eCommerce for electrical distributors

eCommerce for electrical distributors is B2B ordering built around how electrical wholesale actually works: contractor accounts with contract pricing and credit terms, catalogs that run from tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands of SKUs, cut-wire products priced by the foot, and real-time inventory across a branch network.

We know this sector from the inside. Our founder, Rudy Abitbol, was Director of Digital Channels at Lumen (part of Sonepar), Quebec's largest electrical distributor — where digital became the default B2B ordering channel. Now we build that capability for distributors on Shopify Plus.

Because every hard problem in B2B commerce shows up at once. The catalog is enormous — tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of SKUs with part numbers, cross-references, and technical attributes — so search and product data quality carry the entire experience. Pricing is contractual: every contractor account has its own agreements, volume tiers, and credit terms, and no two customers see the same numbers. The products themselves resist simple modeling — wire sold by the foot, reels, cut charges, packaging hierarchies. Fulfillment runs through a branch network, not a single warehouse, so inventory has to be real and local. And the buyers are electricians on job sites, not procurement staff at desks. Any one of these is a project. An electrical distributor's platform has to solve all of them — and then win adoption against the phone and the counter.

By treating length as data, not as a workaround. Wire and cable need price-per-foot or price-per-metre display, quantity fields that accept the exact length a contractor needs, minimum-cut and increment rules, and cut charges applied automatically below threshold quantities. The platform has to know the difference between a full reel — a stocked SKU with its own price break — and a custom cut, which is a made-to-order line that draws down inventory from the reel it comes off. Because wire is commodity-priced and moves with copper, the price shown must always be the customer's contract price, synced from the ERP rather than typed into the storefront. We build this on Shopify Plus with cart-transform logic and account-level pricing, so a 340-foot cut of THHN lands in your ERP looking exactly like an order your counter staff took.

Location-level truth. A contractor deciding between delivery and will-call needs to see stock at their branch — not a network-wide total that hides a local stockout. That means inventory synced from the ERP at the branch level, a storefront that lets the buyer choose their branch and hold it across sessions, and pickup flows that notify the counter when an order is ready. It also means meeting buyers where they work: electricians order from job sites, so the experience has to be excellent on a phone — quick reorder, part-number search, barcode-friendly lists, and live availability before they drive to the branch. At Lumen, a native mobile app gave field workers real-time inventory visibility and ordering from job sites. That is the standard: the branch network becomes a competitive weapon online instead of a logistics detail buried in the ERP.

The ERP is the backbone; everything else plugs into it. Contract pricing, credit limits, branch inventory, and customer records live in the ERP and sync to the storefront in real time, while web orders flow back with the right account, ship-to, and job references. EDI handles the document exchange larger trading partners expect — invoices, acknowledgements, advance ship notices. And for institutional and enterprise buyers, cXML PunchOut lets procurement teams shop your catalog from inside their own purchasing system, with your contract pricing, and return the cart to their approval workflow. This is the architecture our founder oversaw at Lumen — eCommerce platform, ERP, EDI connectors, and cXML PunchOut operating as one connected ecosystem, alongside an integration with Gestion CMEQ, the management platform Quebec's electrical contractors run their businesses on. We bring that same architecture to Shopify Plus through our platform integration services.

Yes. Quebec's Charter of the French Language requires customer-facing commerce to work in French — catalog, checkout, emails, and support content included. For a distributor with tens of thousands of technical SKUs, that is a product-data problem as much as a translation problem: French descriptions and attributes at scale, search that understands the trade's French terminology, and an experience that feels native to the electricians using it. We are a Montreal agency operating in both languages, and we build bilingual B2B storefronts as the default — structured product data feeding French and English from one source, so the two catalogs never drift apart.

Before founding Human After All, Rudy Abitbol was Director of Digital Channels at Lumen (part of Sonepar) — 40+ branches, a 565,000 sq ft distribution centre, and thousands of B2B customers. The results: 52% B2B sales growth, four consecutive years of double-digit online growth, and digital established as the default B2B ordering channel. That took an eCommerce advisor program training contractors in branches and on job sites, sales-team alignment, a native mobile app for field workers with real-time inventory, and deep ERP, EDI, and cXML PunchOut integration.

Human After All was founded in Montreal in 2018 and has delivered 50+ B2B storefronts since. We are a Shopify Plus Partner and an Akeneo Partner, with 18+ years of B2B commerce behind every engagement. Read the full Lumen case study, or see how we work with distributors across every sector.