Catalogue or online store? For suppliers who quote

A store takes money. A catalogue takes a question. Everything else follows from that: a store needs fixed prices, a payment gateway, shipping rules and stock counts it can trust; a catalogue needs the full range, good filters, and a way for a buyer to ask about ten things at once and get one answer back.

• Your price depends on who is asking. Trade accounts, volume breaks, delivery zones, thirty-day terms. If the answer to “how much” is “it depends”, a cart can only show the wrong number.
• Buyers need to talk before they buy. Specifications, minimum quantities, lead times, whether the 60 micron bag will hold what they are putting in it. A phone call closes these sales. A checkout page loses them.
• Stock changes faster than the website. One supplier we work with runs stock from a spreadsheet that changes daily. A store that promises “in stock” and is wrong costs a customer. A catalogue that says “ask us” never does.
• You would rather ring back within the hour. Many suppliers close better on the phone than any page could. The website’s job is to produce the call with the details already in hand.

• Fixed prices, retail buyers. The same product costs the same for everyone, and the buyer is a person with a card, not a company with an account.
• Orders arrive at eleven at night. If your customers shop when you are asleep, the site has to finish the sale without you.
• You control the stock. You know what is on the shelf and the website can be told when it changes.

Our own keyboard shop, ROQ Gear, is a store for exactly these reasons: one price, retail buyers, stock we hold in Durban, orders at all hours. The storefront is hand-built so it browses instantly on a phone, and the checkout is WooCommerce with PayFast, because a payment page is not somewhere to be original.

The whole range is on the site, browsable and filterable, with the photos and specifications a buyer needs to shortlist. Instead of a cart there is an enquiry basket: add the ten items you are interested in, type the quantities, and send one enquiry. It lands in your inbox as a single email with every item, quantity and the buyer’s details, and the buyer gets a confirmation. You quote by reply or by phone, the way you already do, with the guesswork removed.

Your team edits products in WordPress. Where stock lives in a spreadsheet, we read the spreadsheet, so nobody types the same list twice. And because there is no payment, tax or shipping logic, a catalogue is a smaller build than a store, which matters when the range is large and the budget is not.

Some suppliers have both kinds of product: a trade range that is always quoted, and a handful of items with a fixed retail price. The catalogue can carry a checkout for just those items. On our architecture the checkout is a separate system that can be added later without rebuilding the site, so the sensible order is usually catalogue first, then a store for the products that have earned one.

Take your last twenty orders. How many could a stranger have placed correctly from a price on a screen, with no phone call? If the answer is most of them, build a store. If it is a few, build a catalogue and give it a very good enquiry form. If you are not sure, send us the order book and we will tell you which it is before we quote for either.