Dealer B2B store rebuild with trade pricing and postcode store finder

The challenge

A UK musical-instrument distributor sells to a network of trade dealers through its own online store. Over the years the store had picked up many custom features built by our team: dealer-only product options, a separate Pro Dealer price tier and an Excel-based stock upload. The store ran on an older platform version that had become hard to secure and maintain, and it needed to work properly on mobile devices.

The distributor needed a current, maintainable store without losing any of the dealer functionality its trade customers relied on. Later, it also wanted to help consumers find their nearest stockist and to give logged-in dealers their own content.

What we did

• Mobile responsiveness. We first made the existing store responsive so it worked properly on phones and tablets.
• Rebuild on a current version. We rebuilt the store on OpenCart 4.0.2.3, re-implementing the dealer-only colour options, dealer labels, Pro Dealer pricing in the cart and the Excel stock upload. The new store was built and reviewed on a demo copy before launch, and we updated the server to PHP 8 at go-live.
• Checkout and layout refinements. We adjusted checkout wording, delivery address labels and stock messages, updated the footer and fixed image display.
• Map-based stockist locator. We turned the dealer list into a Google Maps locator with a table below, a clickable website column and a spreadsheet upload format so the client can maintain dealers themselves. We then refined popups, zoom and labels.
• Dealer-only pages. We added admin-editable Dealer Support and Clearance pages that only logged-in dealers can see, hidden from search engines, plus an admin-editable stockist page.
• Postcode nearest-store finder. On product pages we replaced the "find a dealer" button with a postcode search that shows the nearest stockist in a popup. Dealer coordinates are geocoded from postcodes for accurate distances, and an admin report logs each search with postcode, product and time.

Tech stack

OpenCart 4, PHP 8, MySQL, cPanel, Google Maps API, Google Geocoding API, Excel import