A lot of what an electrical distributor sells is the same thing, over and over. Wire nuts, straps, connectors and couplings, device plates, tape, ground rods, lamps and fuses. Contractors and plant maintenance teams burn through them every week. Every one of those orders is predictable, and yet most of them still come in as a phone call or a text.
The app gives your customers three ways to take the effort out of the repeat order, and lets them decide how much the app should do on its own.
Reorder: buy it again in one tap
Reorder lets a customer buy a past order again, or reorder a saved list. For an electrical contractor who wires a lot of similar houses, that might be the rough-in package: boxes, staples, NM cable, wire nuts and a few breakers. They pull up the last one, change the quantities, and send it. For a plant, it might be the monthly lamp and fuse restock.
AutoPilot reorder: their usual items on schedule
AutoPilot reorder keeps a customer's usual items coming on schedule so they don't run out. It looks at what that account has actually used over the last year. When AutoPilot is on for a scan program, scanning a bin once orders a set number of days of stock based on that customer's own usage, so a busy contractor shop gets a couple of months' worth of the items they burn through, not one box at a time.
The important part is the dial. Each customer chooses how much AutoPilot does:
- Suggest: the app builds a suggested reorder and the buyer decides what to send.
- Ask first: the app prepares the order on schedule and asks the buyer to confirm before anything goes to you.
- Run on its own: the schedule the customer set up runs as they set it, on the items and quantities they agreed to, and they can change or stop it at any time.
Most electrical customers start at Suggest and move along the dial as they get comfortable. The buyer is always the one who decides how it works. You can see which accounts have AutoPilot on and how it is set.
Blanket orders for contract work
Larger electrical jobs and maintenance contracts often run on a blanket order: a set of items and prices for a job, a building or a contract period. The customer releases material against it as they need it.
In the app, customers can make releases against the blanket themselves. A foreman on a school renovation can release the next floor's worth of fixtures and devices from the job trailer. The pricing is the contract pricing, and everyone can see what has been released and what is left.
Why steady reorders are worth chasing
The repeat items are some of your most dependable business. They are rarely bid out line by line, and they are exactly the kind of order a competitor picks off when the customer gets frustrated waiting on hold. Getting those orders onto a reorder list, AutoPilot or a blanket means the customer doesn't have to think about you, in a good way.
It also smooths out your own purchasing. When more of your volume runs on steady schedules, your buyers can plan stock with less guessing and fewer emergency vendor orders.
See how it works with your own electrical catalog.