Building materials ecommerce is transforming the way industrial manufacturers and distributors do business — but along with new growth comes new complexity. Customers expect real-time pricing that is accurate and tailored to their accounts, whether online or offline. Yet, too many companies still rely on outdated methods that can’t keep up with shifting demand, making it tough to deliver consistent, competitive pricing at scale. Modern dynamic pricing solutions offer a better way — giving businesses the agility to connect strategic goals with operational execution and win more customers in a rapidly changing market.
The Challenge: Consistent, Customer-Specific Pricing Across Channels
Why Consistent Pricing Matters
Today’s customers expect more than just a seamless purchase — they want to know the price they see is the price they’ll pay, no matter how they engage with your business. When pricing varies from one channel to another, it erodes trust and can quickly send customers searching for more predictable partners. Consistency means every interaction — whether it’s with a sales rep, a customer service agent, via your ecommerce portal, or at the invoice stage — delivers accurate, account-specific pricing tailored to each buyer.
When this consistency breaks down, it can stall adoption of digital channels. For example, if an ecommerce site shows only generic prices while a customer expects their negotiated rate, frustration grows and orders drop. On the other hand, when customers have confidence in your pricing transparency, they’re more likely to embrace self-service and place frequent, higher-value orders. Consistent, tailored pricing is key: it’s not just about efficiency — it’s foundational for building customer loyalty and driving digital growth.
The Ecommerce Push — and the Pricing Gap
Manufacturers and distributors are investing heavily in ecommerce to meet customer demands for convenience and 24/7 access. According to a report from Simon-Kucher & Partners, nearly half of all building materials will be purchased online by 2030.
Image source: simon-kucher.com: Winning In 2025: How Building Material Suppliers Can Navigate a Changing Market
The first step is deploying an ecommerce platform where customers can browse products, check availability, manage logistics, and complete purchases. While many companies have built these platforms, they often encounter persistent pricing challenges in ecommerce that limit adoption and conversion. Without seamless, account-specific pricing that matches customer expectations, even the best ecommerce solution falls flat. Pricing isn’t just a detail — it’s a primary lever for driving online sales and building trust in digital channels.
Why? The likely culprit is pricing.
ERPs are systems of record, not dynamic pricing engines. They don’t support real-time price calculations or personalized pricing based on customer data. As a result, ecommerce platforms integrated with ERPs can only offer static list prices, making it difficult to deliver the right price to the right customer at the right time.
The Bottom Line
Here’s the pricing challenge in simple terms:
- Generic list prices fail to drive ecommerce adoption.
- ERP-based pricing creates slow response times that degrade the customer experience.
The PROS Advantage
Unlike traditional ERP systems, PROS Price Optimization and Management is purpose-built for real-time, dynamic pricing at scale. It’s designed to help manufacturers and distributors manage complex pricing strategies with precision, speed, and intelligence. Here’s what sets us apart:
- Real-Time Pricing Execution: PROS delivers precise, account-specific prices in milliseconds, ensuring you can respond instantly to market changes and customer needs.
- Advanced Price Optimization: Leverage AI-driven insights to identify the optimal pricing strategies that improve profitability and competitiveness.
- Scalable Complexity Management: Store and manage complex pricing conditions, configure sophisticated pricing logic, and simplify even the most challenging pricing scenarios.
- Seamless Integration: Easily integrate with ERP and CRM systems to streamline workflows and eliminate manual pricing tasks.
- Increased Agility and Accuracy: Empower your teams with the tools to make data-driven decisions and deliver consistent, error-free quotes.
With PROS, you can confidently deliver the right price, at the right time, to the right customer. Our confidence in performance is reflected in our inclusion of response-time commitments in our standard license agreements.
Customer Example
A UK-based distributor faced a challenge many B2B businesses know well: their ecommerce platform allowed customers to browse the catalog and see their negotiated prices — but only for products in their specific price lists.
This created a major blind spot. For items not covered by a customer’s negotiated list, the system showed the standard list price. While this seemed logical, it proved unrealistic for both large key accounts and smaller businesses. The result? Poor win rates for new products and missed opportunities.
Sales agents had to intervene manually — creating more customized price lists to meet customer expectations. This was time-consuming and undermined the scalability and efficiency that ecommerce should deliver.
This gap harmed the buying experience and made customers less likely to add those products to their quotes.
The distributor wanted to show relevant, customer-specific pricing — even for products outside the negotiated list — to encourage engagement and drive conversions. With PROS Price Optimization and Management, they achieved two key results:
- Generated competitive, market-driven prices for products outside the customer’s negotiated list, tailored to each account’s profile and buying history.
- Delivered accurate pricing in near real-time, combining negotiated prices with optimized prices for uncovered items — creating a seamless and consistent experience across the web shop.
This approach improved quote conversion rates and strengthened customer trust by keeping pricing relevant and transparent throughout the buying journey.
Conclusion
By leveraging advanced, scalable solutions like PROS Smart CPQ and SPOM, you can streamline your quoting processes, reduce errors, and deliver tailored, precise pricing that meets the demands of today’s complex B2B sales environments. These innovations not only enhance operational efficiency, but also foster stronger customer relationships and drive sustainable revenue growth.
Are you ready to transform your sales process and achieve faster, error-free quotes? Contact us today to learn more or schedule a personalized demo to see PROS solutions in action. Let’s revolutionize your quoting experience together!
Frequently Asked Questions
Consistent pricing is essential for building trust and encouraging customers to use your ecommerce platform. When a customer sees the same accurate, account-specific price whether they are online, talking to a sales rep, or looking at an invoice, it creates a seamless and reliable buying experience. Inconsistencies, like showing generic list prices online, can frustrate customers and push them back to manual ordering methods.
Many businesses struggle with ecommerce adoption because of two main pricing issues:
Irrelevant Prices: Displaying generic list prices instead of the negotiated rates customers expect. This makes the ecommerce site feel useless for their needs.
Slow Performance: Relying on ERP systems for pricing, which are not built for real-time calculations. This leads to slow loading times (15-30 seconds or more) and a poor user experience that drives customers away.
Managing complex pricing with multiple agreements, discounts, and promotions is a common challenge. Standard ERP systems are not designed to handle these calculations in real time for a digital channel. A purpose-built solution like PROS Price Optimization and Management is designed to store complex pricing logic and deliver accurate, account-specific prices in milliseconds, ensuring your ecommerce platform can handle any pricing scenario.
This is a frequent blind spot that hurts sales. If the ecommerce site defaults to a standard list price, customers are unlikely to purchase the item. PROS Price Optimization and Management solves this by using AI to generate a relevant, competitive price for items outside a customer’s negotiated list. This price is tailored to the account’s profile, encouraging them to add new products to their order and increasing your win rate.
A real-time pricing solution ensures that your ecommerce platform delivers the correct, tailored price for every account, instantly. This eliminates frustrating delays and builds confidence. By combining an account’s negotiated prices with optimized prices for other items, you create a seamless experience that strengthens trust and keeps them engaged on your site.
By implementing PROS, you can achieve two key outcomes. First, you can generate competitive, market-driven prices for all products, even those outside an account’s specific price list. Second, you can deliver all pricing information in near-real time. This combined approach improves quote conversion rates, drives adoption of your ecommerce channel, and strengthens customer relationships through pricing transparency.
