Our Town Fencing Trade Portal
Custom B2B trade portal built with Laravel for Hunter Valley fencing manufacturer Our Town Fencing. Syncs thousands of fencing products daily from ProfitPlus, giving trade customers 24/7 self-service access to product catalogue, ordering tools and job tracking.
The Challenge
Our Town Fencing is a Hunter Valley fencing manufacturer with a large network of trade customers who buy and sell their products daily. Those trade customers needed reliable, self-service access to current product information, pricing, order tools and job status -- but managing all of that over phone calls and spreadsheets wasn't scaling with the business.
What We Built
We developed a custom trade customer portal using Laravel -- a secure, login-only B2B portal giving each trade customer 24/7 access to everything they need in one place.
At its core is a searchable online product catalogue with thousands of SKUs, synced automatically every morning from Our Town Fencing's ProfitPlus accounting system. A scheduled export generates a plain text database file which transfers to the server via encrypted rsync -- a straightforward inventory integration that keeps the catalogue accurate without any manual effort.
Beyond the product catalogue, the trade portal includes a printable manual order sheet, a B2B ordering system for quotes and purchase orders, drawing sheet downloads, marketing material downloads like signage and brochures, current trading terms, and a daily trade job tracker emailed to customers each morning showing all their upcoming custom manufacturing jobs.
The whole portal is fully responsive and printer-friendly -- because plenty of tradies across Newcastle and the Hunter Valley still want something in hand on-site.
A Long-Standing Partnership
After working with Our Town Fencing for more than five years, we had existing product knowledge and a deep understanding of their business before writing a line of code. This custom portal development project is one of over a dozen applications we've built together -- and there's more in the pipeline.
Technology
Laravel portal development, ProfitPlus integration via scheduled export and encrypted rsync, secure user authentication, searchable product database with thousands of SKUs, automated daily email notifications, B2B ordering tools, responsive and printer-friendly design.
