We build the ordering side of an industrial business: contract pricing, quotations, reorders and the ERP connection behind them.
Industrial ecommerce has little in common with a consumer store. Prices depend on who is logged in, half the catalogue is quoted rather than listed, orders arrive as part numbers from a purchasing system, and your distributors are watching. Code Industrial designs and builds for those conditions.
Ordering is the visible part. Most of the engagement is the catalogue underneath it, the account model around it and the integration behind it.
A B2B ecommerce agency for manufacturers is working on a transaction with almost none of the assumptions a retail store is built on. The price is contractual and specific to the account. Quantities follow pack sizes and minimum orders. Delivery involves incoterms, freight classes and sometimes a hazardous goods declaration. Approval may sit with a purchasing department the buyer does not control. And a large share of the catalogue is not listed at all, because it is quoted. The design work is mostly about making that complexity invisible to the person placing the order.
Account-based catalogues and contract pricing, quote-to-order flows, rapid reorder by part number and from order history, account hierarchies and approval steps, ERP and PIM integration, stock and lead-time display, payment on account, punchout and EDI where a customer requires it, and the distributor model that sits around all of it.
ERP implementation, warehouse and logistics systems, and the commercial pricing policy itself. We build against the pricing rules your commercial team sets and integrate with the systems that already hold stock and orders. Deciding what a customer pays remains yours, and it needs to be settled before the build rather than during it.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The right build depends less on what you make than on how you sell it. These four models cover most manufacturers who ask us about online ordering.
What manufacturers ask before committing to online ordering.
A B2B ecommerce agency for manufacturers starts from account-based pricing, quotations, pack sizes, credit terms and ERP integration, which is where the cost and the risk sit. A general ecommerce agency will build a good storefront and then meet those requirements as exceptions. The catalogue underneath is also different: technical attributes, drawings, documents and compatibility, rather than images and variants of size and colour.
It can if it is launched without a channel decision, and this is the single most common reason these projects stall. The workable pattern for most manufacturers is a distributor-facing ordering platform plus an open catalogue that routes end-user enquiries to the right partner. Partners get a better tool than they have now and you gain visibility of demand. The boundary needs to be agreed with the channel before anything is built.
No, and most industrial manufacturers should not. A common structure is an open technical catalogue with full specifications and documents, which is what search visibility depends on, and pricing and ordering behind an account login. Buyers can evaluate the product without an account and transact once they have one. Hiding the technical content along with the price is the mistake to avoid, since that is what makes you findable.
It depends on how much of the complexity sits in pricing and integration. Where the catalogue and content are the main asset and ordering is account-based, WordPress with a commerce layer connected to the ERP is often the practical answer. Where transaction volume and tax or logistics rules are heavy, a dedicated commerce platform earns its cost. We recommend after the scoping stage rather than before it.
Usually, and the shape depends on what the ERP exposes. Live calls give accurate account pricing and stock at the cost of a dependency, so we build caching and a defined fallback for when the system is unavailable. Where live access is not possible, scheduled synchronisation with clearly stated stock indications works for most industrial buyers, who are more tolerant of an indication than of a wrong figure.
By treating adoption as part of the project. That means choosing which accounts move first, giving sales representatives a reason to promote it rather than a reason to fear it, and making the reorder path faster than sending an email, which is the standard it is really competing with. We plan onboarding during the build and report on activation afterwards, because a platform without users is the usual failure mode here.
Direct ordering for your accounts, a distributor platform, a quotation flow or a punchout requirement from a customer tender. Tell us the commercial model and we will tell you how we would approach the B2B ecommerce work, what we would need from your ERP and roughly what it costs.