The website was fine for a wholesale brand that did not sell online. For a DTC operation, it was the wrong tool entirely.

There was no product detail a retail buyer actually needs. A homeowner deciding between two porcelain tiles for their kitchen floor wants the slip rating, the rectification status, the shade variation, and whether it works over underfloor heating. None of that was on the site. What was there was a lifestyle photo and a product name.

Quantity calculation was not addressed. This brand had always sold to trade buyers who calculated their own square meterage. Retail buyers do not. They know their room size. They do not know how many boxes that converts to, what wastage to add, or what the total costs. Without a calculator, every uncertain buyer abandoned the page or called in.

There was no checkout. Not a broken one. None. The site sent buyers to a dealer locator, which sent them somewhere else to complete a purchase the brand got no credit for and no data from.

Payment flexibility had not been considered because payment was not the site's job. For DTC it matters. A homeowner ordering 60m² of porcelain tile is spending several hundred pounds. Klarna changes the conversion rate on that basket size.

Organic search was an afterthought. No structured content, no technical spec data, no collection pages built around what buyers search: wood-effect floor tiles, large format bathroom tiles, outdoor porcelain paving. The brand was invisible for the searches that should have been sending buyers directly to them.

Tiles IT Solutions rebuilt the site on WooCommerce with WordPress, starting from what a retail tile buyer actually needs to get from first visit to checkout without calling anyone.

Product pages were rebuilt from scratch. Every product now carries a full technical specification panel: size, thickness, finish, slip rating, rectification, shade variation, frost suitability, and underfloor heating compatibility. Not buried in a PDF. On the page, scannable. A homeowner and a contractor can both find what they need without scrolling past three paragraphs of marketing copy to reach it.

The area calculator was built directly into the product page. Room length, room width, the calculator returns exact square meterage, recommended pack quantity with a 10% wastage buffer applied, and the total price for that quantity. The Add to Cart button takes the calculated quantity. No arithmetic, no phone call, no uncertainty about whether they have ordered enough.

Collection landing pages were built around real search intent. Wood effect tiles. Slate effect outdoor paving. Large format bathroom tiles. Marble effect porcelain. Each one has its own URL, its own descriptive content, its own faceted filter set. Each one targets a cluster of search terms with genuine monthly volume. The brand went from invisible on those searches to ranking on page one for several of them within three months of launch.

Checkout was built for the order sizes this brand sells. Stripe handles standard card payments. Klarna gives buyers the option to spread the cost on larger orders. Google Pay sits on the cart page for buyers who do not want to type card details on a phone. The free shipping threshold displays on the product page, not just at checkout, so buyers know before they start building their basket.

The implementation challenge was product data. The brand's internal records had never been built for retail. Technical specs existed in supplier documents and internal spreadsheets, formatted inconsistently, incomplete in places, sometimes contradictory between formats of the same product. Before any page went live, every product was audited against supplier data sheets. Gaps were filled. Contradictions were resolved. It took longer than building the site. But a product page with wrong or missing technical data is worse than no product page for a buyer who is trying to make a considered purchase.

Cloudflare sits in front of the site for performance and security. Google Analytics with full conversion tracking was configured before launch, so the brand had clean data from day one rather than trying to retrofit attribution after the fact.

Before: The website was a brochure with a dealer locator at the end. A retail buyer who found the brand online hit a dead end. No specs, no calculator, no checkout, no way to buy. The brand had no visibility into who was looking at their products or why they were leaving without purchasing. DTC revenue was zero because there was no DTC channel.

After: A buyer lands on a collection page built around the search term they used. They filter by finish and size, open a product page with the full spec on screen, enter their room dimensions, get a pack count and total price back immediately, and check out with Klarna on their phone in under ten minutes. The brand sees the order, owns the customer relationship, and has the data to understand what drove the conversion.

• DTC revenue grew 50% within two quarters of the WooCommerce store going live
• Phone enquiries about quantities and pricing dropped sharply once the area calculator and full product specs went live on every product page
• Organic search visibility built from near zero, with the brand ranking on page one for several high-volume tile search terms within three months
• Average order value increased on DTC versus wholesale, with Klarna adoption on larger orders improving conversion on high-ticket basket sizes
• Full customer data captured for the first time, giving the brand visibility into buyer behaviour, popular products, and conversion drop-off points
• Product data audited and standardised across the full catalogue before launch, removing the technical gaps that would have driven retail buyers back to Google to find answers elsewhere

The distributor model works until it stops working. When it stops, the brand discovers it has been building someone else's customer relationships for years. A DTC channel built properly gives that back. This one did it in two quarters.