We build retrieval assistants for wholesale hardlines distributors. It lives inside your B2B portal, grounded in your catalog, your PDFs, your cross-references, your order history, and your ERP. Retailers and your inside sales team ask in plain language and get a grounded answer with the source cited, in seconds.
No deck. We build a working agent on a slice of your catalog and show you.
Every answer cites the source document it came from.
Your inside sales team is the second-busiest function in your business after the warehouse. A typical week:
Your senior reps know these answers. They've been in the business for years. Your portal doesn't, because it was built for SKU numbers and these questions aren't. So they land on the same three or four desks every day.
Wire cover so it doesn't get hit by nails?
Nail plate, 16-gauge steel, sized to cover standard 1/2" Romex. 24 in stock at your tier. If you're running multiple, the 5-inch width covers two parallel runs.
A retrieval assistant makes sense when all three of these are true.
Thousands of SKUs, manufacturer datasheets, installation manuals, supersession lists, cross-reference tables. The answers are in your documents. Your portal can't surface them.
Fitment, substitutes, in-stock checks, technical specs, account lookups. Not the "find SKU 4827" type that keyword search handles. The kind that need interpretation, comparison, or context. The questions land on your senior team, who answer them instead of selling.
Retailers, contractors, and buyers come to it daily to find products, place orders, and self-serve. When it can't help them, they email your reps or shop somewhere else.
The assistant doesn't invent product data. SKU lookups are deterministic database queries against your live catalog, not LLM guesses. If a SKU recommendation is part of an answer, it gets validated against the live catalog before it shows up. Invalid SKUs get stripped. For document retrieval like spec sheets or installation manuals, a confidence threshold decides whether the answer is solid enough to return. When nothing meets the bar, the assistant says it doesn't have a definitive answer instead of guessing.
No. The assistant works with your existing portal and your existing ERP. It reads from the catalog, the order data, and the documents you already have. Most distributor systems have documented APIs that integrate cleanly. Custom or legacy setups take more work but are usually doable. Nothing gets replaced.
We work with one industry. Wholesale distribution. The audit call is fifteen minutes, and we use it to walk through your catalog, your portal, and the questions your team is fielding all day. By the end of it, you'll know whether a retrieval assistant makes sense for your business or whether we'd recommend something simpler.
If we're a fit, we'll build a working agent against a slice of your catalog before any contract conversation. You see the system answering questions about your products. Then you decide.
Fifteen minutes. We'll walk your catalog and tell you whether this fits.
Book a call or email hello@retrieva.co