Ecommerce
Selling technical products online is a different problem from selling consumer goods. The buyer needs to be certain the part fits, and no amount of photography substitutes for a specification they can check.
What makes industrial e-commerce different
The buyer arrives knowing more than the seller expects and needing something more specific. They are not browsing for inspiration, they are confirming that a particular item meets a requirement.
That inverts the usual priorities. Large photographs and lifestyle imagery matter less. Dimensions, tolerances, materials, certifications, compatibility and lead time matter more, and a store that hides them behind a downloadable PDF loses the sale to one that does not.
Decided before the build
How the catalogue is structured. It is the decision everything else inherits, and the expensive one to change later.
- What is a product and what is a variant. Get this wrong and you either have thousands of near-identical products or variants nobody can navigate.
- Which attributes buyers filter on. These have to be structured data, not free text buried in a description.
- How compatibility is expressed. Fits-with relationships are what technical buyers actually search on.
- Where product data lives. If an ERP is the source of truth, the store reflects it rather than becoming a second copy that drifts.
- Whether pricing is public. Account-specific pricing, quote-only lines and public list pricing can coexist, but that has to be designed rather than discovered.
Choosing a platform
| Platform | Best when | Constraint |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | A standard catalogue where checkout, tax and compliance should be someone else's problem | Complex variant structures fight the model |
| WooCommerce | The store is secondary to a content-led WordPress site | You own the security and PCI scope of your own checkout |
| Custom | Configuration, engineering review or deep ERP integration is the actual product | Everything checkout solves for you becomes yours to build and maintain |
The default should be a hosted platform. Building your own checkout is a serious undertaking that most catalogues do not need, and the cost shows up later as maintenance rather than upfront as budget.
What decides whether the store gets found
Category pages, and product data that machines can read.
Category pages accumulate the most internal link equity and outlast the products in them, so they deserve real content rather than a grid. Product data needs to be structured, accurate and present in the raw HTML, because a price that only appears after JavaScript runs is invisible to anything that does not execute it.
That last point is becoming more consequential as automated systems read catalogues to compare options. Whatever that turns into commercially, structured and accurate product data is worth having regardless, since it is the same work conventional search rewards.
Search inside the store
On a technical catalogue, internal search is a primary navigation route rather than a fallback, and it needs to handle part numbers, abbreviations and the way people actually type them.
It is also the cheapest research available: internal search logs tell you exactly what buyers wanted and could not find, in their own words. Most stores never look.
Where this fits
Inside web development. The search side is e-commerce SEO, product feeds usually connect to paid media, and improving how a live store converts is conversion optimization.
Frequently asked questions
We have 40,000 SKUs in a spreadsheet. Where do we start?
With the data, before any platform decision. A catalogue that size stands or falls on how consistently attributes are recorded, and a spreadsheet built by several people over years usually has the same attribute written four ways. Cleaning it is the project.
Should we show prices publicly?
A commercial decision rather than a technical one, but be clear about the trade. Hidden pricing loses buyers who are comparing and will not enquire to find out, and it removes you from shopping surfaces entirely. Account-specific pricing behind a login alongside public list pricing is usually the workable middle.
Do we need to sell online at all, or just show the catalogue?
A searchable catalogue that generates enquiries is a legitimate and often better answer for products that need engineering input. It is also considerably cheaper to build, and you can add transactions later once you know what people actually order.
See where you stand
We will review your current search visibility and show you what buyers find when they look for what you do.
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