The problem
The reagent exists. Getting it is the hard part.
Laboratories across West Africa can name exactly what they need. What they cannot easily do is buy it. Sourcing runs through fragmented suppliers with no single point of contact, quotes arrive by email over days, and customs and cold-chain requirements sit outside most e-commerce checkouts entirely.
The result is procurement measured in weeks and months rather than days, with research timelines bending around it.
The approach
Catalogue clarity first, then the commercial machinery
- 01
Put the specifics on the card
Every product carries its manufacturer, catalogue number, GBP price, pack size and stock status on the card itself. A lab technician can confirm they are looking at the right item without opening anything.
- 02
Make discovery match how labs actually search
Search covers product names, catalogue numbers and manufacturers. Category and manufacturer filters combine, and up to four products can be compared side by side, because procurement decisions are comparative.
- 03
Support two buying modes, not one
Institutional procurement runs on quotes and purchase orders; smaller orders want a cart. The platform carries both a Request Quote path and a standard basket rather than forcing every buyer through the same funnel.
- 04
Build for accounts, not anonymous checkout
Registration and login underpin institutional accounts, so repeat ordering, order history and account-specific handling have somewhere to live as the business grows.
What shipped
The live platform
Screens captured from the production site, not mockups.
Catalogue
Manufacturer, cat. number, GBP price and stock on every card.
Search & filter
Category and manufacturer filters combine; compare up to four items.
Network map
UK hub, Ghana operations, West Africa expansion corridor.
How it was built
A storefront that has to survive customs
Most of the difficulty in this build was not the shop. It was modelling a catalogue precisely enough for scientific buyers, supporting quote-first and cart-based purchasing side by side, and leaving room for the operational reality underneath: cold chain, customs clearance and multi-country delivery.
Disclosure: JAEMNY Global Scientific Ltd (Co. No. 17227397, England & Wales) is a sister company of GrandPoint Ltd. It is a production platform in live commercial use, designed and built end to end by the GrandPoint team.
- Engagement
- Design, build, launch
- Catalogue
- 28 products, 6 categories
- Manufacturers
- Thermo Fisher, Bio-Rad, VWR, Sigma-Aldrich and 9 more
- Commerce
- Quote requests + cart checkout
- Accounts
- Registration, login, institutional buyers
- Reach
- UK sourcing, Ghana and West Africa delivery
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