Business condition
A distributor runs a catalogue of several thousand lines where trade buyers cannot see their contract price until the final checkout step. Orders are started and abandoned, and the internal sales desk absorbs the difference by phone, spending most of the day confirming prices that are already stored in the ERP. The storefront looks functional and is quietly pushing volume back into manual handling.
Diagnostic signals
The audit covers the catalogue, the pricing rules and the order path from browse to ERP.
- Late pricing Contract prices and quantity breaks resolve only at checkout, so buyers cannot compare before committing.
- Checkout friction Multi-step checkout with no saved delivery profiles and no purchase order reference field for repeat buyers.
- Search failure Internal search returns nothing for partial or mistyped product codes, which is how trade buyers actually search.
- Manual re-entry Order lines retyped into the ERP, creating a second point of pricing error.
- Mobile performance Largest contentful paint well outside budget on mid-range hardware used on site and in vans.
Proposed architecture
Pricing becomes a service the storefront queries, not a calculation buried in checkout, and orders return to the ERP without retyping.
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01
ERP price lists
Contract tiers and quantity breaks synced on schedule
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02
Pricing service
Account-aware resolution with cached responses
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03
Catalogue display
Contract price and tiers visible on the product card
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04
Two-step checkout
Saved delivery profiles and purchase order references
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05
Order push to ERP
Structured order lines, no manual re-entry
Phased delivery timeline
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Days 1–21
Catalogue and ERP audit
Pricing rules, tier logic, tax and incoterm handling documented line by line with the client's finance lead before any code is written.
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Days 22–50
Pricing service and catalogue
Account-aware pricing exposed at catalogue level, quantity breaks surfaced on the product card, responses cached against a stated freshness window.
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Days 51–75
Checkout rebuild
Checkout reduced to two steps behind a feature flag, released to a pilot account group with the previous path still available.
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Days 76–95
Search retune and performance
Search rebuilt against real query logs to handle partial codes and synonyms, front end held to an agreed performance budget on mid-range mobile.