Tool Supply & Wholesale · Riverside, CA
A Wholesale E-Commerce Catalog and Inventory System for a Tool Supplier in Riverside, CA
The Tool Guys were a nationwide telemarketer. Now farmers and field workers reach their whole warehouse with the click of a button, and the owners run stock on software they own.
About the Client
The Tool Guys are a tool supplier in Riverside, CA, selling hand tools, power tools, air and automotive equipment to working shops, and they sold nationwide by phone. They wanted to be reachable without a sales call.
The Challenge
A telemarketing operation puts a person between the customer and the warehouse. That works until the customer is a farmer at the end of a long day or a field worker who needs a part before tomorrow morning, and neither of them wants to sit through a phone call to find out whether something is on the shelf. The Tool Guys wanted to make their warehouse accessible to exactly those buyers, with the click of a button instead of a conversation.
The second problem was the back office. Hundreds of items with real stock levels usually means renting an inventory platform, forever, and then renting a storefront to sit on top of it. The owners did not want to trade a phone-based business for a stack of monthly software bills.
What I Built
A full e-commerce store with wholesale availability, so both retail buyers and wholesale accounts shop the same warehouse on their own terms. The site carries an entire catalog of hundreds of items, browsable by aisle the way the warehouse is actually organized, with same-day shipping on in-stock orders stated plainly at the top of the page.
Underneath it, an inventory management system built into the site itself. Stock, catalog and orders live in one place the owners control, which means they never have to subscribe to another third-party software again.
Under the Hood: Owning the Inventory System Instead of Renting One
Most stores this size run a storefront plugged into a separate inventory service, and every item, every sync and every user seat has a price attached. Here the catalog and the stock ledger are part of the same application, so an item's availability on the storefront and the count in the back office are the same record rather than two systems arguing over a nightly sync.
That is why the storefront can promise same-day shipping on in-stock orders and mean it: what a customer sees on the product page is the warehouse count, not a cached copy of it. And because the software is theirs, the operating cost of the store does not climb every time a vendor changes a pricing tier.
Project Gallery
The Results
- A nationwide telemarketer now sells through an accessible online store with wholesale availability
- Farmers and field workers reach the whole warehouse with a click instead of a sales call
- An entire catalog of hundreds of items browsable the way the warehouse is organized
- An inventory management system the owners own outright, ending third-party software subscriptions
Still selling over the phone?
I build catalogs and inventory systems your business owns, not another monthly subscription.