The day €4 out of every €10 started coming from trade customers

An online fine-food shop asks me to help it "sell a bit more". Looking closely at its orders, I come across something the owner had never really noticed: the same customers, at regular intervals, were placing enormous orders. Not gifts, not enthusiastic home cooks. Restaurants and hotels stocking up with him, at consumer prices, for lack of anything better. He had a trade clientele right under his nose, and he was treating it like any Tom, Dick or Harry.

It is a more common situation than you would think. Many shops already have trade customers buying "like everyone else", because no door has ever been opened for them. Those customers are only too happy to order more, more often, if you speak their language: volume-based pricing, orders that repeat easily, clean invoicing. The job was not to find new customers. It was to serve better the ones already there.

Opening a door for trade buyers, without breaking the consumer shop

We built an area dedicated to trade customers: volume pricing reserved for trade accounts, the option to reorder in two clicks what they buy every week, quotes and invoicing that match their needs. The consumer who comes to buy a gift box sees nothing change: he keeps his shop and his prices. Two worlds on the same site, each with its own rules. That clean separation is what let the trade channel grow without damaging the rest.

The stumble: at launch, trade prices leaked over to the consumer side

On the first day it went live, we had a separation problem. Because of a setting that had not been configured correctly, some trade-only prices ended up visible to consumers. Nothing catastrophic, but picture the scene: a loyal customer discovering he is paying more than "the trade price" displayed right next to it. That is the kind of detail that damages trust in an instant. We spotted it quickly, cut it off, and fixed it so each world only sees its own prices. The lesson: when you run two price lists on the same site, the wall between them is not a technical detail, it is the basics. You test it before launch, not after.

A trade buyer does not shop like a consumer

The reason these customers were buying in dribs and drabs is that we were asking them to shop like a consumer: search for each product, fill a basket, re-enter everything the following week. A restaurant ordering the same thirty lines every week does not have time for that. What it wants is to pull up its usual order and relaunch it in two clicks, see pricing that rewards volume, get a clean invoice for its books, and be able to order on a Sunday evening when it is doing its stocktake. Nothing extraordinary, but as long as that is not there, it takes the bare minimum and tops up elsewhere.

One of the trade buyers said something that sums it all up: "I preferred ordering from you, but it was too much hassle, so I held back." He was not looking for cheaper elsewhere, he was looking for simpler. The day he got his own area, his orders doubled without a single sales call being made. We had not won a new customer, we had just stopped making his life difficult.

What you can do alone this week

Open your order history and look for abnormally large baskets, or customers who return with metronome-like regularity. Make a list of them. There is a good chance you will find trade buyers who do not know it yet, or that you were not aware of. These are your first potential trade accounts, and you already have them. Talking to them differently is often the closest growth opportunity there is, the one people look for far away when it is sitting in their own figures.

Structuring this trade side, with the right pricing and the right follow-up, is what my work on sales and CRM is for. To attract a clientele that belongs to you rather than paying for it, read how to bring people in through Google; and on the profitability of your campaigns, there is the work we do on the sales machine.