Six things builders' merchants need to hear right now
June 2026
On 7th May 2026, over 60 senior leaders from national and regional builders' merchants gathered at The Grand Hotel, Birmingham for the inaugural Branch of the Future event — a partnership between Brave Bison, Pimberly, Commerce and The Journey. The trade customer is changing. The question is whether merchants are changing fast enough to keep up.
Here's what some of the people in the room had to say.
The customer has already moved on. Are you listening?
Kyle Leivers, Co-Founder of The Journey made the case that the biggest shift merchants can make isn't operational, it's attitudinal. Too many businesses assume they already know what their customers need, drawing on years of learned experience. But the new trade customer is different. Taking the time to understand what they actually want, rather than what worked for the customer before them, is the most important thing merchants can do right now.
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Product data isn't a nice-to-have. It's the foundation.
Sam Crimes, Customer Success Manager at Pimberly, pulled no punches on what merchants are getting wrong when it comes to ecommerce readiness: product data. Suppliers are notoriously difficult to extract quality assets and information from, and the result is merchant websites that ask customers to buy on the basis of a SKU code and a blank image. Compare that to fashion — where a single product on ASOS might have ten images, a video and hundreds of attributes — and the gap is stark. No one buys what they can't see.
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Bob and Dave aren't the same customer. Stop treating them like they are.
John Godwin, Co-Founder and Consultant at The Journey, introduced two customer archetypes that ran through much of the day's conversation: Bob, the experienced trade buyer who knows the branch manager and plays the long game, and Dave, the younger, digitally native customer who organises his day around convenience rather than relationships. The divide between them isn't just about age, it's about completely different buying journeys, expectations and tolerances. Merchants need to serve both, not choose between them.
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AI at the counter: how MP Moran is using data to get ahead
Shaun Bridgeman, Head of Ecommerce at MP Moran, shared how they're approaching AI, not just as a customer-facing tool, but as an internal one. By scanning customer data, the business can better understand where customers are, what they're buying and whether the right stock is in the right branches. The practical upshot: less time spent downloading spreadsheets that break, and more time actually steering product range decisions. The goal is to support the customer journey from account management all the way through to purchase.
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Why most trade ecommerce projects underperform and what to do about it
Rupert Chappell, Sales Director at Commerce talked about how the first sign that a trade ecommerce project is heading for trouble, is often a lack of executive alignment at the start. Too many organisations go into digital transformation expecting overnight results — all customers online from day one, revenue flooding through the new platform. The reality is slower and messier. Success metrics need to be agreed upfront, adoption needs to be tracked carefully, and everyone in the business needs to be honest about what the transformation is actually supposed to achieve.
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Certainty is the product
Al Ward, VP of Commerce at Brave Bison said if there was one word that came up more than any other across the day, it was certainty. The new trade customer doesn't just want to find a product — they want to know it's actually the right product, that it's in stock, that it'll arrive when they need it, and that the price is what they expect. Break any one of those promises and you don't just lose the transaction. You lose the customer. And they won't tell you they're leaving — they'll just disappear.
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Trust is the only loyalty programme that matters
Finally, Andy Pickup, Digital Director at MKM brought it back to the biggest theme of the day. Trust. Real trust, not the assumed loyalty of a long-standing account — is what keeps trade customers coming back. The minute that trust is broken, they're gone. And in a world where customers have more choice than ever before, and where switching is just a better website away, the merchants who earn and protect trust at every touchpoint are the ones who'll grow.
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Branch of the Future is a modular, ready-to-deploy digital commerce framework built specifically for builders’ merchants. Backed by four industry-leading partners - BigCommerce, Brave Bison, The Journey and Pimberly - it brings together platform, product data, strategy and implementation in one packaged solution.
It provides a fast, evidence-led way to identify how your business can connect a modern commerce solution to your operations without the usual cost, risk, or complexity.
No complicated, seven-figure re-platform project. Just a clear path to meet your customers where they are – both in branch and online.
Want to learn more about what was covered on the day? Read the full takeaways here.
