EC Pack supplies packaging and supply products to trade buyers across the UK. Like many established wholesalers, they had never operated a proper B2B web channel—their teams lived in phone, email, and spreadsheets. The brief was to stand up a serious trade storefront on WooCommerce with the same depth of B2B rules as a larger programme, while treating Xero not only as the finance ledger but as the backbone for inventory truth.
Industry: Industrial B2B packaging & supply
Five-month engagement: discovery, WooCommerce-based B2B build, and Xero-centred integrations, with multiple iteration cycles as requirements and UX were refined. Training and handover completed without field-sales tooling in scope.
The challenge
- No live website meant no self-serve catalogue, no audit trail for quotes and orders, and a heavy load on the team for routine “what’s in stock / what’s my price” conversations.
- Xero already anchored both accounting and stock control; any commerce layer had to respect that—product availability and inventory positions had to be driven from Xero through integration, not duplicated in a silo that would drift.
- Trade buyers expect wholesale hygiene: approved accounts, login-gated pricing, MOQs and volume rules, customer-specific pricing and shipping behaviour, and clear product discovery across a technical range.
- Without a field-sales app in scope, the experience had to work entirely for buyers and internal staff at desks—fast pages, dependable checkout, and fewer manual hops between the shop and Xero.
What we did
- Anchored the programme on WooCommerce and extended it for B2B workflows that are not available out of the box—registration and approval paths, gated pricing, rules around quantities and customer groups, and catalogue behaviour matched to how EC Pack trades.
- Designed and implemented integration so inventory and stock-related signals stay aligned with Xero: the shop reflects the warehouse and finance system the team already trusts, reducing double entry and “two sources of truth” risk.
- Connected invoicing and money flows so completed work continues into Xero for tax and reporting, with automation around customer-facing paperwork where required—parallel in spirit to other Xero-heavy wholesale builds, but with inventory ownership explicitly on the Xero side.
- Refined UX for industrial buyers: clearer IA by product families and applications, trust and proof on the page, and performance tuning so heavy catalogue browsing stays responsive.
- Skipped sales-agent and van-selling features entirely; scoped training and handover around office-based teams and registered buyers on the web channel.
Results
A credible digital trade front door
EC Pack moved from an invisible or informal online presence to a wholesale-grade site that reflects what buyers expect from a serious packaging supplier—without changing how they already run accounts and stock in Xero.
One operational spine for stock and books
Treating Xero as the inventory and accounting hub, with integration into the storefront, cut the risk of selling against stale quantities and simplified how finance and operations stay aligned.
Less operational drag on routine trade
Self-serve discovery, clear rules on the site, and fewer manual touchpoints between order capture and Xero free the team to focus on higher-value enquiries instead of re-keying what the system should already know.
We’re a packaging supplier, not a software company—we needed trade ordering to work the way we already run the business in Xero. Codestern built us a B2B site on WooCommerce that respects our stock and accounts in one place, without asking us to invent a second inventory system. For the first time we have a proper web channel our customers can actually use.
Focus areas
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
- B2B wholesale
- Xero inventory & accounts
- Custom B2B rules
- Integration & performance