Plumin Online

The challenge

Plumin Online sells thousands of plumbing and drainage products to trade and DIY customers, and it is one of a family of trade supply storefronts alongside Roofin Online and Supaplastics. A catalogue that size brings its own problems. Customers need to find the exact fitting fast, trade buyers expect to switch between ex-VAT and inc-VAT prices at a click, and the team needs to run the whole operation (products, orders, content and customers) without wrestling a clunky admin. The brief was a fast, modern store that is genuinely easy to buy from and easy to run.

What we built

We designed and built Plumin a full custom e-commerce store on Laravel, with a fast, modern storefront and a powerful custom back office behind it.

• A proper trade catalogue. Thousands of products organised into a deep, hierarchical mega-menu, with brands, variants, image galleries, clean tidy URLs and live search suggestions that surface the right product (and SKU) as you type.
• Ex-VAT and inc-VAT at a click. A site-wide VAT toggle lets trade and retail customers see prices the way they think about them, right across the site.
• Smooth checkout. A multi-step checkout for guests and account holders, with discount codes, postcode-based UK delivery pricing and secure card payments through Stripe, followed by automatic order confirmation emails.
• Full customer accounts. Registration with email verification and optional two-factor security, order history, a saved address book and profile management.
• Content and SEO built in. A news and how-to guides section, policy and help pages, structured data for rich results and a full sitemap, with the previous store's URLs carefully redirected so years of search ranking carried straight over.

An AI shopping assistant that knows the catalogue

Every page carries a friendly chat assistant, and the clever part is that it is grounded in Plumin's live, in-stock catalogue, so it only ever recommends real products that are actually available. Customers can describe what they are trying to do, get help finding the right fitting or size, compare options, and, once they are happy, have the assistant drop the product straight into their basket. It replies in real time, and the team can see every conversation and even how many chats turn into orders.

A full admin back office

Behind the store sits a powerful custom admin panel where the team runs everything: live dashboards for revenue and orders, full product and category management with image handling and stock reports, order management with manual orders and CSV exports, discount codes, UK delivery zones and rates, the blog and content, customers, newsletter subscribers and marketing reports. Staff sign in securely with email or single sign-on, roles and permissions control who can do what, and a full activity log records every change.

A custom-built trade e-commerce store with an AI shopping assistant grounded in the live catalogue and a complete custom admin back office, briefed, built and delivered in 24 hours.

The result

Plumin went live with a fast, modern store that is a pleasure to buy from and, just as importantly, a pleasure to run. Customers find the right part quickly, whether they search, browse the mega-menu or simply ask the assistant, and they check out in ex-VAT or inc-VAT prices without thinking about it. The team runs the entire operation from one back office. And it went from brief to live in 24 hours.