Sell into stockists and trade.

B2B retail traffic behaves nothing like consumer retail. The visitor is usually a buyer, a specifier or a purchasing manager with a product code, a specification or a job to complete, and their objective is to confirm availability and price and move on. Discovery merchandising - hero carousels, lifestyle photography, curated edits - serves the consumer mindset and gets in the way of this one.

What they need instead is unglamorous: search that tolerates part numbers and misspellings, filters that match the attributes they actually specify by, stock that is honest rather than optimistic, and specifications complete enough to make a decision without phoning anyone. Every one of those is a data problem before it is a design problem.

That is why range work starts with the product data rather than the templates. A catalogue modelled properly - attributes, variants, relationships, downloadable documentation - can be presented well. A catalogue of inconsistent records cannot be rescued by design, and the site will keep sending buyers to the phone.

A large catalogue is one of the strongest organic assets a B2B retailer can hold, because buyers search for exactly the things it contains: specific products, specific codes, specific comparisons. Realising that requires each product and category to be a real, indexable, individually useful page rather than a state inside a filtered application - which is how a lot of catalogue sites quietly become invisible.

Category pages deserve particular attention. Left as bare product grids they compete with nothing; given genuine guidance - what distinguishes the options, what to consider when specifying, what most buyers in this situation choose - they become the page that ranks and the page that converts, because they answer the question behind the search.

Structured product data pays twice here: the same modelling that makes filtering work also produces the schema that makes listings eligible for richer search results.

Many B2B retailers serve trade accounts and end customers from the same catalogue at different prices under different terms, and the common failures are opposite: a public site that leaks trade pricing, or a trade experience so gated that legitimate buyers cannot see what you sell before registering.

The workable pattern is a public catalogue that is fully browsable and indexable, with pricing and ordering that resolve to the logged-in account - trade sees contract prices and credit terms, everyone else sees list. It keeps the SEO value of an open catalogue while protecting the commercial relationships underneath.

The account experience is then where the real work sits: reordering, lists, order history and approvals. That is the same argument as the B2B e-commerce page, and where the two overlap we build them as one project rather than two.