Trade Customers Have Changed. Have Builders’ Merchants?

The trade customer has changed. The question facing every builders’ merchant is no longer whether digital matters in their business — it’s whether the digital experience they offer today is good enough to keep the customers they already have.

That was the central theme of the inaugural Branch of the Future event, hosted on 7th May 2026 at The Grand Hotel, Birmingham. Over 60 senior leaders from national and regional builders’ merchants spent the afternoon with us — alongside our partners at Brave Bison, Commerce, and The Journey — working through what’s really changing in the trade buying journey, where merchants are falling short, and what the leading operators in the sector are doing about it.

The full event report is available to download now from the Branch of the Future hub. Here’s a preview of what’s inside.

The migration is already happening

The Journey’s co-founders Kyle Leivers and John Godwin opened the day with research that should give every merchant board pause. 31% of UK trade customers have already switched merchant because another website was easier to use. A further 14% say they would switch the moment they found one that worked better. Sixty percent expect to use digital even more, and 39% already start their journey online before they ever pick up the phone or walk into a branch.

The merchants who can’t meet trade customers online are leaking revenue they don’t see. The merchants who can — credibly, reliably, with the right product data behind the experience — are picking it up.

As Kyle put it: “If you want to win online with a builder or a tradesperson, certainty and being able to select when they want it is absolutely key.”

Certainty is the new currency

The phrase that came up more than any other across the day was trust. Not in the abstract — in the very specific, operational sense of can the customer believe what your website tells them?

The numbers tell the story. 92% of trade customers say seeing live branch stock matters, but only 27% of assessed merchant websites show it with quantities. 86% would switch merchants if they couldn’t see a specific delivery date. 89% have abandoned a builders’ merchant online order. 64% still call their branch every week for information that, by their own admission, should already be online.

This is the gap Pimberly is built to close. Trade buyers don’t care about the architecture diagrams behind your eCommerce platform. They care whether the product page tells them what they need to know, whether the stock count is real, and whether the lead time will hold. Every one of those answers comes from the same place: clean, complete, current product data, syndicated reliably to every channel.

Two customers, one operating model

Steve Collinge of Insight Retail Group framed the strategic problem neatly: merchants are now serving two customers at once. “Bob” still values the branch relationship and the conversation at the counter. “Davey” expects the speed and visibility he gets from every other digital service in his life. The mistake is treating this as a choice. As Steve said, “Just because you do something to keep Davey happy doesn’t mean you alienate Bob.”

Convenience, he argued, is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the strategy. Live stock, click-and-collect, lockers, fast delivery, digital account access — these aren’t extras, they’re table stakes for the next generation of trade buyers.

And the decision increasingly gets made before the branch ever sees the customer. Trade buyers are now influenced by search, social, peer recommendation and — critically — AI-assisted discovery. “If you are not being shown within LLMs,” Steve warned, “if you’re not visible with the questions in the same way that Toolstation may be, then you are invisible.”

Why most trade eCommerce still underperforms

Across two panels — Why So Much Trade Revenue is Still Offline and Why Most Trade eCommerce Currently Tends to Fail — operators from Jewson, MKM, JT Atkinson, Toolstation, MP Moran and others were refreshingly candid about what’s actually holding the sector back.

The consensus was clear, and it wasn’t about front-end design. Trade eCommerce fails when it’s treated as a channel project instead of a business transformation project. Jack Haywood of Jewson summed up the real blockers: “models, systems, and data.” Andy Pickup of MKM was equally direct: “If you don’t have the right data, then customers don’t buy. It’s really straightforward.”

Adrian Gordon of JT Atkinson described it as a chain-link system — search, range, product information, stock, pricing, fulfilment — that has to be optimised end to end. Improving one link doesn’t help if the customer hits friction in the next one. “We’ve delivered a really great site search,” he said, “but the products aren’t there to be found.”

This is the work. And it sits squarely in the product data layer. The merchants who win the next five years will be the ones who treat enriched, accurate, configurable product information not as a project but as the foundation everything else is built on.

Loyalty, AI, and the buyer of tomorrow

The day’s most forward-looking conversations turned to AI and what it means for trade buying. Adrian Gordon offered a sobering forecast: “I think we understand our current buyers, but the buyer of tomorrow might not even be a human.” He raised the risk of split baskets, where automated buying systems source across multiple merchants and high-margin lines drift to whoever has the best data, the best stock visibility, and the cleanest fulfilment promise.

Shaun Bridgeman of MP Moran put the answer simply: “Give the LLMs the right accurate information so that when a customer goes into ChatGPT or Copilot and asks the question, your data is in the right conversation.”

That’s a product information challenge before it’s anything else.

Closing the gap

Brave Bison’s Allan Ward closed the event with a message that captures the moment the sector is in. “It’s not about replacing the branch,” he said. “It’s about extending its value.” The branch still matters. The relationship still matters. But the pre-branch moments — the search, the comparison, the stock check, the delivery promise — are where customers are now deciding who to trust.

People want certainty. People want convenience. People want trust. The merchants who build all three into every touchpoint will grow. The ones who don’t, won’t.

Get the full report

The full Branch of the Future event report includes every session, the supporting research from The Journey, panel insights from Jewson, MKM, JT Atkinson, Toolstation, CMO Group, MP Moran, Ideal Bathrooms and BMF, and a closing perspective from Brave Bison.

Download the report from the Branch of the Future hub →