Ecommerce for Cambridge businesses.

There is an assumption buried in almost every ecommerce quote, which is that your customer arrives wanting to look around. In Cambridge that assumption is wrong more often than it is right.

Manufacturing, distribution and the trades along the highway corridor produce a different kind of buyer. They know the part number. They ordered it in March. They want to know whether you have forty of them, what they pay for forty, and whether it can be on a truck on Thursday. Browsing is not the behaviour and a storefront designed around discovery actively slows them down.

What that buyer needs is an order desk with a website in front of it.

What a trade checkout has to do

The gap between a consumer store and a trade one is not cosmetic. It is six or seven pieces of machinery a normal build does not contain.

Company accounts rather than customer accounts. A single account with one email address does not survive real trade use. The purchasing coordinator orders, the site supervisor orders, and both need to see the same company, the same pricing and the same history without sharing a password.

Pricing that follows the customer. Your sheet is not one list, it is a list per account or per tier, negotiated and revised. If the website shows list price to somebody who agreed a discount two years ago, they will stop using it inside a week and you will never find out why.

Quantities that match how you actually sell. Cases, pallets, lengths, minimums and multiples. A cart that lets somebody order seven of something sold in boxes of twelve is a phone call you have to make and a shipment you have to repack.

Purchase orders, terms and tax status. A purchase order field that carries through to the invoice, because an invoice without one gets rejected by accounts payable. Net terms for approved accounts. Tax exemption handled on the account rather than argued about afterwards.

Reorder as the primary action. Not search, not categories. Reorder from history, a saved list, and a visible stock position so nobody has to ring to find out whether it is worth placing the order at all.

Freight told honestly. Pallet and LTL shipments do not price themselves accurately in a cart. The workable pattern is agreed flat rates by zone for known accounts, or an order placed and the freight quoted against it. Bolting a parcel calculator onto a pallet is how a store quietly loses money on every large order.

Where Shopify sits on this, with the caveat

We build on Shopify for nearly everything, and here is the honest version of what that means for a trade seller.

The native business-to-business tooling is genuine. Company profiles with multiple buyers, catalogues with their own price lists, payment terms, and a checkout that behaves differently for trade than for retail. It also sits on the top plan, which is a real monthly cost and the first thing we work out with you rather than around.

Below that plan, the pattern that works is pricing gated behind an approved account with draft orders behind it: the buyer builds a request, you convert it to an order with the right pricing and the right freight, and they pay from a link. It is less elegant and it is perfectly serviceable, and for a seller with a few dozen accounts it is usually the correct starting point.

What we would not do is sell you a configurator you do not need. If your products genuinely need a rules engine, say so early, because that is a different project and the platform question gets a different answer.

The counter is still open

The local part, and it changes the build more than people expect.

This city is laid out as three centres rather than one, and a seller with a yard or a counter in Galt, Preston or Hespeler is running a collection business alongside the shipped one. Trades turn up in person. Drivers collect. Somebody's apprentice is sent at seven in the morning for something that should have been ordered yesterday.

That means pickup is not a checkbox at the end of a consumer checkout, it is a channel. A real location with real hours, an order that can be placed the night before and collected first thing, a notification that fires when it is genuinely picked and staged rather than when it is paid for, and stock that reflects what is physically on the shelf at that location rather than a company-wide total.

Highway 401 runs along the edge of the city, which is why so much distribution sits here and why your shipped orders go further than your reputation does. A buyer in Milton or London has no reason to know who you are, so the public side of the site is doing a different job from the account side: proving you are a real operation with real stock, while the logged-in side gets on with the ordering.

Our own store is consumer, and we are not going to blur that

The credential we lead with elsewhere needs qualifying on this page.

Northern Raised is a brand we own and run, selling to households on Shopify across the province. Simply Meats is a client store in the same category. Running a store with our own money taught us things that transfer directly: how fast a bad shipping rule leaks margin, what a discount habit does to a customer base, why inventory that lies breaks trust faster than a slow site.

What it did not teach us is what a purchasing coordinator wants at eight in the morning. That came from building sites for industrial and trade clients where the buyer is procurement rather than a household, which is a different vocabulary and a different set of anxieties. We would rather separate those two claims than let one borrow credibility from the other.

Cost, timeline and what to do first

Store builds start at $10,000 and a trade build normally sits above that, because accounts, price lists, quoting and freight logic are engineering rather than theme work. Nothing begins without a fixed written price, each phase is billed once it has landed, and the build is measured in weeks rather than months, usually a week and a half to three and a half. A migration is quoted separately and honestly.

If you are weighing this up, start by pulling your last hundred orders and sorting them into reorders, new orders and quotes. The split tells you which of the three the site should be built around, and it is usually not the one the owner expects. Send us that split and you will get a direct answer, including when the answer is that a tidy price list and a better phone process would serve you better this year. The service in full is on our ecommerce page.