Building B2B Commerce for 30,000 SKUs
Curbell Plastics is North America's largest distributor of plastic materials, serving both industrial customers who need to source specific materials and an internal sales organization that manages complex account relationships. Their website functioned primarily as a catalog — a place to browse product information, but not a place to actually buy anything. For a company with over 30,000 product SKUs spanning dozens of material categories, that gap between "browse" and "buy" represented significant untapped revenue.
The Problem
The site wasn't effectively supporting its two primary user groups, and their needs were in tension. Customers needed better product discovery, pricing visibility, and the ability to purchase online without calling or faxing. The sales team needed a platform that complemented their workflow rather than competing with it — they didn't want self-serve commerce to cut them out of relationships they'd built over years.
Key gaps included weak search and filtering across a massive product catalog, limited discoverability for materials that buyers often search for by technical specification rather than product name, no streamlined online purchasing experience, and complex shipping, tax, and pricing rules that had never been reflected digitally. The platform needed to evolve from brochureware into a true eCommerce engine — without alienating the sales organization in the process.
The Approach
I led the discovery and design work, starting by aligning business stakeholders, sales teams, and customer needs to define core purchasing journeys and behaviors. Understanding the sales team's concerns early was critical — if they saw the platform as a threat to their commissions and relationships, adoption would fail regardless of how good the customer experience was.
The product discovery challenge was the design centerpiece. Thirty thousand SKUs across complex material categories, with properties like thickness, temperature resistance, and chemical compatibility that industrial buyers filter by. I designed the search and filtering system to handle this complexity through progressive disclosure — starting with broad material categories, then revealing specification-level filters as users narrowed their search. This avoided overwhelming casual browsers while giving expert buyers the precision they needed. The information architecture was restructured so that products could be found by material type, application, industry, or technical property — reflecting the multiple mental models different buyers bring to the catalog.
The checkout flow had to accommodate B2B purchasing complexity that consumer eCommerce never deals with: multi-tier pricing based on account relationships, account-based purchasing with approval workflows, and shipping and tax calculation logic that varied by material type, quantity, and destination. I designed real-time credit card processing flows alongside account-based ordering, so the platform could serve both one-time buyers and established accounts.
Balancing self-serve customer purchasing with sales-assisted pathways was the thread that ran through every decision. The platform was designed so that self-serve commerce handled straightforward reorders and small purchases efficiently, while complex or high-value orders were routed to the sales team with full context — making the sales rep's job easier rather than redundant.
Impact
Transformed the website from a static brochure into a revenue-generating eCommerce platform for North America's largest distributor of plastic materials
Enabled secure, real-time transactions with integrated shipping and tax calculations — opening a new self-serve purchasing channel projected to capture 10–15% of previously phone/fax-only orders in year one
Improved product discoverability through robust search, specification-level filtering, and restructured information architecture — estimated 40% reduction in time-to-find for target products
Balanced self-serve efficiency with sales-assisted workflows, strengthening alignment between the digital experience and the sales organization rather than creating channel conflict