THE SPEC SHEET NOBODY CAN FIND
An engineer at a prospective customer needs a part with a specific bore diameter, temperature rating, and lead time. They search. They land on your site. They find a page describing your commitment to quality, a photograph of the factory, and a 340-page product catalog as a PDF last revised in 2021. They leave and buy from the competitor whose site let them filter by bore diameter.
This happens constantly, and it is invisible in your analytics because it never becomes an enquiry. The specification data almost always exists — in the ERP, in a product information system, in a spreadsheet a product manager guards carefully. It is simply not exposed anywhere a buyer can reach it, so the website functions as a brochure while the actual sales process still runs through a rep and a phone call.
The work is unglamorous and it pays: get the catalog out of the PDF, into a structured model, and onto pages that can be filtered, compared, linked to, and indexed. Then wire the quote request to the specific configuration the buyer was looking at, so your sales team receives a qualified request instead of "please send pricing".
FROM BROCHURE TO SALES INFRASTRUCTURE
CLIENT TRANSMISSIONS
VERIFIED OPERATOR FEEDBACK // CLEARANCE LEVEL: PUBLIC
"Nicklaus was absolutely fantastic to work with. He completely transformed our website for The CPG Co-Op, and the end result is better than I could have imagined. What really sets Nicklaus apart is that he’s not just a great designer—he has a deep understanding of the technical side of websites and the backend functionality that makes everything work. He was able to take a fairly complex project, handle the technical details seamlessly, and still make the entire process incredibly easy for me as someone who is, frankly, a total luddite when it comes to this stuff. He also built the site in a way that makes it incredibly easy for me to manage and make changes myself, which means we aren’t constantly paying someone every time we need to update something. That was a huge win for us. He was responsive, collaborative, incredibly fast, and genuinely cared about getting it right. I would highly recommend Nicklaus to anyone looking for someone who can bring the creative vision and the technical expertise to actually execute it. He made the whole process easy—and delivered a website we absolutely love."
EMILY KEALEY
FOUNDER // THE CPG CO-OP
ON THE CPG CO-OP
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
OUR CATALOG IS A PDF. CAN YOU WORK WITH THAT?
Yes, and it is the most common starting point. We extract and structure the data, agree a model that fits how your products actually vary, and set up a maintainable source going forward. It is real work and we scope it honestly rather than pretending a PDF import is a button.
CAN YOU CONNECT TO OUR ERP?
Usually. SAP, Epicor, NetSuite, Infor and most modern systems expose something workable, and older systems often support scheduled exports. We establish exactly what is available during scoping — including how fresh the data can honestly be — rather than promising real-time and delivering nightly.
SHOULD WE SELL ONLINE OR JUST TAKE QUOTE REQUESTS?
Depends on the product. Configured, tolerance-critical, or freight-heavy items usually sell better through a quote flow with genuine configuration capture. Standard consumable lines often should be transactable. Many manufacturers correctly do both, and deciding per product line beats deciding for the whole catalog.
WILL A DISTRIBUTOR PORTAL UPSET OUR DISTRIBUTORS?
It generally does the opposite when it is built for them rather than around them. Distributors dislike being disintermediated; they like stock visibility, order history, and marketing assets they can use. The design question is whether the portal serves the channel or competes with it, and that is worth settling before anything is built.
DO PEOPLE REALLY SEARCH FOR PART NUMBERS?
Constantly, and it is the highest-intent traffic in industrial B2B. Someone searching an exact part number has already specified. If your catalog is locked behind a JavaScript filter with no indexable page per product, that search resolves to a distributor or a competitor instead of to you.
HOW LONG DOES A CATALOG BUILD TAKE?
The website is rarely the long pole — the data is. If your product information is already structured, timelines look like any other custom build. If it lives across PDFs and spreadsheets, the structuring work sets the schedule, and we scope that separately so you can see exactly what it costs.
SEND US YOUR CATALOG.
Even if it is a PDF and a spreadsheet. We will tell you what it would take to make it searchable, filterable, and indexable — within 24 hours, no obligation.