STI Group was a Chelyabinsk trading house distributing household chemistry — detergents, cleaning agents, paper goods — to both retail customers and a network of small regional shops. The two audiences had completely different needs and price structures, and the company was serving both from the same phone line. Dealers faxed orders; retail customers drove to the warehouse. Stock figures lived inside 1C, which meant 'do you have it in stock?' required a phone call and a walk to the warehouse.
The brief: a single platform that serves a public catalogue and checkout to retail buyers, and a password-protected dealer portal with per-dealer price matrices, real-time stock from 1C, and bulk ordering tools for shop owners who order 200 lines at a time. It had to integrate with 1C rather than replace it — the accountants refused anything else — and it had to survive the reality of 2012 Russian hosting and browser market share.
A 3,000-SKU consumer storefront with category navigation tuned for household goods, promotional blocks and a checkout that worked on the ageing browsers common in regional offices.
Approved dealers saw their own negotiated price matrix, credit-limit status and order history. One dealer's prices were never visible to another — a contractual requirement.
A scheduled export-import bridge pushed stock levels and price updates from 1C to the web platform every 15 minutes, ending the era of ordering items the warehouse had already sold.
Dealers could upload a CSV of 200+ line items or clone a previous order in two clicks — built around how small shop owners actually restock, not around how designers imagine they do.
Dealer accounts onboarded in the first nine months — more than double the active dealer base the company had served by phone the previous year.
Average order-to-confirmation time, down from roughly two working days when every order passed through a manager by phone or fax.
Share of dealer reorder volume flowing through the portal by the end of year two, with fax ordering formally retired in 2014.
// results vary by project — ask us how we measured this one
“The portal stopped being a website and became our biggest salesperson — one that never sleeps and never quotes the wrong price.”
Head of Sales, STI Group · name withheld under NDA — reference call available// the company has since closed — screenshots preserved as delivered
Wholesale portals, dealer logins and integrations with the systems you already run. Tell us what slows your sales team down — we will scope it, price it and ship it.
