A Wholesale Business Held Back by a Portal That Couldn't Perform
Saddleback is a premium cycling distributor established in 2004, supplying road cycling and mountain bike products to an extensive network of UK and European stockists. Their brand portfolio is strong and their relationships with independent bike dealers are central to the business.
When they came to Swanky, the wholesale ordering portal was the biggest bottleneck in the business. High-volume orders required manual line-item entry, a process that could take 30 to 90 minutes per order. Tiered pricing for gold, silver, and bronze stockists was managed in spreadsheets outside the store. Trade buyers had no visibility of their credit balance at checkout. The portal was not built for the way professional buyers work, and every unnecessary minute spent on order admin was time the Saddleback team and their stockists were not spending on selling.
A B2B Portal Built for Professional Buyers
01.
Shopify Plus B2B With Tiered Pricing
A Shopify Plus B2B store was built with native company accounts and location-based pricing. Gold, silver, and bronze stockist tiers were implemented using Shopify Plus customer tagging, so each account logged in to see their specific pricing without any manual intervention from the Saddleback team. Tiered pricing moved from spreadsheets to the store, eliminating a major source of order errors.
02.
Custom Credit App
A custom credit app was built to give trade buyers real-time visibility of their available credit balance directly at checkout. Accounts with sufficient credit could apply it to their order without contacting the sales team. Accounts approaching their limit received proactive alerts. The credit app removed one of the biggest friction points in the wholesale ordering process.
03.
CSV Bulk Ordering
A CSV upload tool was built to allow stockists to place large orders by uploading a product list directly into the store. A 30-to-90-minute manual ordering process was reduced to under five minutes. For high-volume stockists, this single feature transformed the economics of ordering from Saddleback, and the volume of business they chose to place with them.
04.
Product Variant File Downloads
A self-service download system was built allowing trade buyers to access up-to-date pricing sheets, inventory availability, and product variant files directly from their account portal. Previously, this data was distributed manually on request. The self-service layer reduced account management overhead and gave stockists the information they needed to sell more product.
“The new portal changed how our stockists experience ordering from us. What used to take an hour now takes minutes. The credit visibility and tiered pricing just work. The sales numbers in month one told us everything we needed to know.”
Andy Wigmore
Founder & Managing Director, Saddleback
