Sell direct and through your dealers, on one catalogue
Ecommerce for manufacturers who sell to distributors, to dealers and direct to the end customer at the same time, on a catalogue where a product is specified to order rather than picked off a shelf.
Two routes to market, and a catalogue that has to serve both
A manufacturer rarely sells one way. There is a dealer network on agreed margins and a handful of large accounts on negotiated terms. Increasingly there is also an end customer who found the product online and wants to buy it from you.
Those audiences need different prices, different catalogues and different rules, and they are looking at the same products. Run them on separate systems and you maintain the product specification twice, reconcile two sets of orders in the ERP, and discover the discrepancy at month end.
Each dealer is a company account with its own buyers, its own agreed price list and its own order history. Larger groups sit in an account tree, so a head office and its branches are one relationship with several ordering points. Company accounts from Starter, organization hierarchy from Growth, price lists from Scale.
The same catalogue, presented and priced for someone buying one unit on a card. Dealer prices are set per company with contract pricing (Scale), so direct buyers never see them. A separate dealer catalogue runs as its own channel.
Per-customer price lists with the dates they start and stop applying, so an annual agreement expires on schedule rather than when someone remembers. Contract pricing from Scale.
The specification lives once. Each channel selects what it sells and overrides only its price, translation or availability, so a change to the product reaches every route to market at the same time.
Products specified to order, priced from the specification
Manufacturing catalogues are rarely a list of finished goods. A buyer chooses a length, a material, a tolerance, a finish and a fixing, and the price follows from what they chose. Most commerce platforms cannot hold that, so the configuration happens in a spreadsheet and comes back as an email your sales engineer retypes.
Vendure supports three motions for this, and they do not all start on the same plan. The differences are set out below rather than averaged into one claim.
A buyer asks for a price on something they have described, your team responds, and the accepted quote converts into an order with nothing retyped. This covers most made-to-order selling.
Buyers assemble a made-to-order product through structured configuration input and get a price for that exact configuration. This is CPQ for B2B ecommerce, sold elsewhere as a separate product. It starts on Enterprise, not on a card-on-file plan.
The buyer requests changes and your team sends revised versions, with comments, documents, internal approval and every version kept. For projects where the first number is never the final one.
Product types group the fields a category needs and enforce the ones it requires, so a catalogue of ten thousand specified items stays consistent rather than drifting per product manager. From Scale.
What industrial ecommerce needs beyond a product page
Unit, box and pallet
Packaging units, from Growth, set a pack size and minimum quantity per unit of sale. The price follows the pack size, and stock is calculated from the base stock. A separate pallet rate is a price rule on contract pricing, from Scale.
Quick order for the trade
Dealers who order the same lines every week add many items at once by part number, or rebuild a previous order in one click with anything unavailable flagged first. From Starter.
Approvals on the customer's side
Orders route through approval policies, so anything over a limit waits for the right person at the buying company before it reaches your production schedule. From Scale.
Tax ID validation
Store and validate the tax identifiers a customer gives you. EU VAT numbers can be checked against VIES when the ID is created and re-checked on a schedule. From Starter.
A catalogue buyers can search
Catalog search on the Database search engine from Starter, the Typesense search engine from Growth, and search analytics from Scale so you can see which part numbers people look for and fail to find.
A record of what changed
The audit log and administrator single sign-on from Scale: who changed a price, a specification or an order, and when.
Included in your Vendure plan under one commercial licence, with support from the Vendure team and no separate add-on SKU. On open-source Vendure Core, this is a capability your team builds and maintains itself. See what's included.
The ERP stays where it is
Your ERP holds the bill of materials, the stock, the customer master and the production schedule. It is not moving, and it should not have to. Your team connects the ERP through Vendure's APIs and plugins. An order placed by a dealer reaches the ERP as an order, and a stock or price change in the ERP reaches every storefront.
The point is not the integration itself. It is that nobody re-keys an order between the two, which is where the errors and the lead-time complaints come from. See ERP and integrations.
Teams building complex commerce with Vendure
What manufacturers ask before they commit
Three things, in this order. A customer model that holds a dealer with several buyers rather than one login. Pricing resolved per customer, because the dealer margin and the direct price are different numbers for the same product. And a product record that can be specified to order rather than picked off a shelf. Everything else, catalogue, checkout, payments and search, is the same as any other store.
That is a commercial decision rather than a platform one, but the platform has to support whichever answer you give. Dealer prices are set per company with contract pricing (Scale), so direct buyers never see them. A separate dealer catalogue runs as its own channel.
Yes, and the honest answer is that it depends which plan. Quote requests from Starter cover made-to-order selling where a person prices the request. The product configurator, which prices a specification automatically and is usually sold as CPQ, starts on Enterprise. If configure-to-order is the reason you are reading this page, plan for Enterprise.
Yes, from Growth. Branches sit as business units under one company account, each with its own buyers, delivery addresses and orders. A group price list on contract pricing (Scale) applies across branches.
Through the ERP. Your team connects the ERP through Vendure's APIs and plugins. Vendure does not replace production planning and does not try to. Your integration places clean, validated orders into the system that already runs your schedule, and brings stock back to the buyer.
Then the direct storefront is not the point and you should ignore it. What matters is company accounts, agreed pricing, reordering and approvals, which is the same ground covered on wholesale and distribution. Start there.
Model your routes to market
Set up your dealer ordering in a 14-day trial, or compare the plans. The product configurator for made-to-order products is part of Enterprise.