The B2B Platform Built for How Electrical Wholesalers Actually Sell

Selldi is an all-in-one commerce platform for electrical wholesalers and distributors: a B2B store with per-customer and per-installer pricing, credit terms, quick order lists and recurring orders; a B2C storefront on the same catalogue; a rep CRM; sales-channel management; an AI Email Reader that turns emailed and PDF/Excel orders into ERP entries; and connection to any ERP via API. It sells cable by the metre and by the drum, carries technical parameters and datasheets, supports project quotes and RFQ, and works multi-currency across the EU. It fits distributors who sell to contractors, installers and retail; it is a poor fit if you carry a handful of SKUs or never need customer-specific pricing.

It is 7:40 on a Tuesday and the trade counter of an electrical wholesaler is already three deep. An installer wants 240 metres of 3-core SWA cut off a drum, plus two consumer units and a box of glands, on his account, and he wants to be on site by nine. Behind him, a facilities buyer is holding a printed schedule for a 40-unit refurbishment and asking for a firm price before lunch. And somewhere in an inbox, an email from a regular contractor is sitting with a spreadsheet attached: eighteen line items, all article numbers, no prose. Every one of those is a normal transaction for an electrical distributor. The question is whether your systems make them easy or make your counter staff heroes.

Most generic commerce software was never built for this. It assumes you sell whole units at one price to whoever shows up. Electrical wholesale is the opposite: partial lengths, tiered account pricing, datasheets that decide a sale, credit terms that keep contractors loyal, and orders that arrive as PDFs and Excel files instead of neat clicks. Selldi is an all-in-one platform designed around exactly these habits, so the software bends to the trade rather than the other way round.

Cable by the metre and by the drum

Cable is where a lot of platforms quietly fall apart. You buy it on a drum and you sell it three ways: full drums, standard part-drums, and cut lengths to the metre. A customer ordering 240 metres of SWA is not ordering "240 units" of anything. Selldi handles multiple selling units against one product, so the same cable line can be priced and stocked as a drum and as a per-metre cut, with the platform keeping the running length honest as orders come off the reel. Minimum cut lengths, cutting notes and drum-versus-length choices all live on the product, so the person at the counter or the contractor at midnight sees the same rules.

The same logic covers trunking sold in lengths, conduit sold in bars, and accessories sold in boxes and singles. One catalogue entry, several ways to buy it, and stock that reflects reality instead of a fiction where everything is a tidy integer.

Parameters and datasheets decide the sale

An electrician does not buy "a cable." They buy a specific cross-section, conductor material, voltage rating, sheath type and standard, and they will not commit until they can see the datasheet. If your product pages are marketing fluff, the buyer bounces to a competitor who published the technical detail. Selldi treats parameters as first-class: cross-section, current rating, insulation, IP rating, colour, standard compliance, whatever your categories need, all searchable and filterable so a buyer can narrow 400 cable variants down to the four that fit the job. Datasheets, declarations of conformity and installation notes attach directly to the product, downloadable in the store and visible to the rep in the CRM.

That matters for search, too. Trade buyers search by manufacturer article number and by EAN, not by adjective. Selldi search is built to match on article code and barcode first, so a contractor who has the number off an old invoice or a scanned box finds the exact line in one attempt.

Every contractor sees their own price

Wholesale runs on relationships expressed as pricing. The national contractor, the one-van sole trader and the retail walk-in cannot see the same number, and your reps negotiate deals that have to stick. Selldi gives you per-customer and per-group pricing, contract prices on specific lines, volume breaks, and net terms that only appear once the buyer logs in. A logged-in installer sees their agreed price on every product without a phone call; a prospect sees list or nothing, exactly as you decide. Because it is one platform, the price a rep agrees in the CRM is the price the customer pays in the store, with no rekeying and no drift.

Project quotes and RFQ, not just carts

A refurbishment or a new-build electrical fit-out does not begin with an add-to-cart. It begins with a schedule of quantities and a request for a price. Selldi supports RFQ and project quoting: a contractor submits a list of items and quantities, your estimator or rep prices it as a single project, and the approved quote converts straight into an order without anyone retyping the lines. The whole exchange, the request, the revisions, the final number, stays attached to the customer in the CRM, so the next phase of the same job starts from what was already agreed instead of a blank page.

Reordering consumables should take seconds

The bread and butter of an electrical wholesaler is the contractor who reorders the same glands, terminals, clips, tape, fixings and lamps every single week. Making them hunt the catalogue each time is a good way to lose them to a rival with a faster counter. Selldi gives repeat buyers saved quick order lists, order-by-article-number entry, one-click reordering from history, and recurring scheduled orders for predictable consumption. A site manager can rebuild last month's van stock in under a minute, and the platform remembers what "the usual" means for each account.

Credit terms that keep contractors loyal

In this trade, credit is not a nicety, it is the reason a contractor stays. Selldi models account credit limits, payment terms and on-account ordering, so an approved customer checks out on their terms and your finance team keeps visibility of exposure per account. New or unvetted buyers can be held to prepayment while trusted contractors order freely, all governed by rules rather than by whoever happens to be on the counter.

The order that arrives as an email

Here is the reality no platform brochure likes to admit: a large share of wholesale orders still land as an email with a PDF or an Excel attachment, dumped straight from a contractor's estimating tool. Traditionally someone reads that, finds each article number, and types it into your system, which is slow and error-prone at exactly the moment volume spikes. Selldi's AI Email Reader ingests those emailed orders, reads the PDF and spreadsheet line items, matches them to your catalogue, and turns them into structured orders ready to push into your ERP. Your team confirms rather than transcribes, and the contractor who will only ever email a spreadsheet is served as smoothly as the one who logs in.

One catalogue, wholesale and retail and export

Plenty of electrical distributors also sell to the public, and increasingly across borders. Selldi runs a B2C storefront on the same catalogue and the same stock as your B2B side, so a lamp or a socket is one product with a trade price behind login and a retail price out front, never two systems to reconcile. For cross-border trade it is multi-currency and available in eight languages, so an installer in another EU country browses in their language and buys in their currency against the same warehouse. Sales channels are managed centrally in CENTER, and everything, B2B, B2C, reps and channels, shares one set of products, stock and customer data.

Underneath, Selldi connects to your ERP via API, whether that is SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite or another system, so stock levels, prices, customers and orders stay in step with the system your finance and warehouse teams already trust. The store is the shopfront; your ERP stays the source of truth.

When Selldi is not the right fit

Honesty helps both of us. If you sell a small fixed range at a single public price with no accounts, no credit and no negotiated deals, an all-in-one wholesale platform is more than you need and a simpler tool will serve you better. If your business is purely retail with no trade customers, you are paying for B2B machinery you will not use. And if you have no interest in connecting an ERP or letting reps manage customers, the parts of Selldi that create the most value, per-customer pricing, credit control, CRM and ERP sync, sit idle. Selldi earns its keep when you have real accounts, customer-specific pricing, cable and cut lengths, project quotes and orders arriving in more than one format. That is most serious electrical wholesalers, but it is worth being clear it is not everyone.

If that scene at the trade counter felt familiar, the fastest way to judge fit is to see it running. Selldi offers a live demo with a real catalogue, per-customer pricing and the order flows described here, available on subscription or licence, so you can put your own awkward cable-and-credit scenarios against it before you commit.