MerchantLink

The UK builders' merchant sector turns over billions of pounds a year, yet sourcing materials has barely changed in decades. Around 80% of UK tradespeople now use smartphones for work, checking prices and availability on the go, but the actual process of comparing and ordering from local merchants remains stubbornly manual. With rising material costs named as the number one challenge by nearly a third of tradespeople, that inefficiency is increasingly costly. Equipment hire is even more fragmented, running almost entirely on phone calls with no transparent pricing and no digital trail. MerchantLink was built to fix both sides at once: a genuine marketplace, not a directory.

All three surfaces share one backend and one design language. The complexity is invisible to the people using it.

• Mobile app: the consumer marketplace for tradespeople and DIY customers, available on iOS and Android.
• Merchant portal: a real-time operations dashboard designed for the shop floor, built for an iPad on the counter.
• Admin portal: the catalogue management and intelligent matching engine that keeps the marketplace clean and consistent.

The hardest problem we solved sits underneath everything else. Every merchant uploads their own product list in their own format, with their own naming conventions. We built a matching engine that reconciles all of it into a single canonical catalogue, so the same product from five different merchants becomes one comparable listing.

It works through a layered cascade: learned mappings, barcode and product-number matching, normalised match keys that see through inconsistent naming, and fuzzy AI-powered semantic matching that understands trade slang and synonyms. New products are automatically scored for quality and either approved or routed to a human review queue.

Hundreds of inconsistent merchant spreadsheets. One clean, comparable, searchable catalogue. Automatically.

The signature consumer feature. A customer fills one basket with everything a job needs, and MerchantLink solves a genuine supply-chain problem on their behalf, splitting that basket across local merchants two ways:

• Optimised: the best overall result, balancing price, merchant distance and merchant rating.
• Fastest: the shortest delivery window across the whole order.

The price-and-logistics calculation a tradesperson would do by ringing round five merchants, done in a single tap.

Running alongside retail is a complete second marketplace that brings modern mechanics to a phone-based industry. A customer describes what they need, including equipment, quantity, dates and site address, and the request fans out to every eligible local merchant. Merchants submit competing bids, the customer compares and chats in real time, and accepts the best offer item by item.

Built with genuine domain depth: three distinct service modes, deposits and damage waivers, photo-evidence assessment at handover and return, extensions, disputes, and compliance tracking for safety certifications.

The ring-around-for-a-quote ritual, replaced with a transparent bidding marketplace.

Artificial intelligence is not a feature bolted on to MerchantLink. It is woven through the platform, built on Forta Studio's own proprietary Forta Toolkit.

• Smart shopping lists: paste or type a raw product list and AI parses every item, matches it to the catalogue, and learns from each confirmation. Products go straight into the basket.
• AI Customer Service Agent: an intelligent support agent handling customer and merchant queries in natural language, escalating seamlessly to the human team when needed.
• How-To and BOQ Agents: AI assistants that turn a plain-English project description into step-by-step guidance and a fully costed bill of quantities, matched directly to the catalogue.
• Conversational assistant: a streaming chat helper for product and project questions, available throughout the app.
• Semantic search: discovery that understands how tradespeople actually talk, not just exact keywords.

The merchant portal was designed for the realities of a busy counter. Orders stream in live with audio alerts. Staff accept, prepare and dispatch in one tap. An automatic SLA keeps fulfilment moving and pauses outside opening hours. Underneath sits Stripe Connect payouts, VAT invoicing, analytics, role-based access and multi-branch support: the operational infrastructure a modern merchant business needs.