Shoal
Building a B2B Ecommerce Platform for PPE Procurement
Umbraco Commerce website for B2B
Client Overview
Shoal Group is a health and safety solutions provider with a clear mission: to support organisations in making sure everyone goes home healthy and safe.
The business supplies PPE products to B2B customers, with product fulfilment supported through its supplier partner, Portwest. Demand for Shoal’s PPE products was increasing, but its ordering model was still largely manual: customers browsed physical brochures, placed orders by phone and the Shoal team manually entered those orders into the Portwest portal.
To support growth, Shoal needed a dedicated ecommerce platform that could bring its product catalogue online, make the buying journey easier for B2B customers and reduce the operational burden on its internal team.
The Challenge
Shoal’s existing WordPress website was brochureware only. It did not include ecommerce functionality, product browsing, online account management or a live product catalogue. The new platform needed to do more than simply list products; it had to support Shoal’s B2B operating model.
The key challenges were:
- Bringing a large PPE product catalogue online.
- Supporting B2B quote-based purchasing rather than conventional card checkout.
- Allowing organisations to have parent and child user accounts.
- Supporting customer-specific price lists and discounts.
- Importing product data from Portwest despite the absence of an API.
- Creating a scalable technical foundation for future integrations.
- Giving Shoal’s team control over content, products, navigation, banners, SEO metadata and customer account structures.
Early project discovery sessions considered SaaS ecommerce platforms, but further discovery showed that Shoal’s deeper B2B requirements would need more flexibility than a SaaS ecommerce platform could comfortably provide.
The project therefore moved to Umbraco Commerce, giving Shoal a more customisable platform built around its specific operational needs.
The Solution
Quba designed and built ShoalX, a new Umbraco Commerce ecommerce website at shoalx.com. The platform gives Shoal a dedicated B2B ecommerce experience where customers can browse PPE products, build baskets, request quotes and manage their accounts online.
The live website now presents Shoal as “Your Trusted PPE Partner” and includes structured product categories. The homepage also promotes benefits including free shipping, simple quotes and access to expert advice.
Rather than forcing Shoal into a standard ecommerce checkout model, the platform was designed around its B2B workflow. Customers can browse products, add items to a basket and submit that basket as a quote request. This preserves Shoal’s account-led sales process while moving the product discovery and quote-building experience online.
Why Umbraco Commerce
The decision to use Umbraco Commerce was central to the project.
During discovery, Quba identified that Shoal required functionality that went beyond standard ecommerce features. These included B2B companies, administrator users, child accounts, price lists per organisation, discounts per company, client registration approval, bespoke backend logic and future integration flexibility.
Umbraco Commerce provided the right balance of ecommerce capability and custom development flexibility. Because it runs on top of Umbraco CMS, Shoal can manage content and commerce in one familiar back-office environment, and it is future proof allowing the platform to be extended to meet future bespoke B2B requirements.
This approach also avoided the constraints of a closed SaaS platform, where source-code-level customisation would have been limited.
Key Features
B2B account structure
ShoalX supports a B2B account hierarchy, allowing companies to have administrator users and child users associated with the same parent organisation. This gives Shoal the foundations for account-based purchasing, customer management and future sales growth.
Quote-based ecommerce journey
Because Shoal’s customers are B2B buyers, the platform does not rely on card payment at launch. Instead, baskets are submitted as quote requests, allowing Shoal’s team to continue processing orders through the appropriate account and invoicing workflow.
Customer-specific pricing and discounts
The platform was specified to support price lists and discounts at both organisation and client level. This allows Shoal to reflect the commercial arrangements it has with different B2B customers.
Product catalogue and filtering
ShoalX brings the PPE catalogue online with browsable categories, product listing pages, product detail pages and faceted filtering.
Product configurator
The product page specification included support for configurable products, including custom text and logo upload. For security, uploaded files are stored separately from the public Umbraco media library and made accessible through the orders area.
Search
The site uses a combination of Umbraco’s Examine search and Azure AI Search to index content and make products and site content discoverable. The live site includes global search functionality and search result behaviour in the main navigation.
Editable content and navigation
Shoal’s team can manage key areas of the site through Umbraco, including navigation links, footer links, social channels, notification bars, page metadata, generic content pages, banners and homepage content.
The Result
ShoalX gives Shoal a modern B2B ecommerce platform tailored to the realities of PPE procurement. Customers can now browse the catalogue online, search and filter products, add items to a basket, and submit quote requests without needing to rely on physical brochures or phone-led product discovery.
For Shoal, the platform reduces friction in the ordering process, improves customer self-service, and creates a stronger digital foundation for future growth. The site is also built to support future phases, including deeper Portwest automation if an API becomes available, potential B2C checkout, expanded integrations, additional payment methods and further ecommerce optimisation.
The result is not simply an online catalogue. It is a scalable B2B commerce platform that reflects how Shoal actually sells, how its customers buy, and how the business can continue to develop its digital sales operation.
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