Sectors
Sixteen sectors, and for each what it genuinely imposes on an online shop. Not a list of references by trade: a description of the technical constraints that recur in a sector and that a developer discovers too late if they have never met them.
Why you are here
You sell wine, spare parts, cosmetics or furniture, and you want to know whether the person you are talking to grasps what that changes. It is a fair question: most e-commerce quotes are written as if all shops were alike, when the trade determines half the technical choices.
These pages do not claim each sector needs a different platform — it rarely does. They set out where the hard points specific to a trade sit, the ones that show up when structuring the catalogue, calculating a price or shipping an order. Knowing them beforehand means handling them in the design rather than patching them after launch.
How the section is organised
The sixteen sectors are grouped by family of constraints. Trades with a variant-heavy catalogue: fashion, sport and cycling, jewellery and watches, second-hand and consignment. Regulated or perishable trades: groceries and food, wine, beer and spirits, cosmetics and perfume, CBD and vaping.
Technical, high-volume trades: car and motorcycle parts, consumer electronics and IT, industry and technical equipment, building materials and DIY. And trades with particular logistics or manufacturing: furniture, bedding and decoration, personalised and engraved goods, hospitality and takeaway, wholesalers and B2B. Each page stands alone, but neighbouring sectors often share the same difficulty.
What really separates one sector from another
Technically, the difference almost never lies in the design. It lies in three things. First product structure: a size and a colour are handled as variations, an engraving or a made-to-measure cut needs a configurator and a free field attached to the order line, and a unique second-hand item forces single-unit stock that rules out restocking.
Then pricing rules: a B2B site shows prices excluding tax, applies a rate per customer group and handles quantity discounts; a consumer site shows tax-inclusive prices. That single difference touches the catalogue, the checkout, the invoices and the accounting export, and is hard to retrofit.
Finally outbound constraints: bulky delivery with a specialist carrier for furniture, age checks and communication restrictions for alcohol or vaping, batch and date handling for food and cosmetics, vehicle-compatibility search for car parts. Those three axes are what each page details for its sector.
Very different constraints from one trade to another
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Fashion and clothing
Size and colour variations, stock per variant, multiple images and returns handling.
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Wholesalers and B2B
Prices excluding tax, rates per customer group, quantity discounts, recurring orders and quotes.
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Groceries and food
Dates, batches, pack sizes and transport constraints: catalogue and logistics are tied together.
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Car and motorcycle parts
Vehicle-compatibility search and catalogues running into tens of thousands of references.
In this section
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Fashion e-commerce: variants, stock and returns
A fashion store doesn’t have a catalogue problem, it has a combination problem: the same jacket comes in eight sizes and twelve…
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Food e-commerce: use-by dates, batches and cold chain
As soon as a product perishes, stock stops being a counter. It becomes a set of dated batches that have to be sold in the right…
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Wine, beer and spirits e-commerce: the constraints
A bottle is not an item like any other: heavy, fragile, regulated on dispatch, barred from most paid advertising channels, and…
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Cosmetics e-commerce: INCI, batches and labelling
A cosmetic product sells with its label. Online, that label has to become queryable, translated, exportable fields, without the…
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Car and motorbike parts e-commerce
In this trade the buyer isn’t looking for a product, they’re looking for what fits their car or bike. The whole shop architecture…
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High-tech and IT e-commerce: serials and after-sales
Selling IT hardware, phones or consumables puts demands on a catalogue that no CMS covers out of the box: tracking the exact unit…
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Industrial and technical equipment e-commerce
On an industrial store the catalogue is not owned by the site: it belongs to the ERP. The store is an ordering front end, and…
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Building materials and DIY e-commerce
Here the basket does not count items, it counts square metres, tonnes and rolls. Between what the buyer types and what actually…
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B2B and wholesale e-commerce: pricing, quotes, credit
A trade store looks like a consumer store right up to the moment you look at the price. From there almost everything diverges…
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Furniture and bedding e-commerce: freight and lead times
In furniture, the catalogue is almost never the hard part: what happens between the click and the buyer’s doorway is. Volume…
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Personalised products and printing e-commerce
On a promotional products, printed textile or online print store, the catalogue holds no prices: it holds the elements used to…
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Second-hand and consignment e-commerce
A second-hand store behaves nothing like a store selling new goods: each listing describes one object, disappears once sold, and…
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Restaurant and takeaway e-commerce
Online food ordering behaves like nothing else in e-commerce: a dish sells by service, drops off the menu when an ingredient runs…
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Jewellery and watch e-commerce
In jewellery and watchmaking, the hard part is almost never the theme. It comes from single-unit stock, from variants that…
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Sport, cycling and outdoor e-commerce
Selling a bike, a pair of skis or a climbing harness online means selling a measurement before you sell a product. The catalogue…
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CBD and vaping e-commerce
In this sector the first architectural decision is neither the theme nor the catalogue: it is the ability to keep taking payments…