A wholesale page that fills the container for you

The problem

A furniture exporter takes small wholesale orders through the website. A buyer orders 120 chairs, ten thousand dollars of goods, and twelve hundred dollars of ocean freight — because that volume can only go LCL, charged by the cubic metre, and ordering more does not move the rate. The buyer sees the landed price, decides it is expensive, and goes to ask the next supplier. The factory knows perfectly well what should happen: a few small buyers share a container. But that has always been the sales desk doing it by hand over chat — who is shipping this month, who is short how many cubes, who can wait two weeks. When it works, nothing is recorded; when it does not, the buyer has already gone.

What we built

We put that on the page. There is a 40HQ loading this month, five buyers have booked 41.2 of its 68 cubic metres, and 26.8 are open. The buyer sees it while ordering, books his own 9.6, and the bar grows. How much is still missing is stated, and so is what the freight becomes when it is filled — because that number is exactly why he would go and find someone. He sends the link to a peer in the trade, the peer books, the box is full, and **the freight line on the left switches from the LCL rate to a share of one container** — for the five who booked before him as well. There is nothing to believe in here: no draw, no points, no promise. The saving is a real freight differential that already existed; it just used to depend on somebody shouting in a group chat.

Try it yourself

• The demo books the 9.6 m³ by itself; the bar moves to 50.8 of 68.
• Press the button marked Demo to bring another buyer in, and watch the freight on the left go from $1,238 to $826.
• Change the quantity to 250 or 500 — the cubic metres and the landed unit price move together.
• Read the freight line’s description as it changes: “LCL, your volume only” becomes “share of one 40HQ”.

Who this suits

Any business where one customer alone does not reach the efficient size but several together do: export consolidation, group purchasing, shared delivery runs, print runs, tooling amortised over buyers. The test is simple — if your sales team is in a group chat asking who else is shipping this month, that conversation can be a progress bar instead.

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