Founded locally in New York over 25 years ago, ULE Group grew to become a national leader in electrical, lighting, and power-distribution solutions. They achieved this by earning the loyalty of contractors, developers, and facilities managers—people who know they can rely on the ULE team’s deep product expertise and responsive service to help complete any project on time and on budget, no matter the scale. These customers work hard, and appreciate that the ULE Group works hard to serve them—viewing themselves not just as a supplier, but as a strategic partner in all of their customers’ endeavors.
Technology evolves at a rapid pace, and the tech around lighting and power-delivery systems is certainly no exception. ULE Group always kept pace, integrating the latest technology into their extensive catalog as well as their knowledge base, so they could guide customers on optimal use of each new system. So when their customer base grew and expanded nationwide—and the scope of the projects they supported grew with it—ULE Group was not about to let outdated technology slow them down. Analyzing their commercial operations top to bottom, they identified the one weak link in their supply chain that could hinder their ability to keep pace with growing demand: their website.
The ULE Group team were well-versed in comparing technical systems in order to select the best solution for a customer’s needs—and this time, they were the customer. After evaluating several choices, Shopify stood out as the clear choice for a high return on investment, fast time to market, and a powerful infrastructure with the flexibility to help ULE Group evolve and grow into the future.
Partnering with Uncap, a Shopify Platinum Partner, ULE Group was able to build a fully-charged ecommerce powerhouse on Shopify, achieving remarkable results:
- The tech stack is now built to handle up to a million SKUs with real-time inventory accuracy.
- With Shopify B2B, thousands of individual contract price lists are supported and protected.
- Website traffic increased by a staggering 559% year over year.
- Online sales grew 599% quarter over quarter.
The Challenge: Finding a Partner with the Skills to Build Intuitive, Easy Shopping—in a Store with a Million SKUs
As online became the default way to buy, businesses found ways to make ecommerce easier—and with every improvement, customers’ expectations continued to surge. Soon these expectations migrated from the B2C world to B2B, as buyers accustomed to frictionless self-serve in their personal DTC shopping came to expect the same when making large business purchases. In fact, 2024 research from Gartner showed 61% of B2B buyers preferred buying without a sales rep, and research from McKinsey showed 39% of buyers would feel comfortable making self-serve purchases of $500,000 or more.
With these developments in mind, ULE Group knew they needed a website that would allow customers to easily browse and buy from their full catalog—but with over 250,000 individual SKUs to start, that was easier said than done.
Fortunately, ULE Group found the perfect ecommerce transformation partner in Uncap, a Shopify Platinum Partner built for the types of businesses many agencies avoid, like manufacturers, distributors, and industrial brands with big catalogs, messy data, and real operational complexity. Uncap doesn’t go in for glitz and glamor—they’re an engineering-first firm that builds ecommerce as infrastructure, taking businesses with millions of SKUs, tangled ERPs, PIMs, CRMs, and legacy systems and rebuilding them according to a blueprint designed with success in mind.
From day one, Uncap was on the same page with ULE Group: The foundation for future success would be built on Shopify. At its core, Uncap sees Shopify not as a simple platform, but as the backbone of modern industrial commerce. Uncap knows how to partner closely with Shopify, iPaaS providers, and ERP systems to create durable, scalable ecosystems rather than one-off websites. Building ULE Group’s new store on Shopify would be no small undertaking, but they were up to the task.
“This is the kind of challenge Uncap lives for, where technical rigor meets real operational impact, while also keeping TCO minimal,” says Denis Dyli, CEO of Uncap.
One key principle on which there was perfect alignment between ULE Group, Uncap, and Shopify: Power and efficiency don’t need to work against one another—successful enterprises are born when power and efficiency work together as equal partners. Composable commerce on Shopify is successful because the platform was engineered to allow businesses to evolve for maximum growth, with minimal waste,
The Solution: The Right Tools for the Company with the Right Tools
Some business models are ready-made for ecommerce—think t-shirts with fun slogans, custom-printed business cards—or to an extent, any company whose selection of products ranges in the single, double, or triple digits; not so many products that you can’t view the whole selection without exhausting either your mouse-clicking finger, your device’s battery, or both.
Then there are companies that weren’t originally built with the internet in mind, companies that live more in the nuts and bolts—sometimes literally. While you can’t necessarily see electricity itself in all of its forms, ultimately ULE Group’s business was built on the sale of devices, systems, machines, and parts—physical items you could touch—and lots of them.
But ULE Group was ready to move, and Uncap was ready too. Never one for glossy pitch decks, Uncap followed a pattern familiar to ULE Group as well as their customers: They rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
Working with ULE Group fired us up in the best possible way. This was not a standard build, it was a deep, messy, ambitious piece of modern commerce plumbing. We were genuinely thrilled to help design and deliver one of the most complex infrastructures we have ever touched, built natively on Shopify, with true B2B and B2C unified commerce and tight, real integrations across ERP, PIM, and ESP.
Every ULE Group customer has a job to do, and step one is to make sure they have what they need for steps two through ten. That’s why Uncap was the perfect partner for ULE Group: They’d built proprietary tools like Product Fitment and Parts Diagrams specifically for businesses and customers for whom compatibility and technical accuracy matter more than shiny UX. And Shopify provided the perfect framework for Uncap to build the right store with the right capabilities, and with a TCO that made it more than worth it.
As ULE Group describes:
“We were able to set up a fully integrated ecommerce site with a complete tech stack and launch in under nine months from project kickoff. Shopify allowed us to move quickly while laying a strong foundation for growth, scalability, and future enhancements. Its built-in performance, security, and flexibility gave us the confidence to deliver a great B2B experience without delaying time to market.”
The Results Speak for Themselves
ULE Group had the perfect partner to build their new ecommerce store—and in choosing Shopify, they’d gained an additional partner for the future. Shopify didn’t just build a great commerce platform then sit back and admire their work; like ULE Group, Shopify knows the importance of mastering new tools and continuing to advance in order to deliver better solutions to their customers. In fact, Shopify spent $1.4 billion in R&D in 2024 alone so that their customers could sell more, iterate faster, and go to market with the flexibility to adapt to whatever comes next.
I like the flexibility and speed of the Shopify platform. It allows our team to make updates quickly, launch new features with ease, and connect seamlessly with the other tools in our tech stack. We can manage our content, products, and integrations without getting slowed down by heavy development work, which keeps us agile and able to respond faster to customer and business needs.
All that agility and responsiveness derived from the solid foundation and seamless integration of their powerful tech stack, supporting a quarter of a million SKUs, multiple differentiated contract price lists, and tight integrations with Epicor ERP, Akeneo PIM, Klaviyo ESP, and the Algolia search platform. Here’s Denise again on their spectacular results:
"With our Shopify site, we’re finally able to tell our full story and showcase our capabilities online. It highlights the breadth of products and brands we carry, and it’s become a true extension of our sales and marketing efforts. Since launch, we’ve seen new customers discover us daily, research our projects, and reach out for custom quotes or to talk to a sales team member. Our sales team and existing customers are also using the site as a tool to explore product options, check availability, and generate ideas for upcoming jobs, which has had a positive impact across the business."
And it was all made possible by finding the right partner to power their move—and the right platform to power their future.