---
title: "Tell a Contractor Which Branch Has It, Before They Drive"
url: https://www.uncap.com/industry/construction-supply
author: "Denis Dyli"
published: 2026-09-20
updated: 2026-09-27
summary: "Uncap builds construction supply ecommerce on Shopify where a contractor account sees branch stock before they commit, orders for will call or jobsite delivery, books the rental alongside the purchase, and has the lot billed to the job. Uncap Portal is a private ordering portal that lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place, with multi-user accounts, roles, budgets, approvals and net terms. Portal is not a rental management system: the fleet, reservation calendar and return workflow stay in the rental or ERP system, with Uncap Connect moving the data in real time. Job-based billing, nearest-branch logic and the rental exposure layer are built during implementation. Uncap is a Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, with 380+ storefronts launched."
---

# Tell a Contractor Which Branch Has It, Before They Drive

> Uncap builds construction supply ecommerce on Shopify where a contractor account sees branch stock before they commit, orders for will call or jobsite delivery, books the rental alongside the purchase, and has the lot billed to the job. Uncap Portal is a private ordering portal that lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place, with multi-user accounts, roles, budgets, approvals and net terms. Portal is not a rental management system: the fleet, reservation calendar and return workflow stay in the rental or ERP system, with Uncap Connect moving the data in real time. Job-based billing, nearest-branch logic and the rental exposure layer are built during implementation. Uncap is a Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, with 380+ storefronts launched.

## The challenge

**Where a generic storefront breaks for construction supply**

Construction supply is a speed business, and the website is usually the slowest thing in it.

|  | Factor | Generic storefront setup | What construction supply needs |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| Branch stock | An aggregate figure across every branch, which sends a crew to an empty shelf. | Availability for the branch the contractor selects, with other branches surfaced when the nearest is short. |
| Rental and sale | One side modeled and the other ignored, so half the business stays on the phone. | The rental booked alongside the purchase in one session. |
| Fastener pricing | One price, with carton and pallet hidden behind a quantity field. | Box, carton and pallet side by side, priced per thousand where that is how the line sells. |
| Job accounts | Billing by company, with someone reconciling deliveries against cost codes by hand. | Purchases reported and billed by job, with a purchase order raised against the job. |
| Consumables | Blades, bits, abrasives and fixings that are never digitized, because phoning the counter is faster. | A reorder list one click from becoming this week's order. |

Construction supply is not a catalog business. It is a speed business, and the website is usually the slowest thing in it.

Your buyer is on site. They do not browse. They want to know what is on the shelf at the branch nearest to them, whether they can collect it in twenty minutes or have it delivered to the jobsite by lunch, and what it costs on their account. If the site cannot answer all three, they call the counter, and the counter becomes the bottleneck for every crew in your territory.

Four things make this harder than it looks.

**Rental and sale live in one catalog and behave nothing alike.** A saw is a product. The same saw for three days is a reservation with a start date, a return, a condition check and a different billing cycle. Your rental fleet is tracked somewhere your storefront has never looked. Most storefronts model one side and ignore the other, so half the business stays on the phone.

**Fasteners price at three levels at once.** Box, carton and pallet, each with its own price and its own break, sold per thousand for some lines. A contractor deciding between a carton and a pallet needs all three visible, not one hidden behind a quantity field.

**Job accounts are not customer accounts.** Contractors want purchases reported and billed by job, not by company, with a purchase order raised against the job rather than the business. Without it, someone reconciles a month of jobsite deliveries against cost codes by hand, and that someone is usually your accounts team. The same gap shows up on the tool crib side, where a contractor running a crib on their own site has no way to reorder into it from your website.

**Branch stock is the whole answer, and it is usually national.** An aggregate figure across every branch is worse than no figure, because it sends a crew to an empty shelf.

Underneath it all sit consumables. Blades, bits, abrasives, fixings. Low value, high frequency, entirely predictable, and almost never digitized, because nobody has made reordering them faster than phoning the counter.

## The Uncap solution

**Where a rental gets ordered, and where it is managed**

Portal is where a rental gets ordered next to a purchase. It is not a rental management system, and it does not replace one.

Hub: Uncap Portal on Shopify (Products, services and rentals in one place)

### What the contractor sees

- **Branch availability**, For the location they are closest to
- **Will call and jobsite delivery**, Real fulfillment choices, not a note in the order comments
- **Rental alongside purchase**, The saw and the blades for it in one session
- **Box, carton and pallet**, Side by side, priced per thousand where the line sells that way

### What stays in your rental and ERP systems

- **The fleet**, Tracked where it already lives
- **The reservation calendar**, Start dates and returns
- **Condition and return workflow**, Including damage handling
- **Systems of record**, Your ERP and rental system remain the truth

### Connectors

- **Uncap Connect**, Moves the data between them in real time, embedded in Shopify rather than as middleware
- **Uncap Quotes**, Covers the specification end, with version history, approvals and one-click conversion to an order

Build for the jobsite, not for the catalog.

A contractor account logs in and sees their pricing, their assortment and branch availability for the location they are closest to, with will call and jobsite delivery as real fulfillment choices rather than a note in the order comments. Consumables sit in a reorder list one click from becoming this week's order. Fasteners show box, carton and pallet side by side, priced per thousand where that is how the line sells, so the buyer makes the commercial decision rather than guessing at it.

[Uncap Portal](https://www.uncap.com/products/portal) is the account layer, and it is worth being specific about why it fits this trade. Its published description is a private ordering portal that "lets buyers order products, services, and rentals in one place", with real multi-user accounts, roles and permissions, each buyer seeing their own assortment and pricing, reorder lists and order history a click away, net terms, invoices and payments in the portal, and budgets, approvals and limits per user. Rental sitting alongside product ordering in the same portal is unusual, and it is the reason this page leads on it.

Be precise about what that does and does not mean, because you will test it. Portal is where a rental gets ordered next to a purchase. It is not a rental management system, and it does not replace one. Your fleet, your reservation calendar, your condition and return workflow and your damage handling stay where they already live. [Uncap Connect](https://www.uncap.com/products/connect) moves the data between them in real time, embedded in Shopify rather than as middleware, with your ERP and rental system remaining the systems of record.

[Uncap Quotes](https://www.uncap.com/products/quotes) covers the specification end: build and send a quote in minutes, revise it without losing the version history, apply negotiated prices, tiers and volume breaks automatically, route approvals, and convert an accepted quote into a Shopify order in one click.

Job-level billing and nearest-branch logic are built during implementation. So is the rental exposure layer. Every vendor you speak to will be building those too, and the honest question is what they are building them on top of.

## Key features

**What Uncap builds for construction supply distributors**

Built for the jobsite, not for the catalog.

### 01 · Branch stock, Branch stock before the drive

Availability for the branch the contractor selects rather than a national total.

### 02 · Fulfillment, Will call and jobsite delivery

The branch gets a pick instruction and the buyer gets a notification when it is staged.

### 03 · Rental, Rental ordered alongside purchase

Uncap Portal lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place.

### 04 · Fasteners, Box, carton and pallet pricing

All three visible with their breaks, sold per thousand where the line works that way.

### 05 · Jobs, Job accounts underneath contractor accounts

Purchases tracked against a named job. Built during implementation on top of Portal's account structure.

### 06 · Reorder, Consumables as a one-click reorder

Reorder lists and order history a click away in Portal.

### 07 · Roles, Roles, budgets and approvals per user

A foreman orders within a limit, and the owner is not approving every box of anchors.

### 08 · Terms, Net terms, invoices and payment in the portal

With a purchase order number carried on the order where the contractor works that way.

### 09 · Quotes, Specification quoting

Uncap Quotes for larger or spec-driven purchases, with version history and approval routing.

**Branch stock before the drive.** Availability shown for the branch the contractor selects rather than as a national total, with other branches holding the item surfaced when the nearest one is short.

**Will call and jobsite delivery as real fulfillment paths.** Select a branch and collect, or schedule delivery to the site. The branch gets a pick instruction, the buyer gets a notification when it is staged, and will call is reported as will call.

**Rental ordered alongside purchase.** Uncap Portal lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place, so the saw and the blades for it go into one session instead of a website order plus a phone call.

**Fasteners priced at box, carton and pallet.** All three visible with their breaks, sold per thousand where the line works that way, so a contractor sees the commercial decision instead of discovering it at checkout.

**Job accounts underneath contractor accounts.** Purchases tracked and reported against a named job so material is billed and cost-coded the way the contractor runs the work, built during implementation on top of Portal's multi-user account structure.

**Consumables as a one-click reorder.** Reorder lists and order history a click away in Portal, which is what turns the most predictable revenue in the business into the least expensive to serve.

**Roles, budgets and approvals per user.** Real multi-user accounts with roles and permissions, budgets, approvals and limits per user, so a foreman orders within a limit and the owner is not approving every box of anchors.

**Net terms, invoices and payment in the portal.** Account terms, invoices and payments handled where the buyer already is rather than through a separate call to accounts, with a purchase order number carried on the order where the contractor works that way.

**Specification quoting.** Uncap Quotes for the larger or spec-driven purchases, with version history, approval routing and one-click conversion to an order.

## Why Uncap

**What is shipped and what still has to be built**

The build list is the same for every vendor you will speak to. What differs is how much of the rest already exists.

|  | Capability | How it is delivered | Detail |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| Rental-capable ordering | Shipped: Uncap Portal | A private ordering portal that lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place. |
| Account structure | Shipped: Uncap Portal | Multi-user accounts with roles and permissions, budgets, approvals and limits per user, net terms and invoices. |
| Quoting | Shipped: Uncap Quotes | Version history, approval routing and one-click conversion to an order. |
| ERP sync | Shipped: Uncap Connect | Real time, embedded in Shopify, with the ERP and rental system as the systems of record. |
| Job-based billing and cost attribution | Built in implementation | Custom work on every platform in this category. |
| Nearest-branch and same-day cutoff logic | Built in implementation | Including will call cutoffs and delivery zone logic. |
| Rental exposure layer | Built in implementation | Availability, reservation request, pickup or delivery, rates and terms, plus combined rental and sale carts. |

**Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, with 380+ storefronts launched.** [Shopify B2B](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/b2b/catalogs/index) supplies company accounts, company-specific catalogs and customer-specific price lists enforced at login. The jobsite logic is what Uncap builds above it.

**Rental and product ordering in one portal is a published capability, not a proposal.** Uncap Portal's own description is a private ordering portal that lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place. For a distributor who rents and sells, that is the difference between one buying session and two. Every serious comparison you run will tell you that rental itself should stay led by your rental or ERP system rather than by a storefront, and that is correct. What the commerce layer has to do is expose it cleanly, and that part already exists here.

**[ULE Group](/work/ulegroup), and the construction connection is on the record.** Uncap's ULE Group case study is headed "Industrial supply built to scale" and describes a business that "offers a vast catalog of specialized construction products". Over a million SKUs on Shopify B2B with Epicor as the ERP, a PIM, and a hundred plus Algolia search filters. The /work listing publishes a 6X increase in online sales and a 559% year on year increase in traffic.

**The partner matters more than the platform here, and that is not our line.** Both independent vendor comparisons run for this page reached the same conclusion unprompted: for a branch-based distributor who rents and sells and bills by job, platform choice is secondary to whether the partner has actually built branch fulfillment, job-cost attribution and rental exposure before. Ask for those three specifically. Ask us too.

## Related pages

**Selling building materials as well as tools and jobsite supply?** Building materials is a dimensional business rather than an urgency business. Products sell by the square foot and the linear foot, every quantity needs a waste factor added before it is correct, lead times on mill and special orders are long and variable, and commercial work is decided by submittals and spec packages rather than by what is on the shelf today. If that is the half of your catalog you are trying to fix, start with [building materials](https://www.uncap.com/industry/building-materials). Distributors carrying both run them from one Shopify store and one ERP connection.

## Ready to talk

The order you lose is the one where a crew was waiting, the website could not say which branch had it, and somebody phoned a competitor who could.

Book a free strategy session. We will look at your branch network and how availability is held, how rental is run today and what system owns the fleet, how your fastener lines price across box, carton and pallet, and what job-level reporting your contractors are asking for.

Not ready to build yet? [Uncap Blueprint](https://www.uncap.com/blueprint) maps the architecture and the phased plan before a dollar goes into development.

## What this page covers

- Framing, fasteners and connectors. The box, carton and pallet problem in its purest form, sold per thousand and bought by the crew that is already on site.
- Tools and jobsite equipment. High value, often specified, and frequently the product a contractor is deciding whether to buy or rent.
- Rental and jobsite supply. The half of the business most storefronts ignore, ordered in the same session as the purchase rather than in a separate phone call.
- Concrete, masonry and aggregates. Heavy, delivery-led and scheduled to the pour, where jobsite delivery timing is the entire service.
- Contractor and specification accounts. The account structure underneath all of it: roles, limits, job-level reporting and terms.

## Frequently asked questions

### Can we sell and rent from the same store?

Yes, and this is the clearest fit on the page. Uncap Portal is published as a private ordering portal that lets buyers order products, services and rentals in one place, so a contractor books the equipment and buys the consumables for it in a single session. Be clear on the boundary though, because every serious vendor comparison will raise it: the commerce layer should not be your rental management system. Fleet, reservation calendars, condition and return workflow and damage handling belong in the rental or ERP system that already runs them. What Uncap builds is the exposure layer, availability, reservation request, pickup or delivery, rates and terms, and the ordering experience around it.

### How does branch availability work?

Availability is read per location from your ERP and shown for the branch the contractor selects, not aggregated across the network. Where the nearest branch is short, other branches holding the item can be surfaced so the order is still placeable. This is the single highest-value thing on a construction supply site, because a wrong answer sends a crew to an empty shelf and they do not come back to the website.

### Can contractors have purchases billed by job?

Yes, built during implementation on top of Uncap Portal's multi-user account structure. Purchases are tagged and reported against a named job so material is cost-coded the way the contractor runs the work. Worth knowing that job-level attribution is custom work on every platform in this category, so judge vendors on whether they have built it before rather than on whether they claim it.

### How do fasteners price across box, carton and pallet?

All three are shown with their own price and break, and sold per thousand where the line works that way. The point is that the buyer sees the commercial decision on the page. A cart that hides pallet pricing behind a quantity threshold costs you the larger order and costs the contractor a second delivery.

### Is Shopify suitable when fulfillment flexibility is the whole business?

It is a fair question and it comes from Shopify's own documentation, which carries caveats around B2B shipping and pickup, particularly on combined ship-and-pickup scenarios, and notes that some external integrations are not fully compatible with Shopify B2B companies and catalogs. Both are warnings about how the build is done rather than about the platform. Branch-level availability, will call cutoffs and delivery zone logic are implementation work on every platform in this category, including the ones marketed as distributor-native. The question to put to any vendor is not which platform they prefer, but whether they will demo branch A versus branch B availability for a real part, a will call order from checkout to counter handoff, and a rental and a purchase in one cart, using your data.

### What still has to be built rather than switched on?

Job-based billing and cost attribution, nearest-branch and same-day cutoff logic, the rental exposure layer, and combined rental and sale carts. That list is the same for every vendor you will speak to. What differs is how much of the rest already exists, and here the account structure, rental-capable ordering, quoting and ERP sync are shipped products rather than scope.

### Which ERP systems does this connect to?

Uncap publishes integrations for twelve ERP systems, each with its own documented integration page: Acumatica, Cin7, Epicor, Fishbowl, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Odoo, Oracle, QuickBooks, Sage and SAP. Uncap's own framing is that these connect to Shopify "whether through an owned Uncap Connect app or a managed iPaaS integration", so the delivery mechanism differs by system rather than one size fitting all. Epicor Prophet 21 is the integration published on the Uncap Connect product page itself. For a specific ERP and the depth of sync your operation needs, the Uncap team confirms fit directly rather than claiming a connector that has not been built.

Beneath those vendor pages sit pages for the individual products construction supply distributors actually run. The ones that come up most here are [Epicor BisTrack](https://www.uncap.com/integration/epicor-bistrack), [Sage 300](https://www.uncap.com/integration/sage-300), [Dynamics GP](https://www.uncap.com/integration/dynamics-gp), [Epicor Eagle](https://www.uncap.com/integration/epicor-eagle), [Epicor Prophet 21](https://www.uncap.com/integration/epicor-prophet-21) and [Infor FACTS](https://www.uncap.com/integration/infor-facts). Each page covers what the integration involves on that specific system, including what the vendor documents and what it does not.