Trade counter website for a wholesale buyer

Business to business websites written as if they were shops

Almost every technique that works on a consumer site is wrong here. A buyer for a discount retailer is not browsing, not being persuaded by lifestyle photography, and not going to be nudged into an impulse decision by a countdown. They have a category to fill, a margin to hit and a limited amount of time.

What they need is unglamorous. Which brands do you actually carry. What condition is the stock. What are the minimum quantities. Can you ship a pallet to Rotterdam. Who is my contact and will the same person answer next week.

There is a second complication that most wholesale sites handle badly. There are two completely different audiences arriving on the same site: people who want to buy stock and people who want to offload it. They want opposite information and if the site does not separate them immediately, both leave.

What I built instead

Eight pages rather than one, because a buyer genuinely does need to go somewhere specific rather than scroll through everything. A brand catalogue you can filter, an A to Z, and a clear split between the buyer path and the seller path from the top of the homepage.

The whole thing is deliberately plainer than the consumer samples. This is the one build where restraint is the design.

Buyers and sellers are separated in the first screen

Two clearly labelled routes, immediately. Trying to serve both audiences with the same copy produces something that convinces neither, and it is the most common failure on wholesale sites.

A filterable brand catalogue and an A to Z

Buyers arrive looking for a specific label far more often than they arrive open minded. Both a search path and a browse path, because they are used differently.

Eight pages instead of one

Every other sample here is a single page, which suits a decision made in one sitting. A buyer will send a colleague a link to one specific thing, and that requires the thing to have its own address.

A named account manager, stated as a policy

In wholesale, continuity of contact is a genuine differentiator and a real anxiety. Naming it as how the business operates is worth more than any amount of copy about service.

Margin language, not value language

Margins that survive a markdown is a sentence written for somebody whose job is measured in gross margin percentage. Consumer language would signal that you do not understand who is reading.

Logistics given real space

Pallets, containers, timescales, where you ship. Unglamorous, and frequently the actual reason a buyer chooses one supplier over another.

Why this one looks the least exciting

Of all twelve samples this is the plainest, and that is deliberate rather than a shortfall. A wholesale buyer visiting on a Tuesday afternoon with three suppliers to compare is not looking to be impressed, they are looking to establish some facts quickly and get on. Any visual ambition that slows that down is working against the business. Judging a business to business site by whether it looks striking is one of the most expensive mistakes in this trade.