and quoted separately. We have not shipped it, so we are not going to imply we have.
What we'd build
Six of the things we build or run, chosen for this industry. Each says whether it is in the monthly plan or quoted on top — custom software is software, not pages. Plans and prices are on the pricing page.
The public sees retail pricing; a logged-in builder sees wholesale. Registration goes through an approval step so you decide who gets trade rates, rather than publishing them to the world. Multiple price tiers and per-account terms are a step beyond what we built for Square Flooring, and are quoted on their own.
Live availability against the product a customer is looking at, so the phone stops ringing with "do you have it in stock". For a supplier this single feature usually removes more calls than everything else combined.
A new trade account application lands in Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive with the ABN, the trade type and the source attached — so your sales side knows a new builder registered before they ring for a price.
Trade quotes generated from what is in the cart, with the customer's tier applied. Syncing to Xero, MYOB or Unleashed depends on what your system exposes, so we check before we quote it.
Buyers search for the product — the timber, the tile, the fixing, the finish — not for "building supplies Melbourne". Category and product-family pages are where a supplier's search traffic actually lives.
A builder's review carries more weight with the next builder than a homeowner's does. Asking at the right point in a trade relationship is a different job to asking a walk-in customer.
A basic AI chatbot trained on your business, answering common customer questions on your site around the clock. We build it, train it and connect it free with every plan — AI message usage is billed separately.
Anything beyond basic question answering — lead capture and qualification, a large knowledge base, appointment booking, or connecting to your CRM and other systems — is quoted per project.
Your existing tools
Every tool listed here publishes a developer API, which is why it is listed — we checked. That is not the same as a connection already built: what can be pushed depends on your plan and setup, so we scope it before quoting. Where your software has no API, we say so rather than quote around it.
How the job is won
Very different from a retail buyer, and worth designing for separately.
Usually a specific material or spec, often on site, often on a phone with dirty hands.
If either is missing they ring a competitor who publishes both. This is where most suppliers lose them.
Once they have bought twice, they want trade pricing. The application should take a minute, not a PDF.
This is the whole prize. A trade customer with an account and an order history rarely shops around again.
Worth being blunt about
Trade customers are not resistant to technology — they are resistant to anything slower than a phone call to someone who knows them. A portal with their pricing, their history and a one-tap reorder is genuinely faster than ringing. A portal that makes them hunt for a price is worse, and they will never open it twice. That is the whole design problem, and most wholesale sites lose it.
What your customers type
These are the kinds of phrases people use when they need a trade supplier. Which of them are worth chasing depends on volume, difficulty and what the work is worth to you — that is what the keyword research settles before we write a word, and it is the first thing we do on any project.
Most trade suppliers run something like Shopify, WooCommerce, Unleashed, Cin7 or Xero. Where that software publishes an API we can feed it directly; where it does not, the enquiry still arrives as structured data rather than a paragraph of email. We check which before we quote anything.
Google Ads
A supplier's ad money is nearly always wasted on broad category terms. The conversions come from people searching for a specific product they have already decided on.
Ad spend is not part of the plan — it goes straight to Google. What the plan covers is building and managing the campaigns. See how we run Google Ads →
Being straight with you
We are a small Melbourne agency with two clients so far. Here is what that means for a project in your industry.
Flooring supply for retail and trade. Website, a trade account system with logins and tiered pricing, SEO and Google Business Profile.
An NDIS provider with no content, no photography and no time. We asked questions and produced everything else — copy, imagery and their Google Business Profile.
This is the one industry on the site where the case study and the page describe the same work. Everything above is something we have actually delivered, not a proposal.
FAQs
They are choosing a builder for two years of their life.
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Learn more →Long decisions, seasonal demand
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