One national storefront for 23 dealers, and one budget behind it.

Office Products Depot is a network of independently owned dealers across 23 locations in New Zealand. Each dealer ran its own online store on its own subdomain, and for generic product searches that meant the network competed with the parent brand - and with itself - for exactly the same terms.

The cost showed up in the customer experience. Someone in Auckland searching for a height adjustable desk could land on a South Island dealer's store and meet a shipping charge that ended the visit there and then. Meanwhile the category is fought over by national retailers with far larger budgets - Noel Leeming, JB Hi-Fi, Mighty Ape and PB Tech among them - and increasingly by manufacturers like Dell and Samsung selling direct.

The answer was a national B2C store to carry the generic demand, with the dealer sites staying exactly where they are. They now reference the national store, so a dealer can still promote to their own customers and keep the relationship, while the searches nobody owned get answered once, properly, by a single site with one budget behind it.

Underneath it was a migration off WebSphere Commerce, and not a simple one. The dealer stores had lived in subfolders on the main domain, at opd.co.nz/store/ and everything beneath it. They moved to store.opd.co.nz on a custom platform, which freed opd.co.nz itself to become the B2C store - so the root domain changed purpose entirely while years of product URLs sat indexed against the old arrangement.

Mapping every one of those URLs onto the new structure and testing that the map held was the largest single piece of work in the project, and the least visible. Skipping it is how a business loses a decade of search equity on a Friday afternoon.

We set the SEO and analytics requirements for the build and tested them before launch, working alongside OPD's software partner, who did the development. On the analytics side that meant a GA4 and Google Tag Manager implementation built around how the store actually works: the store-selector modal that opens when someone adds to cart, which dealer they choose and where it sat in the results, and whether the visitor is a B2C shopper or a signed-in trade customer.

Looker Studio reporting was built on top of it, and we then ran Google Ads and Google Shopping against the new store.

One national budget now answers the generic demand that 23 dealers used to chase separately. That is more efficient for the business, and for Google, which no longer has to choose between near-identical pages competing for the same query.

Generic, high-value product terms now rank where they previously did not: laminators, monitors, height adjustable desks, keyboards and mice, monitor arms. City-level terms such as office chairs in Christchurch, Hamilton and Tauranga rank as well, which is the outcome you want - national authority on the search, and the right local branch at the end of it.

Google Shopping went live in June 2025 against a deliberately limited product feed and has performed well above the level that would justify running it. We have left the exact return on ad spend off this page on purpose. The attribution window was set wide for the trial, and while none of it was brand traffic dressed up as generic, a number that flattering deserves the caveat more than it deserves a headline.

Because of the tracking work, OPD can also see which dealer a B2C order belongs to - so the national store reports back to the individual members whose stock and service fulfilled it.