Context
HDPE Plumbing & Trading supplies contractors and merchants from Alrode South, Alberton. The old WordPress catalogue needed a trade-first replacement: browse lines, build a quote cart, and keep selling prices honest when supplier PDFs change.
Approach
- Ship an Astro wholesale site with product-line hubs and a quote-cart flow (not public checkout)
- Parse supplier PDFs through a Python pricelist bot with markup rules and human approval
- Publish approved
list_zarprices to the website; export matched SKUs to Pastel Partner for accounting - Keep cost fields out of the public HTML — trade pricing discipline by design
Outcome
Live site at hdpeplumbingtrade.co.za. Demo handover documents a published price list (hundreds of items) and Pastel CSV export for matched stock codes. No invented revenue metrics.
Stack notes
- Astro marketing + catalogue site
- Python
price_ingestpipeline + SQLite canonical prices - Pastel Partner inventory CSV export
- Netlify hosting