Our Products
Our focus is on heavyside, first fix construction products. All the products used to create the building structure that are then invisible to the naked eye upon completion – that’s what we specialise in. We’re talking about aggregates, plasterboard, insulation, timber, sheet materials.
These products are inherently bulky and heavy, and can’t be packed into parcels and delivered ten-at-a-time by an Amazon van. They must be delivered by construction specific suppliers – such as builders merchants and specialised distributors – on large vehicles from local warehouses and yards.
Our Suppliers
To facilitate the nationwide delivery of heavyside construction products, Materials Market utilises an extensive network of supply chain partners. These range from large established names with hundreds of branches across the country, to small independent merchants dedicated to servicing their local area.
All of these suppliers have Supplier Accounts on the Materials Market platform, and are ready and waiting to fulfil the hundreds of orders placed by customers every day.
Allocating Orders to Suppliers
When a customer places an order on the Materials Market website, our smart marketplace technology matches the order with all of the potential suppliers based on their delivery radius and product range. There are an average of 15 eligible suppliers for each order, which is testament to the size of our network and its relevancy to the product range we sell.
Orders are offered to the eligible suppliers for acceptance, with the best performing suppliers being given priority. Once accepted by a supplier – more than 50% of orders are accepted within 30 minutes – the order is then delivered by that supplier on the delivery date that the customer chose.
The Benefits of Our Approach
Although it would be a lot easier for all of us if this were not the case, the localised nature of construction material supply chains makes it a lot harder to fulfil orders with the ease and transparency of Amazon and other eCommerce players. This is an industry wide problem and explains the slow digitisation of construction product sales. However, our unique approach – with our ever-growing supplier network and smart marketplace technology – offers great benefits to customers.
Speedy Named-Day Delivery
Most websites state an arbitrary lead time (e.g. 3-5 days) that leaves the customer in the dark as to when they can expect their delivery. This is largely because these websites use centralised supply chains that have longer, more variable lead times due to the distance they have to travel. At Materials Market, our localised network of builders merchants supports some of the fastest lead times on the internet (2 days for most products), and allows the customer to choose a specific delivery date. At checkout, you will be able to choose any delivery date you want, starting with the earliest available for your basket of products.
Low Delivery Charges
Given the size of our network, you’re never far from a Materials Market supplier, and the builders merchants on our platform sell a broad range of heavyside products from their branch locations. This means that, even if you build a diverse basket of products containing a mix of timber, insulation, aggregates and plasterboard, you can expect to pay little to no delivery charges whatsoever. This is in stark contrast to many other websites where, although the prices might appear cheap at first, exorbitant delivery charges are added at checkout. Check out our Delivery Policy here, and look out for products with the “Core” tag – any combination of these over £300 will qualify for free delivery.
Competitive Prices
To allocate orders to suppliers, we offer them in a live marketplace environment where suppliers are competing against each other for your business. This competitive environment supports the low prices that we are able to offer our customers, allowing them to harness the power of our 750-strong supplier network at the click of a button. Before Materials Market, customers would have to reach out to multiple suppliers for every order they wanted to place, playing them off against each other to ensure the best prices. With our network and technology, we’ve already done this work for you. To test our competitiveness, we ran a comparison against ten other online players, and when factoring in delivery charges we were cheaper by 15-40%. If you’ve got a cheaper price, feel free to put us to the test with our Beat My Quote feature!
