From phone-and-fax to $4.2M online in eighteen months
A 30-year-old trade supplier with 11,000 SKUs, no website, and a fax machine still in daily use. We built a custom trade ecommerce platform with account pricing, credit terms and live stock from their existing ERP.
- Ecommerce
- Bespoke systems
- Google Ads
- Training
- Online revenue, year one
- $4.2M
- Orders processed monthly
- 2,400+
- Hours saved on order entry weeklyPreviously manual phone and fax orders
- 31
How we approached it
- Sat in the trade counter for two days watching how orders were actually placed
- Mapped their existing ERP's stock and pricing tables before writing any code
- Prioritised trade account features over consumer polish — this is a B2B buyer
- Shipped a working ordering system in nine weeks, then iterated with real users
The challenge
Ridgeline had a loyal trade base and a warehouse that ran like clockwork, but every single order came in by phone or fax and was rekeyed by hand. Two staff spent most of their week on data entry. Their competitors had been online for years and were quietly taking the younger builders.
What we built
A custom storefront rather than an off-the-shelf platform, because trade pricing genuinely is the hard part: every account has negotiated rates, credit limits and delivery runs. We built a live two-way sync with their ERP so stock and pricing are never stale, added saved order templates for repeat jobs, and gave the counter staff an internal view so they could place phone orders through the same system.
The result
Online now accounts for just over half of all orders. The two staff previously on data entry moved to customer service and outbound sales. Order errors, which had been a constant source of credit notes, dropped to near zero because builders now enter their own part numbers.
“We were the last ones still taking orders on a fax machine. Now our young blokes order from the ute at 6am and it's in the yard ready by seven. It's changed how the whole business runs.”
Let's talk about your business.
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