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In Brief

Asquare AI built the website and catalogue system for YS Online Ltd, a London wholesaler exporting phones, consoles, wearables and networking kit worldwide. The site carries 25 product lines with their colours, capacities and 40 exact manufacturer part numbers, generates its own PDF catalogue on every deploy, and records every enquiry in three places. The client edits stock in a private content system and everything else updates on its own.

By Anirudh Katti, Founder · Published September 2026

The Situation

A trade buyer does not want a shop. They want a specification and a price for their quantity.

Wholesale is a business of specifics. A buyer in Dubai or Lagos is not browsing. They want to know whether you can put 500 units of one colour and one capacity on a pallet this week, what the manufacturer part number is, and what it costs to their port. The part number matters because it goes on their customs paperwork, and the wrong one means a shipment sitting at a dock.

YS Online had the stock and the trade relationships. What they did not have was a website that carried that level of detail, or any way to keep one current. Their range shifts every week as new lines land and old ones sell out. Any site that needed a developer to update it would have been out of date within a fortnight.

What We Did

One catalogue behind everything, so nothing is ever typed twice.

Rather than build a website and a separate PDF and a separate spreadsheet of leads, we built one source of truth and let everything else be produced from it automatically.

01
A catalogue with real part numbers: 25 lines across 5 categories and 8 brands, each with its colours, capacities, packing and the exact manufacturer code for every combination. All 40 codes were read off the manufacturer's own listing one at a time, never guessed from a pattern, because a wrong code costs the buyer a delayed shipment.
02
A 46 page site that builds itself: product, brand, category and market pages, search, and an enquiry list in place of a basket. Pages are served as flat files, so they arrive quickly for a buyer in the Gulf or West Africa, not just one in London.
03
The PDF buyers always ask for: a 9 page wholesale catalogue with the part number grids, redrawn from the same data every time the site publishes. A buyer fills in one form and it lands in their inbox in under two seconds, with no one in the office doing anything.
04
A lead trail with no single point of failure: every catalogue request, product enquiry and contact message is written to the server, emailed to the office, and copied into a Google Sheet the client owns. If Google is unavailable, leads queue and go across later. Nothing depends on one service staying up.
05
A back office the client can actually use: stock is edited in a private content system that never faces the public, and the site rebuilds and republishes itself through working hours. Adding a phone is a form, not a phone call to us.
Getting The Details Right

Wholesale buyers notice the things that are easy to fake.

Lines that have not shipped yet are labelled as such rather than hidden. The unreleased folding iPhone leads the homepage carrying "Shipping in October" where everything else says "Now shipping", and its button asks for interest instead of offering an order. It is the line buyers ask after most, so burying it would cost enquiries and pretending it were in stock would cost trust.

Prices are quoted, not published, because in this trade the price depends on quantity and destination. The site's job is to get a serious buyer to a quote request that already carries the models, the quantities and the port, so the first reply from the office can be an actual price rather than three questions.

The form that emails the catalogue is a way to send mail from the company's domain, so it is guarded: a hidden trap for bots, a check that the address can receive mail at all, and limits per address, per visitor and per hour. Left open, it would have been used to send mail to strangers and taken the domain's reputation down with it.

46
Pages, rebuilt from the catalogue automatically
40
Exact part numbers, each checked at source
1.7s
From a buyer pressing send to the catalogue leaving
The Point

The website is not the deliverable. The system behind it is.

Any agency can build a wholesaler a good looking site. It goes stale the moment the stock moves, and within a season the client is back to sending PDFs by hand and keeping leads in their head. What YS Online have now is a catalogue they control, a website and a PDF that follow it without being asked, and a record of every buyer who has ever enquired.

That is the difference worth paying for. Not the design, though the design matters. The fact that nothing in it depends on us being available.

Industry Context

Wholesale and export sites sell on specification, not on browsing

UK wholesalers and exporters are increasingly found the same way as any other business, through search, but the buyer arriving is a professional with a purchase order to raise. They are checking whether your range covers what their customer wants, whether the specification matches what they will declare at customs, and how quickly you answer. Very few of them want to pay by card on a website.

That makes a trade site a qualification tool rather than a shop. The pages have to carry manufacturer level detail, the enquiry has to collect quantity and destination so the quote can be real, and the catalogue has to be downloadable because buyers forward it internally before they ever reply. Anything that needs a developer to keep current will not be kept current.

Common Questions
What should a wholesale or export website include?

The detail a trade buyer checks before they order: exact model, colour, capacity, packing and the manufacturer part number for each combination, plus where you ship and how you quote. Most wholesale buyers are comparing specification and lead time, not browsing, so the site's job is to get them to an enquiry with everything they need already answered.

Should a wholesale website show prices?

Usually not. In wholesale and export the price depends on quantity, destination and the day's stock position, so a published price is either wrong or the highest one you could charge. A quote request with the models, quantities and destination port collects what you need to price the order properly and starts a conversation rather than ending one.

How do you keep a large product catalogue up to date without a developer?

Keep one source of truth and let everything else be generated from it. The client edits products in a private content system, and the site, the search pages and the downloadable PDF catalogue are all rebuilt from that same data automatically. Nothing is typed twice, so nothing can fall out of step.

Run a wholesale, export or distribution business?

If your stock moves faster than your website does, the website is costing you enquiries. We build trade sites where the catalogue, the PDF and the lead record all follow one source of truth, and the client keeps control of it.

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