Dealer Hub

The situation

Independent dealers are a huge part of how Springfree sells in the US. A trampoline is a big physical product, plenty of buyers want to see one in person before they commit, and dealers are how that happens.

By the time I was Senior Product Manager, our direct-to-consumer storefront had years of product work behind it. The dealer side of the business had no equivalent home online, and the longer that went on, the harder the gap was to justify.

What I did

I led Dealer Hub, a wholesale channel built on Shopify Plus B2B, with NetSuite as the system of record and Celigo keeping the two in sync. That’s the same integration pattern our consumer business already ran on, so the wholesale channel started life on plumbing we trusted. Dealers got a place to browse the catalogue and place their own orders. Wholesale runs on different rules than consumer checkout, and Shopify Plus gave us the pieces to handle them without building a second business by hand.

We also launched 25 branded Shopify storefronts for the dealers themselves. Rather than one big release, we went in phases. We’d launch a wave, watch it closely, then fold whatever we learned into the next one. It was deliberately boring, and it worked.

As the rollout matured, the channel needed an owner on the human side too, and the company created a Dealer Success Manager role around it.

What changed

More than 20 dealers came onboard, and the dealer channel now drives the majority of Springfree’s US revenue. That means most of the US business runs through a platform my team shipped.

All 25 branded storefronts launched with zero critical defects, and I put that down to the phased rollout more than to luck. Every wave made the next one safer.

The clearest sign the work stuck is that the company hired for it. A Dealer Success Manager role exists because the channel grew into something worth someone’s whole job, and a program that creates a job is well past the project stage.