Picture the clean version first. Contractor emails a quote request. Someone picks it up, locates the pricing in the CRM, builds the quote in a spreadsheet, checks stock, adds freight from a postcode lookup, sends back a PDF. Two days.

Now the real version. The request sits unread for half a day because the inbox is shared and everyone assumed someone else had seen it. The pricing file is out of date because it was last updated three months ago. The freight zone is wrong because the postcode straddles two zones and whoever built the quote picked the cheaper one. The PDF goes out, the contractor spots a spec error, and the whole thing starts again.

Fridays after midday: Monday problem. Every time.

Three people spending a meaningful chunk of their week building quotes in spreadsheets for accounts placing largely predictable orders. A contractor who uses the same 600x600 porcelain on every fit-out should not be waiting two days to hear a price they essentially already know. They ordered the same job six months ago. The price has not changed. But the process has not changed either, and it is eating time nobody has.

The other thing nobody was measuring: how many contractors requested a quote, waited, and went somewhere else before it arrived. No visibility into that number. No way to know how much the delay was costing.

Tiles IT Solutions built the portal on BigCommerce with a React front end, and built it specifically around how a tile trade buyer actually works through a project specification, not around how a generic B2B portal assumes they do.

Log in, and you see your prices. Not a catalogue with a discount applied on top. Your actual rate, per product, per category, loaded from the pricing rules attached to your account before the first page paints. Stock across all warehouses. Your quote history going back as far as the account exists. Open quotes waiting for approval. All of it on one screen when you arrive.

To build a new quote: select the product, type the square meterage, enter the delivery postcode. That is it. The portal calculates the product cost at your account rate, looks up the freight for that postcode and that order weight, confirms availability against live stock, and returns an estimated delivery window. Not an approximation. A number the distributor stands behind. The contractor can approve it and convert to an order without leaving the screen. Or they can save it and come back. Or flag it for their account manager if they want to talk before committing.

Most approve in the portal. The ones who call are the ones with a genuine commercial question, not a clarification question.

Account managers get a dashboard view of every quote their accounts generate. When a high-value quote sits unconverted for 24 hours, a notification fires. The account manager can reach out knowing exactly what was quoted, which gives the conversation a different quality than a cold check-in call.

The freight logic was the hard part. Not hard to understand, hard to get right. Tile delivery pricing varies by order weight, pallet count, postcode, access type (residential versus trade yard), and whether the site needs a tail-lift or crane. The distributor's freight matrix lived in a spreadsheet one person maintained. It had not been touched consistently in 18 months. Wrong zones, outdated rates, missing postcodes. Before the portal could return a number a contractor would trust, every row of that matrix had to be audited, corrected, and rebuilt as a structured rule set the portal could query. Eight days of work before a single quote was generated. But a quote with the wrong freight on it is not a quote. It is the beginning of another email.

Before: Quote request arrives in a shared inbox. Sits. Someone picks it up. Pricing file opened, cross-referenced, manually entered. Stock checked in a separate system. Freight estimated from a postcode spreadsheet that may or may not be current. PDF assembled, proofed, sent. Contractor waits. By Friday afternoon, anything that came in after noon was not moving until Monday. Some contractors had already phoned a competitor before the PDF landed.

After: Contractor logs in at 10pm. Selects the porcelain they use on every job, types 280m², enters the site postcode. Ten seconds. The portal returns their price, the freight, the stock position, and a delivery window. They approve it. Order confirmed. The account manager finds out because the system tells them, not because anyone had to make a call.

• Quote turnaround cut from two days to ten minutes, with the portal returning a fully priced, freight-included quote in real time
• Sales team freed from manual quote building, moving their time from spreadsheet assembly to actual account conversations
• Account manager visibility into unconverted quotes, with automated 24-hour alerts on high-value quotes not yet approved
• Freight calculation automated and accurate, after a full audit and rebuild of the freight matrix before launch
• Quote-to-order conversion improved, as contractors who could approve immediately no longer had a 48-hour window to find another supplier
• Portal adoption above 70% of active trade accounts within the first quarter, with most routine quotes never reaching the sales inbox

The two-day quote was not protecting the relationship. It was testing it. Every contractor waiting two days is quietly checking whether someone else answers faster. Usually someone does. The portal did not replace the sales team. It removed the part of their job that was losing business while they were busy doing it.