When a brand launches a direct-to-consumer storefront, the channel hears one thing: the company is now competing with us. We have argued before that going direct does not have to mean going to war — route the orders to whoever actually serves that geography, and the direct channel becomes distributor demand. But routing alone still leaves the distributor invisible: the consumer shops on the brand's site, the order arrives in the distributor's book, and the distributor's own identity — the counter the town actually knows — appears nowhere. The next step is to turn that around: give every distributor a public storefront of their own, on the brand's catalogue, at their own address, with the brand's machinery doing all the work.
A storefront is a slug, not a deployment
On xMatix, a distributor's storefront — we call it a microsite — is a record, not a project. It names the partner, the branch that will fulfil, the commerce channel that scopes its catalogue and pricing, a settlement percentage, and a slug. Publish it, and the storefront is live at that slug on the brand portal's own host: a real public page with the partner's name on it, the brand's published catalogue behind it, and cart, checkout and payments identical to the brand's own. Fifty distributors means fifty records, not fifty websites — and because publishing is a deliberate action distinct from creating, a draft can be reviewed before the town sees it. An unpublished or suspended storefront answers as not found, indistinguishable from a page that never existed.
Identity is layered, not forked. The microsite inherits the brand portal's theme and overrides only what the partner's identity needs — an accent colour, a name, a banner — so the storefront reads as "the brand, served by your local distributor" rather than a knock-off. The catalogue, pricing and schemes stay the channel's: what the shopper can buy and at what price is the brand's promise, wherever they buy it.
The pincode decides who sells
Coverage is declared, not assumed: each storefront carries service areas — the pincodes it serves, each with a priority. Distributors who have no storefront of their own can still be routed to, through coverage declared on their dealer record. When a consumer orders on the brand's storefront with routing enabled, the platform resolves the shipping pincode to the covering distributor and stamps that distributor — partner and branch — as the selling organisation on the order. The brand site sold it; the distributor's book owns it; the stock is reserved against the branch that will actually ship it.
Two details in that mechanism carry most of the fairness. First, routing is resolved once, when checkout opens, and frozen on the checkout session — a coverage edit made mid-checkout cannot re-route an order a shopper is already paying for. Second, when no distributor covers a pincode, the order simply stays with the brand: coverage gaps degrade to the direct channel, never to a refusal. And a shopper can ask before committing — the storefront's coverage check answers "serviceable, served by…" from the same data the router uses.
Delivery windows belong to whoever delivers
Routing exposes a subtle bug class: whose delivery slots does the shopper see? If the brand's warehouse offers Tuesday and the distributor who will actually deliver works Thursdays, a Tuesday promise is a lie told politely. So the platform derives the fulfilling branch — the routed distributor's branch when the order is routed, the channel's own otherwise — and delivery windows are offered and booked against that branch's calendar and capacity. Slot selection captures intent; capacity is actually taken at the moment the checkout freezes the deal, and released if the payment never completes — so a browsing shopper cannot hold Thursday hostage.
Settlement that only counts what the storefront sold
The microsite's settlement percentage accrues into a monthly settlement statement — one line per order, at the rate in force when the sale happened, so changing a rate never rewrites a past statement. The discipline is in what does not accrue: only orders a storefront checkout actually placed count. The distributor's ordinary trade — the orders their reps take, their B2B purchases, everything that merely carries them as selling organisation — settles through trade terms as it always did, and never earns storefront commission by association. Commission is a statement both sides can audit, which is the only kind worth automating.
Why this shape wins
The alternatives are both worse. Distributor-built websites fragment the brand: fifty catalogues drifting out of date, prices negotiated by screenshot. A brand-only storefront centralises the demand but alienates the channel that still moves most of the volume. A storefront-per-partner on one platform keeps the catalogue, pricing, schemes and compliance central — one B2B2C machinery — while giving the channel what it actually wanted from the internet: their name, their town, their order book. The brand gets consumer demand it can see; the distributor gets a storefront they could never justify building; the consumer gets the brand's range served by someone four kilometres away. The operating detail — microsites, coverage, routing and settlement — is in the partner microsites documentation.