ResourcesUnified commerce in wholesale B2B, explained
How wholesale B2B companies like Damstahl and Vargus scaled digital sales 10× with unified commerce, bridging ERP gaps and boosting profit margins.
Unified commerce in wholesale B2B has stopped being a luxury. Traditional e-commerce platforms, designed for generic retail, struggle against the specific needs of steel, metals, manufacturing and distribution — and that gap is why Slize exists: a platform built to solve real wholesale problems by pulling disparate systems into one coherent, high-performance ecosystem. Here are the pain points, and what actually answers them.
What the wholesale B2B challenges really are
This market is defined by complexities that baffle standard digital tooling.
Intricate logistics, diverse units — kilos, metres, bundles — cutting services and detailed certification. Managing leftover material and guaranteeing full traceability matters especially in regulated sectors: steel, medical, chemical.
Multiple ERP systems across countries or subsidiaries create data silos and inefficient process. Manual order entry is slow and error-prone, capping digital growth and tying up full-time roles.
Steel-adjacent industries face raw material prices driven by global markets like the London Metal Exchange, which demands real-time pricing at a granularity traditional ERPs can't deliver.
Together these are why a generic platform isn't enough. A platform has to be rooted in the operational reality of industrial sales.
The approach: composability and deep integration
Slize addresses this through a modular, composable architecture that works as an operational backbone — connecting the enterprise systems you already run and consolidating what matters into one accessible interface.
Being composable means integrating your preferred PIM and ERP through APIs rather than accepting a monolith. That's a future-proof architecture: no vendor lock-in, and technologies can be swapped as needed. In practice it means working with clients running several ERPs across countries at once.
Client self-service
The self-service portal replaces manual ordering and improves the buyer's experience:
- Saved baskets and favourites — prepare and store carts for future orders, and mark frequently purchased items for quick reordering.
- Order and invoice access — instant access to past and current orders, with downloadable confirmations, invoices and packing slips.
- Certificate downloads — chemical and mechanical property certificates on demand, which is what traceability on a long project actually requires.
- Advanced search — find a purchase by internal project reference, order number or material charge number.
Dynamic pricing
The pricing engine supports dynamic and fixed strategies side by side, handling billions of live price combinations for clients managing tens of thousands of SKUs and customers. It works from repurchasing cost — today's supplier price — and a management-adjusted RPC used for margin protection or bulk purchasing.
- Templates and brackets — pricing logic built on segmentation templates such as "Keep happy" or "Co-develop", plus quantity-based brackets.
- Granular rule structures — margin logic by product type, size, wall thickness, steel or aluminium grade, market volatility and custom tolerances, so pricing differentiates by product specialty. This is the level of detail traditional ERPs struggle with.
Sales enablement
Representatives take on any customer account to guide them, place orders for them and troubleshoot live. This feature alone cut order entry time by 80% at Damstahl.
Convert customer carts to quotations, add delivery modes, force order holds, override system margins — granular control over the sales process.
To blunt panic buying during price swings, restrict visibility by loyalty or segment and show only a portion of available inventory.
Configurable logistics and industry intelligence
Logistics logic is configurable, including multi-warehouse support with client-specific fulfilment rules — Damstahl depletes stock from particular warehouses in a set order, optimising cost and speed, with automation handling delivery combinations without the client touching anything.
Underneath, the platform natively supports complex units, cutting services, and visibility into leftover material, certificates and full traceability — non-negotiable where compliance is strict.
Lessons from multinational rollouts
Through ongoing co-development with large industrial companies, the platform has evolved specifically around multi-ERP environments, price volatility and the regulatory requirements of multinational operation.
Damstahl — scale and efficiency
As co-developer, Damstahl is the foundational user. They scaled digital orders from 98M to 956M DKK (approx. €12M to €128M) in eighteen months. They unified their marketing site and shop into one web experience, and went further: a CO₂ emissions calculator for custom ESG reporting, and an AI assistant trained on their own knowledge base to answer technical queries.
Vargus — managing multi-ERP environments
Vargus came to us after multiple failed implementations by cheaper vendors, and with traditional leadership to convince. They got a tailored digital catalogue and commerce solution running across five different ERP systems in different countries.
Built around how Vargus actually sells, after previous rollouts failed to fit.
Operating across countries without waiting for consolidation to finish first.
The rollout taught us to add hourly-based pre-deployment discovery and data-readiness steps to onboarding.
Weinmann Aach — flexibility in customisation
Weinmann Aach, a construction steel supplier, shows how far front-end design and pricing logic bend to an industry's workflow. Instead of long scrolling product pages they chose a modern no-scroll interface with a drawer layout, opening product detail and service configuration in expandable panels without leaving the main view.
That interface is built for speed and precision, matching how construction procurement teams work — fast, error-free ordering ahead of visual storytelling. With inline configuration, buyers pick dimensions, services and quantities without navigating between pages.
Their pricing shows the other side of the engine. Because their product costs are relatively stable they chose a simple fixed-price model at €4/kg. Templates and rule sets hold that flat rate while still tracking historical sales graphs and cost trends for future margin protection.
Quantifiable impact, and what's next
Digital maturity without giving up complexity or control: 80% faster order entry for sales teams, 48 full-time roles saved through automation, tenfold growth in digital orders in eighteen months, and 24% higher gross profit on digital versus offline orders.
Ahead of us: AI order automation that extracts and matches order data from customer PDFs and emails to build the basket automatically, and eventually direct XML order processing from customer ERPs. Sales dashboards with recommended actions and price-trend graphs are on the same roadmap.
What the multinational rollouts really underline is the combination — managing complex ERP estates, answering data-trust concerns honestly, and delivering a return you can measure.
See what Slize does with your catalog and ERP landscape.
Book a walkthrough tailored to your systems and product complexity — or just say hello.