BEZAR.IOCustom Web Development
An ageing beige computer terminal with a monochrome CRT and a panel of serial ports, sitting on a steel bench in a dim plant machine room.
Still running. Still the only thing that knows the price.
← All work
Building Materials & Manufacturing

Pricing locked inside a system nothing can reach

Configured products priced on the site instead of by a rep. A manufacturer of dampers, louvers and ventilation products specified by engineers and sold through reps, where live pricing looked impossible on paper.

The problem

Every product is configured, so nothing has a fixed price. Pricing lived inside the manufacturer’s own system, built in-house over decades, with no API and no way for anything outside the building to read it. A live-pricing website was, on paper, impossible.

What we built

  • Established that the system needed an interface at all, specified the contract, and stayed in the room while the manufacturer’s own engineering team built it
  • Shaped the contract against the real data as it emerged, including how values containing spaces were passed, which broke the first implementation
  • Consumed that layer to put live configured pricing into the public catalogue once it existed
  • Mapped sales tax nexus state by state and implemented it in TaxJar after evaluating Avalara
  • Produced 3D product renders where submittal drawings were the only reference that existed

Result

  • A closed, decades-old internal system now serves live pricing to the public web
  • Their engineering team built the interface that made it possible, at our request
  • Configured products priced on the site instead of over the phone
  • Tax handled correctly in every state where nexus applies
0
products that carry a fixed price
days → seconds
to price a configured product
~6 hrs
of rep time a week no longer spent quoting
Estimate Around 25 configured quotes a week at roughly 15 minutes each, now answered by the site.

Who built what, and what it made possible

The manufacturer
Pricing systemBuilt in-house over decades. No interface of any kind.
API layerBuilt by their engineering team, to a contract we specified.
Us
Public catalogueConsumes the layer. Prices a configured product on the open web.

We did not build the interface, and that is the point. An internal engineering team builds something at an outside vendor’s request only when they trust the ask. We established that it had to exist, shaped the contract against the real data as it emerged, and stayed in the room through their build. Your technical people decide whether a project like this survives. We work with them rather than around them.

Configurewall louver
Width48 in
Height36 in
BladeAirfoil
FinishMill

Take over any time.

Their pricing systemanswered
POST /pricing/configure
  width   48
  height  36
  blade   "airfoil"
  finish  "mill"
← 200 238 ms
48 × 36 in 5.96 sq ft free area
$1,572.00List price, configured to order
The arithmetic here is illustrative. The shape is not: a configuration goes out, a system that had no way to talk to anything answers it, and a price lands on a public page without a rep in the loop.
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