£365k of annual uplift projected from AI buyer engagement and 24/7 sales response for a 30-person global wholesale marketplace

The situation

The brief

"We're losing buyers to the time-zone gap. Build us an AI engagement layer that responds instantly, recommends the right products, and converts — without re-platforming our website or hiring more sales staff."

What we're building

• Mapped the full buyer journey end-to-end — registration, category selection, outreach, product discovery, conversation, order — and identified the four points where buyers drop or sales reps lose hours.
• Designed a buyer-product matching engine that sits behind the existing site, taking each buyer's declared categories and behaviour and surfacing the right SKUs from a multi-thousand-line catalogue.
• Specified an automated WhatsApp + email outreach engine — deep-linked product offers sent to all 340 registered buyers on a behaviour-driven cadence, no front-end changes required.
• Architected a 24/7 conversational AI sales agent that handles first-response, qualifies intent, captures custom-brand order parameters (MOQs, colours, specs) and hands over to a human only when needed.
• Scoped the integration plan with the in-house dev team — we deliver the AI logic and APIs, they handle the front-end and order workflow. Clean ownership lines, no platform rebuild.

Engagement length: Two phases, ~120 days total · Deliverable: Live recommender engine, automated outreach pipeline, 24/7 conversational sales agent, integrated with existing platform via API.

What we found

• Median first-response time of 12 hours on inbound enquiries — effectively unanswered for the entire buyer's working day. On a global marketplace where competitors reply in minutes, this was the single largest source of lost revenue.
• 340 registered buyers, no behavioural outreach. The platform was sitting on declared category preferences for every buyer and using none of it. Outreach was either ad-hoc or skipped entirely once a buyer had registered.
• 12 sales reps doing manual triage. First-response work — "what do you sell", "do you ship to my country", "what's your MOQ" — was eating an estimated 40% of sales-team capacity. That's headcount paid to answer questions an AI can answer in seconds.
• In-house chatbot built but not closing the loop. The team had built their own assistant and integrated it with WhatsApp — a real engineering achievement — but it routed everything to a human and inherited the same 12-hour latency. The infrastructure was there; the intelligence layer was missing.
• No discovery layer on the site itself. Buyers landing on the platform had to navigate the full catalogue — cookware, furniture, apparel, footwear — to find the categories they'd already told the platform they buy. The result: drop-off before the basket.

What we recommended

The projected outcome

• £260k/yr in recovered revenue from a step-change in first-response time — 24/7 AI coverage replacing a 12-hour gap, against a buyer base spread across every working day on the planet.
• £105k/yr of sales-team capacity unlocked — ~5 FTE-equivalent of manual first-response work automated, redeployed onto high-value accounts and outbound.
• 40% projected lift in enquiry-to-quote conversion from instant response and behaviour-driven product matching, paired with deep-linked outreach across 340 registered buyers.
• Phase 1 payback inside seven weeks — build cost recovered before the platform subscription has billed twice.
• Zero front-end rebuild. AI logic delivered as APIs the in-house dev team integrates against. The buyer-facing site stays exactly as it is; the intelligence sits behind it.

Status: Phase 1 in build · Phase 2 scoped and contracted · First buyer cohort live in week 6.