Rebuilding a wholesale website that talks to everything behind it.

Crown Supplies has been supplying Norfolk businesses from Norwich for over 30 years. Care homes, schools, cafés, pubs and cleaning firms buy everything from blue roll and degreaser to glassware, food boxes and catering equipment from them, and there are around 15,000 products in the range.

Most of those customers have a trade account, and every account has its own price file. That one detail shaped the whole project.

The problem with the old site

The old website was an OpenCart shop that had been added to for years. It showed one price to everyone, so a trade customer couldn't see what they would actually pay. Most of them did the sensible thing and picked up the phone or sent an email instead.

That meant the office was taking orders by hand and then typing each one into StoreFeeder, the system the warehouse picks from. Prices lived in Crown's own back-office software. Stock lived in StoreFeeder and in supplier feeds. Invoices lived in Xero. None of it was properly joined up with the website.

So the brief wasn't really "a new website". It was: let trade customers order online at their own prices, and get those orders to the warehouse without anyone typing them in again.

Two sites in one

We built it as a public shop and a separate trade portal, on one catalogue.

The public shop is for anyone. Search covers the whole catalogue and comes back quickly, and over time it learns from what people actually click and buy, so the most useful products rise to the top. Product pages lead with the key points, then show whether the item is in stock or how long it will take. A free delivery bar in the basket shows how far you are from the threshold.

The trade portal is where account customers sign in. Every product shows their own agreed price. There's a quick order pad for people who know their codes: type the code, the quantity, press Enter, and move on to the next line. Past orders can be reordered in one click, and invoices download straight from Xero.

Bigger customers often have more than one person ordering, so an account's admin can add their own team and give each person a role. Buyers can order, Accounts can see invoices, and Admins can do both and manage the team.

Getting orders to the warehouse

When a trade customer places an order, it lands in a review queue for Crown's staff. Once it's released, it goes straight into StoreFeeder on the same channel the warehouse already works from. Nobody keys it in, and nothing changes for the people picking and packing.

For anything not in the price file, staff can set a trade price, send a quote, and the customer can accept it and order from it in the portal.

Keeping everything in step

A trade website is only as good as its prices and stock, so a lot of the work happened where nobody will see it.

• Every night, Crown's back-office software sends over price files and customer accounts, and the site picks them up automatically.
• Stock comes in from StoreFeeder and supplier feeds through the day.
• Products that aren't held in stock show a lead time instead of "out of stock", and the team gets an alert when one is ordered.
• New products added in StoreFeeder appear on the site, and archived ones come off.

Moving without losing Google

Crown has been online a long time, and a lot of their customers find them through Google. Losing that in a rebuild would undo much of the good.

We moved all 15,000 products across from OpenCart with their photos and descriptions, then mapped thousands of old web addresses to their new pages so every link and ranking carries over. The site has proper structured data for products, a sitemap that keeps up with the catalogue, and a Google Shopping feed built from live prices and stock.

Built to be trusted

Pricing and ordering rules are the kind of thing that must not quietly break, so the site has over 1,600 automated tests covering prices, ordering, stock and permissions. Before launch we also ran a full security review: customers can only ever see their own account, and prices are always worked out on the server, never trusted from the browser.

What's next

Crown's new site goes live in December. After that, the plan is to move more of the back office into it, so the website becomes the main place the business runs from rather than one more system to keep in step.

If you run a trade or wholesale business and your customers still order by phone because your website can't show them their prices, we'd be glad to talk it through. Visit kyurkchiev.group and book a free discovery call.