EvolutionX, ECI Spruce eCommerce, Spruce ERP, B2B eCommerce, lumber yard eCommerce

EvolutionX eCommerce vs ToolSwift: portal or a store you own

September 30, 2026

ToolSwift vs ECI EvolutionX comparison card over a photo of a contractor loading lumber into a pickup truck at a lumber yard

EvolutionX powers ECI's Spruce eCommerce. How ToolSwift compares for LBM dealers on ERPs, pricing, quoting, catalog, AI, delivery and payments, sourced.

Executive summary

EvolutionX eCommerce is ECI's B2B platform, sold to Spruce dealers as Spruce eCommerce, with a template storefront and unpublished pricing. ToolSwift is a headless platform built for lumber and building supply dealers, with nine ERP connectors including Spruce, a native PIM, AI quoting from photos and voice, a native contractor app and published pricing from $499 a month.

I run ToolSwift, and I built it around one idea: a lumber and building supply dealer should own a store shaped like their business, connected to whatever ERP they run, and priced so they can read the number before they ever speak to us.

Here is what that means in practice. You get two front ends on one catalog: a retail storefront on your own domain for homeowners and walk-in buyers, and a separate contractor dashboard with a native, branded app for your trade accounts. The storefront is custom built on our component library, not picked from a template gallery. The catalog lives in our own PIM, so you can sell what Orgill, Do it Best and Emery Jensen can ship, not only what sits in your yard. A contractor can start a quote from a photo of a handwritten list, a voice note or a takeoff, and your team reviews a priced draft instead of retyping it. Checkout knows each account's credit limit. Delivery pricing follows zones you draw on a map. And you keep your own payment processor, whether that's Stripe, VersaPay, Clover, Square or Moneris.

We connect to nine ERPs: Spruce, BisTrack, Eagle, Profit Master, PRISM, Paladin, Ogasys/Acceo, QuickBooks and NetSuite, and we build connectors for the ones we haven't met yet. If you run Spruce, you can keep every year of configuration you've put into it and change only the part your customers see.

We publish our pricing: $499 a month per store, $250 a month per additional location, $3,000 to $9,000 to onboard, development at $60 an hour, no transaction fees, month to month with 30 days' notice.

If you run Spruce, the alternative you're most likely being shown is Spruce eCommerce. It helps to know what that is. Trade coverage of ECI's AI launch calls EvolutionX the platform "which also powers its Spruce eCommerce platform." EvolutionX is the ecommerce product ECI sells across business supplies, electrical, gas and welding, MRO and medical distribution, with the Spruce connector switched on for lumber dealers. Its storefront is configured from templates and a theme editor. Its documented ERP list holds no major LBM ERP other than Spruce. Its AI Agent, launched in November 2025, is built almost entirely for the merchant. Its price isn't published.

The short version: EvolutionX gives a Spruce dealer a trade account portal. ToolSwift gives any LBM dealer a store they own, on the ERP they already run, pointed at the customer who hasn't found them yet.

Why I wrote this, and how it is sourced

I'm comparing our platform to a competitor's, so read it knowing who wrote it. What I can offer is sourcing. Every ToolSwift capability here is on our feature pages or in our published comparisons. Everything I say about EvolutionX comes from ECI's own help center, product pages and announcements, or from reviews their customers wrote on TrustRadius, and each claim is linked in the Sources section.

This comparison exists because Spruce dealers keep telling me the same thing: they assumed their commerce options were whatever their ERP vendor offered. They aren't. You can keep Spruce and choose your storefront separately, and most dealers I speak to don't know that.

The sections follow the order a dealer usually evaluates in: architecture, ERP integration, pricing, the retail storefront, the contractor experience, quoting, catalog, AI, discoverability, mobile, delivery and payments, reporting, implementation, and the bottom line. There's a full comparison, group by group, at the end.

Architecture: you own the storefront, not a configuration

What you get with ToolSwift

With ToolSwift you own a storefront. It's built for you, and it's a real application rather than a skin over your back office.

The build starts with a design meeting. You tell us how your yard sells, how your customers search, what the homepage should push in April versus November, and we build a site tailored to that: layout, branding and catalog organization. It's built on a reusable component library, so custom doesn't mean starting from a blank page every time, and it doesn't mean an agency-sized bill.

After launch, the site stays in your hands. You manage content through a headless CMS and the store through the admin dashboard, and you get direct access to the dynamic sections of your site, so a spring promo page doesn't need a ticket. Anything under about fifteen minutes of developer time, we just do, with no charge and no process. Larger work is $60 an hour, so you can see exactly what you're buying.

If you have developers of your own, the platform doesn't fence them out. ToolSwift is fully headless: the front end and the back end are decoupled, and all data is available through our REST API. Your team can point their own Next.js front end at that API and run it from whatever repository they like.

Your ERP is a component, not the foundation

ToolSwift is headless and API-first. The storefront, the catalog, pricing, orders, users and integrations live in the platform, and the ERP connects to that API like any other data source.

That has a consequence worth sitting with. If you change ERPs in four years, you're swapping a connector. Your storefront, your catalog, your enrichment work, your customer accounts, your URLs and the SEO history attached to them all stay exactly where they are.

It also means the ERP doesn't cap what you can offer online. We maintain our own pricing logic. If your ERP handles tiered or customer-specific pricing badly, we build that pricing on our side rather than telling you it isn't possible. The same goes for delivery: because zones and fulfillment options live in the commerce platform, your online offer isn't limited to what the ERP can express.

Built for one trade

Every line of our roadmap is lumber, building materials and hardlines. The features that exist because a lumberyard asked for them (two front ends for homeowners and contractors, quotes from a photo of a list, delivery zones drawn around your trucks' real routes, distributor stock sold online without touching the yard) are the core of the product, not configuration layered on top of someone else's.

The ambition is narrower, not smaller, and in a category this specific the narrow bet is the one that compounds.

How EvolutionX is put together

EvolutionX is a configured SaaS storefront. ECI's theme documentation describes a theme editor for colors, fonts, text and button styling, with custom CSS and head and footer script blocks for further changes; the help center also has product configurator and calculator articles.

The platform came from ES Tech Group, founded in Glasgow in 2006 and acquired by ECI in October 2022. ECI's acquisition announcement lists the markets it served: industrial, business supplies, electrical, plumbing, gas and welding, medical supplies "and more." Spruce eCommerce followed on July 20, 2023. When ECI shipped its AI Agent, it went to all EvolutionX and Spruce eCommerce stores at once: one codebase serving many industries, with lumber as one of them.

Impact

With ToolSwift, you own a custom storefront and a native catalog, your ERP is a connector rather than a foundation, and changes are yours to make or ours to make quickly. With EvolutionX, you configure a storefront whose shape ECI owns, on a platform whose roadmap serves many distribution industries at once. The first time you want to do something nobody else in your market is doing, one of those is a build and the other is a support ticket.

ERP integration: nine connectors, built and owned by us

The ERPs we connect to

We connect to Spruce, BisTrack, Eagle, Profit Master, PRISM, Paladin, Ogasys/Acceo, QuickBooks and NetSuite. Those are the systems lumberyards, building supply dealers and hardware stores in North America actually run, and the list grew because dealers asked for them one at a time. You'll find the wider set of accounting, POS, payment, shipping and marketing connections on our integrations page.

Every connector is built the same way, against the same architecture. Where the ERP supports it, pricing and inventory sync in real time. Customer accounts, credit limits and net terms flow through from your system, so a contractor sees their real available credit in the dashboard.

How a connection actually gets built

Connecting an ERP is something we do, on our side, as part of onboarding. If yours is one of the nine we already run, it's configuration. If it's one we haven't met, we build the connector the same way we built the others, and then we own it. If you're running something uncommon or built in-house, we do a feasibility assessment for free before we quote, so you know whether your system is workable before you've committed a dollar.

That last part is the bit worth weighing. An integration someone else built to a spec they published is an integration nobody is responsible for when it breaks at 6 a.m. on a Monday. Ours is our problem.

Keep Spruce. Change the storefront.

This is the part I most want Spruce dealers to hear, because I don't think many of them know it's an option.

You spent years getting Spruce configured the way your business actually runs: your pricing, your branches, your job accounts, your delivery workflow. None of that has to move for you to modernize what your customers see. We integrate with Spruce. Your ERP stays exactly where it is, doing exactly what it does, and the storefront in front of it becomes something you own and control.

The real choice is whether one vendor should decide both your ERP and your commerce. I made the same case to BisTrack dealers weighing Epicor's own store in my BisTrack comparison.

What EvolutionX documents

EvolutionX documents live inventory integrations for Prophet 21, ECI DDMS, Eclipse, Spruce and TIMS, and its live pricing article lists about 20 systems, including Acumatica, Dynamics 365 (through Flintech), Prima, Winman, Horizon and Red Falcon. DDMS is office supplies. TIMS is gas and welding, built by Computers Unlimited. Prophet 21 and Eclipse are wholesale distribution systems connected through third-party middleware.

Apart from Spruce, none of the major LBM ERPs appear: no Eagle, no BisTrack, no Paladin, no Profit Master, no PRISM, no Ogasys or Acceo. For an unsupported ERP, ECI says it works with your ERP's API directly or through a partner integrator, and its DIY Integration collection publishes the JSON contract your developer builds an endpoint against. The work, and its upkeep when the contract changes, sits with you.

Impact

If you run Spruce, Eagle, BisTrack, Paladin, Profit Master, PRISM or Ogasys/Acceo, ToolSwift already has the connector, maintains it, and keeps your ERP a component of your stack rather than the thing your storefront is derived from. On EvolutionX, Spruce is the only one of those with a documented integration. Keep the ERP you've invested a decade in. Change the part your customers see.

Pricing: ToolSwift publishes it, ECI does not

Ours, in one paragraph

$499 a month per store. $250 a month for each additional location. Onboarding runs $3,000 to $9,000 depending on how much catalog work you need. Development beyond that is $60 an hour. No transaction fees. We don't take a percentage of what you sell, because your revenue is yours, and a platform that grows its own bill every time you have a good quarter has its incentives pointed the wrong way. It's month to month, with 30 days' notice.

A three-location dealer is looking at $999 a month. You can work out your own number from that paragraph without talking to anyone, and if you'd rather talk to someone the number won't change.

What the number includes

The monthly fee is the platform. There's no separate hosting or licensing line to add, search is included for every client, and our cost is flat whether a location does $30,000 online or $3 million.

Onboarding covers the whole project, run by one team with one dedicated account manager: discovery and requirements, data migration, the ERP or POS integration, the design of your retail and contractor portals, catalog and pricing configuration, staff training and go-live. Integrations are quoted separately, so you only pay for the ones you need. If you want us to run your product data through our enrichment process, that's priced as an add-on to onboarding.

And the contract is the one you'd want to sign. Month to month is the starting point, not a fallback. A dealer who wants a discount for a longer commitment can choose one; nobody has to.

I publish this because you should be able to compare us to anyone without booking a call first. Pricing that only exists inside a sales process is pricing that adapts to what the sales process learns about you.

Theirs

ECI doesn't publish a price for EvolutionX or Spruce eCommerce. The FAQ on the Spruce eCommerce page says cost varies with the scope of implementation, company size and customizations. TrustRadius lists no pricing plans and no free version or trial, and says the way to get a quote is to schedule a demo. Capterra shows the starting price as not provided by the vendor, and Software Advice routes you to an advisor.

ECI's one public number is in a May 14, 2026 blog post about ecommerce costs for small electrical and plumbing distributors: implementation fees "usually fall between a few thousand dollars and $10,000." The subscription is described as covering license, hosting and monitoring, with no monthly figure.

What opacity costs you

You can't budget until you've been through a sales process. You can't compare two vendors without running two sales processes in parallel. You don't know whether your number is the number the dealer down the road was given. And at renewal, you have no public reference point to push against.

One TrustRadius reviewer, an administrator at a building materials company, rated EvolutionX 6 out of 10 and said their return on investment had historically been disappointing, a concern they had raised before; they wanted the price to scale with how well the site was doing. The same reviewer reports some ROI improvement in the past month, which they put down to Google's updates rather than EvolutionX. A fixed, negotiated, unpublished fee gives the customer no external benchmark to argue from. A published price gives you somewhere to stand.

Impact

You can price ToolSwift right now, from a blog post: $499 a month per store, $250 per additional location, $3,000 to $9,000 to onboard, $60 an hour for development, no transaction fees, month to month. Pricing EvolutionX requires a demo and a quote. Before you sign anything with anyone, ask for the monthly figure in writing and what it does at renewal.

Retail storefront: two experiences, one catalog

Why one site can't serve both buyers

The thing that makes an LBM storefront hard is that two completely different people arrive at the same website.

A homeowner wants a deck. They don't know what a 2x8x16 is, they've never heard of a tally, they want photos and a price and a delivery date, and if the site feels like software they leave. A contractor wants to reorder what they bought last Tuesday, on their account, at their pricing, against a job, in under a minute. Anything designed to charm the homeowner is in their way.

Build one site for both and you compromise on both.

How the ToolSwift retail storefront works

ToolSwift runs two purpose-built experiences on a single shared catalog. The retail storefront lives on your own domain and is built like retail: browsing, imagery, product pages with real content, search designed for people who don't know the SKU, and checkout without a login requirement.

A few details that matter at a lumberyard:

The store selector uses geolocation to send each visitor to their nearest location, so they see the right prices and stock for that store immediately.

Products you don't stock but can get from Orgill, Do it Best or Emery Jensen show up live from the distributor, labeled "Available Online Only."

Special-order items can be listed without a price, as items for inquiry or a quote rather than add-to-cart.

You feature whatever the homepage needs (best sellers, seasonal promotions, high-margin items, banners) with no tier restrictions.

Bulk pricing tiers display directly on product pages, and product bundles carry their own pricing.

One catalog behind both

The word doing the work is shared. One catalog, one PIM, one set of product content, one price book, feeding both the storefront and the contractor dashboard. Enrich a product once and it's enriched in both places. Add a line and it appears in both. You aren't maintaining two websites; you're maintaining one catalog that knows who's looking at it.

Visibility is yours to set. Customers are segmented into groups, and you choose which products each group sees, so some items show only to logged-in trade accounts and stay hidden from retail shoppers. You can create a B2B catalog for a set of accounts, with negotiated pricing and quantity-based tiers shown right on the listings, and run banner promotions aimed only at B2B customers, separate from your retail ones.

Marketing runs from the same dashboard: email and SMS campaigns through Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign, targeted by customer or customer group, and a loyalty program where customers see and redeem points in their own dashboard.

How EvolutionX handles it

EvolutionX runs one storefront with visibility rules on top. ECI's FAQ says you can set customer-specific pricing, restrict product visibility, and show different catalogs for retail versus trade accounts, "all managed directly from Spruce." ECI's docs say pricing is pulled by customer, job and branch, and logged-out shoppers see your Cash Sale account pricing. The page title ECI chose for Spruce eCommerce is "Lumber & Building Supply Payment Portal," and its trade pitch centers on a secure portal to view quotes, pay invoices and track orders.

Impact

ToolSwift gives you a retail storefront and a contractor experience built for their separate jobs, sharing a single catalog so nothing is maintained twice, with visibility, B2B catalogs and promotions set in the dashboard by whoever runs your marketing. EvolutionX gives you one templated storefront that shows different products and prices to different accounts, with the rules administered in Spruce. Only one of them is built to win the customer who hasn't found you yet.

Contractor experience: built for the job site

A contractor's order on ToolSwift, start to finish

Here's what a framer's morning looks like on ToolSwift.

It's 6:40 and he's in the truck. He opens your app, the one with your logo on his home screen, and his account is already there: his company, his pricing, his available credit. He pulls up last week's order for the same job and reorders it in a few clicks, adds two items from his wishlist, and checks out on account. Checkout knows his credit limit and enforces it automatically, so nobody at your counter has to catch an over-limit order by hand.

He picks delivery. At 9:15 a push notification tells him the order status has changed. At noon he messages your counter about a second drop, inside the same order thread, and attaches a photo of the site access. On Friday his invoice appears in the dashboard, downloadable, and he pays it with the card he already vaulted, without a new payment link.

Nothing in that story required a phone call.

What the contractor dashboard and app hold

The contractor side is its own interface, with its own navigation, built around how trade customers order rather than as a logged-in version of the retail site. It holds quotes, orders, invoices, statements, the catalog and messaging, in the dashboard and in the native app.

Accounts are structured the way contractors' businesses are. ToolSwift separates "company" and "user" accounts: one company account can have multiple individual logins, a manager, a purchasing lead and a foreman, each with their own role and activation status. Customers are classed as Pro or Regular, tax exemption is a toggle, and each Pro account can carry a credit limit with its available balance, credit due and usage visible to both sides. Custom pricing and discounts follow client type and order volume.

Around the order itself: bulk ordering and one-click reordering, order filters with AI-powered search, real-time order tracking with status updates, delivery and pickup choices, payment history, downloadable invoices, a loyalty program with points redeemed in the dashboard, and wishlists that turn into purchases.

Messaging, signatures and your counter

Messaging is native in the dashboard and the app, attached to the order or quote it concerns, with PDFs and images. It also connects to SMS and WhatsApp Business, so a contractor can reach you on whichever channel they use, and every conversation is tracked on their account. A question about a delivery date lives with that order instead of in an email thread somebody has to go hunting for.

Signing happens in the same place. Credit applications, quotes and contracts, delivery confirmations and waivers are signed natively in the platform, without printing, scanning or a separate e-signature tool.

And your staff can act for the customer. When a contractor phones in and asks someone inside to just put it through, your team creates the order in the admin, chooses the channel and adds the products. Phone and counter sales run through the same system as online ones.

How EvolutionX handles B2B

EvolutionX's B2B toolkit is shaped by the procurement buyers of the industries it grew up in: cloneable user roles, contract pricing, quicklists, approval workflows with budgets and multi-tier chains, and punchout at Level 1 and Level 2 into Ariba, SAP and Oracle.

On the Spruce integration, ECI's integration docs set two limits a lumberyard will meet quickly. Customers can't create new jobs online; all jobs are created in Spruce and synced. And an admin can start an order for a customer, but it must be completed on the storefront by the customer, because cart verification, tally checking and tax calculation run through storefront checkout.

Here's the question I'd put to a lumber dealer. How many of your accounts are run by a purchasing department?

Impact

A building supply dealer's B2B customer is a framer in a truck, ordering against a job, who needs it on site by ten. ToolSwift is built for that person: a native app, one-click reorder, credit-aware checkout, multi-user company accounts, messaging on the order, signatures in the platform, and staff who can place the order when he calls. EvolutionX's B2B controls are built for purchasing departments, and on the Spruce integration your staff can't finish an order on a customer's behalf. Ask yourself which of your customers has a cost center, and which has a crew.

Quoting: ToolSwift creates the quote, not just manages it

The quote is where the job is won or lost

For most building supply dealers, quoting is the business. A contractor sends over a materials list, somebody inside turns it into priced line items, and whoever comes back first with something accurate usually gets the order.

The bottleneck has never been the software. It's the translation. A quote request arrives as a takeoff from an architect, a spreadsheet, a photograph of a wall, a scribbled list on the back of a delivery note, or a voicemail describing what's needed. Somebody has to turn that into SKUs.

That's the work. Everything else is formatting.

What we've built: the Takeoff Agent

We think quote creation is the problem worth solving, and the Takeoff Agent is how we solve it.

With the Takeoff Agent, a quote starts from whatever the contractor already has in their hand rather than from a SKU they have to go and find. A description of the job. A photograph of the part that failed. A materials list from the architect. A scanned sheet from the site. The platform does the interpretation, matching against your catalog and your pricing, and produces a draft quote that a person at your end reviews before it goes back out.

Nobody should claim that interpretation is perfect. It won't be, and a human reviewing before it reaches the customer is the correct design rather than a limitation. But the difference between reviewing a draft that's largely right and building a quote from nothing is the difference between minutes and an afternoon.

Two things follow from that, and they're the reason this matters more than a feature comparison suggests.

The first is speed, and speed decides quotes. The dealer who replies first wins disproportionately, and the hour lost to transcription is the hour the order goes elsewhere.

The second is depth of bench. Turning a takeoff into SKUs takes product knowledge built over years, which is why at most branches only two or three people can do it well, and why quoting backs up whenever those people are busy or away. Reviewing a draft that's already close takes far less. That turns quoting from a specialist job into something most of your counter can handle.

How a ToolSwift quote moves, step by step

With the Takeoff Agent, a contractor starts a quote from the dashboard or the app by voice, a photo, a scan, a takeoff or a file upload (CSV or PDF). A list that says "2x6-16 PT" or "1/2 CDX" is trade shorthand, not your SKUs, and the matching step reads it against your catalog with that account's pricing applied. That is what separates a quote foundation from a transcription.

The draft lands in your quoting dashboard. Staff can also build and send quotes on a customer's behalf. Each quote gets an assigned sales rep who follows it up, a due date and a revision history, and the quote list filters by time period, status, customer, quote ID or rep, and sorts by date created, due date or amount. The customer and your team discuss it in a thread attached to the quote, with PDFs and images, and the contractor can sign it in the platform.

When it's approved, the quote converts directly into an order with the same line items, pricing and customer account, with nothing re-entered. The contractor gets a push notification when a quote is ready for approval, and keeps their whole quote history, past requests, statuses and previous quotes, in the dashboard and the app without emailing anyone to ask.

Assist AI: quotes from the conversation itself

Real requests don't arrive as one tidy document. A contractor texts half a list, sends a photo of the rest an hour later, then confirms quantities on WhatsApp after a phone call. Assist AI, our AI assistant, is currently in review. It treats all of that as one thread, working inside the live conversation across the quote system, internal messaging, SMS, WhatsApp and email. It helps your team reply to customer emails and keeps a running quote in the background, adding, removing or adjusting items as new information comes in.

When the draft is ready, your staff choose the hand-off: a quote for the customer to approve, or an order placed directly when the customer has already confirmed. Either way the extracted items carry forward without re-entry.

How EvolutionX quotes

On EvolutionX, a logged-in customer adds catalog products to a cart and converts it into a quote or a request, which lands in the admin as a requested quote; staff build quotes in the admin by searching the customer and typing SKUs. Quotes carry an expiry, a PDF, and can be saved, reused and cloned, and open quotes can be reused until they expire. When a third-party product selector adds an item that isn't in your catalog, the request becomes what ECI's documentation calls an offline quote, an email that won't appear as an open quote in the admin or the storefront. Every path starts from a SKU. They built quote management.

Impact

ToolSwift turns what a contractor actually sends you, a photo, a voice note, a takeoff, a message thread, into a priced draft with your team reviewing rather than transcribing, then carries it through rep follow-up, revisions, signature and conversion to an order without re-entry. On EvolutionX, every quote begins with catalog items in a cart or somebody typing SKUs. The hour between a contractor sending a list and getting a price back is where orders are won or lost.

PIM and catalog: sell what you can source

Selling more than you stock

The biggest online opportunity for most building supply dealers isn't selling what's in the yard. It's selling everything you could get.

Say a dealer stocks 8,000 SKUs and could source 70,000 through Orgill or Do it Best. The ones sitting in the warehouse are the ones a contractor already knows you have. The other 62,000 are the orders currently going somewhere else, because nobody knows you can get them.

Our catalog isn't derived from your ERP

ToolSwift has a native PIM. Not a connected one, not a synced one: the product record lives in the platform, and it's the platform's own system of record for what you sell. Product data, pricing logic and catalog structure live in one place and sync with your POS or ERP.

That single design decision has consequences all the way down. Your online range isn't bounded by what's been set up in the back office. You can list a distributor's full catalog, enrich it properly, merchandise it the way you want, and decide independently what gets stocked versus what gets special-ordered. The ERP tells you what's on hand and what it costs. It doesn't get to decide what you're allowed to sell.

Distributor stock, projected into your store

We integrate directly with Orgill, Do it Best and Emery Jensen. Beyond what's on your shelf, we project products from the distributor's DC into your storefront, read live via API, and label them "Available Online Only." It's inventory that isn't in your building, presented as available because it is.

The fulfillment path follows. An item you don't stock can ship to the customer straight from the distribution center at the DC's shipping rate, without touching your yard. Your search results then reflect what you can get, not just what's on the racks, and a lost sale becomes an order.

Enrichment you keep

Distributor data arrives thin: a description that's twelve truncated characters, no attributes, one bad photo, a category that doesn't match anything a customer would search for. Enrichment is work we do rather than work we hand you. We clean up descriptions, specs and imagery, and we map the gathered data against your ERP or POS item file: your part numbers, your descriptions, your items. The output is your catalog with real content attached, yours to keep, not a licensed library that stops being yours the day a subscription lapses. I went deeper on why owned content matters in my Unilog comparison.

Managing the catalog day to day

The admin side is built for big catalogs. Products go in manually or by bulk CSV upload. Variants carry their own attributes, images, pricing and inventory. Categories nest three levels deep (categories, subcategories and sub-subcategories) with an image at each level, and you restructure the hierarchy by drag and drop as the catalog grows. Bulk price changes take a few clicks. Dimensions and weights feed shipping costs. AI writes product descriptions and SEO-friendly tags, and automatically categorizes and tags products by attributes like material, dimensions and color.

Search is included for every client. It runs a hybrid model: exact matching for the contractor who types a part number and should get that part, not five things resembling it, and semantic matching for the homeowner who describes what they're trying to do in words that appear nowhere in your catalog. Once distributor stock sits alongside your own, search is the only realistic way through the catalog, and ours reads directly from the unified catalog.

How EvolutionX handles the catalog

EvolutionX has its own PIM; ECI says Spruce eCommerce includes an industry-specific PIM with a pre-built taxonomy, and its EvolutionX page describes wholesaler content partnerships. Do it Best and Orgill catalogs are switched on inside EvolutionX through an app, using the supplier's API token and FTP access. To price and order those non-stock items on the Spruce integration, ECI's docs have you set vendor codes and a template item in Spruce at the supplier level (Spruce 26.6 or later for the Do it Best and Orgill setup, 27.0 or later for non-stock items), with the storefront doing a live price lookup against Spruce.

One EvolutionX reviewer, a lumber dealer, writes that windows, doors and other custom items will never be part of their online store, for lack of SKUs. If you're evaluating any platform whose content comes through partnerships, ask what happens to that content, and to the enrichment your team layers on top, if you leave.

Impact

On ToolSwift, your catalog is a merchandising decision: a native PIM, distributor stock projected live and drop-shipped from the DC, special-order items listed without a price, and enrichment mapped to your own item file and kept by you. On EvolutionX, selling non-stock items on the Spruce integration runs through vendor codes and template items in Spruce. The dealer who puts 70,000 SKUs online instead of 8,000 is usually running software that didn't make it hard.

AI: built for the buyer first

Who is the AI actually for?

Nearly every platform in this category now has an AI story. The question that separates them isn't how advanced the model is. It's who's sitting in front of it.

Point AI at the merchant and you make your own staff faster. Point it at the buyer and you change what the buyer can do. Both are worth having. Only one of them shows up in your order volume.

Where we're pointing

Our AI work aims at the buyer.

The thesis is simple enough. Your counter staff are good at their jobs and AI makes them somewhat faster. Your customers, though, are currently limited by what a website lets them do: search a catalog, click products, fill a cart. That interface hasn't fundamentally changed in twenty years, and it's a poor fit for someone standing on a job site holding a broken part.

So the work goes into letting a contractor interact the way they'd interact with a person at your counter. Describe what they need. Show a photo of it. Scan the barcode on the box. Hand over the materials list they were given. The platform does the translation into SKUs, pricing and a quote, and a human at your end reviews it before it goes back.

That bet tries to remove a step the customer currently has to perform themselves, and the step we're removing, turning a real-world need into catalog line items, is the one that costs you orders when it's slow.

What the AI does across the platform

On the buyer side: the Takeoff Agent, live today, quoting from voice, photos, scans, takeoffs and files; Assist AI (in review) helping your team reply to emails and building a running quote from a live conversation; AI-powered search with natural language, visual and semantic matching; product recommendations drawn from purchase history and browsing patterns, for cross-selling and upselling; and chatbots and virtual assistants that answer customer questions around the clock.

On the operating side: automatic categorization and tagging, AI-written descriptions and SEO tags, pricing and stock suggestions based on demand and inventory levels, order routing to the nearest warehouse, and flags on potentially fraudulent orders. We also run an admin-side assistant, because merchant-facing wins are real and there's no reason to concede them. But the priority order is deliberate: buyer first.

What ECI built

ECI launched its ecommerce AI Agent in November 2025, free to all EvolutionX and Spruce eCommerce stores initially. It does four things: business insights on sales, orders and customer behavior; a chat interface in the merchant dashboard; product listing enrichment with details and keywords; and fraud scoring for orders. All four serve the merchant. The one buyer-facing AI feature I found is on ECI's EvolutionX page, which lists AI-powered search. The two customers named in the announcement are an office supplies group and an office products dealer.

Impact

ECI's AI Agent is a merchant tool: dashboard insights, a chat window for your team, listing enrichment and fraud scoring. Our AI is aimed at the person buying from you, because a contractor who can photograph a part and get a price back is a contractor who doesn't call your competitor. Efficiency is worth having. Access is worth more.

Discoverability: found by people who don't know you

The customer who doesn't know your name yet

Somebody a few towns over types "pressure treated 2x6 near me" into Google, or asks an AI assistant where to buy cedar decking locally. They've never heard of you. Whether your product pages show up in that answer is worth more than any feature on any platform, and it's decided by things most dealers never see: how pages are rendered, what machine-readable data they carry, and whether the crawlers that now sit between customers and businesses are allowed in.

What we build for

Our storefronts render server-side, with incremental static rendering where it helps, so a crawler receives a complete page (name, price, description, specs) rather than an empty shell that needs JavaScript executed before anything exists. Sitemaps generate dynamically from the catalog, so new products are discoverable without anyone remembering to regenerate a file.

Our storefronts ship open by default. Only the API and the customer portal paths are closed, so GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can read your catalog unless you decide otherwise. Many robots files predate those crawlers and block them by accident.

We've implemented the Universal Commerce Protocol, the emerging standard for making a catalog readable and transactable by AI agents, so an AI shopping assistant can query your catalog directly when a buyer asks where to purchase something. I'd rather be early on that than explain in two years why we weren't.

Products sync to Google Merchant Center from the platform, and your storefront's Google Analytics data feeds straight into ToolSwift's analytics, so visits and conversions sit next to orders and revenue instead of in a separate account.

This is a moment that rewards being ahead. The dealers whose catalogs are machine-readable now will be the ones AI assistants recommend, and that advantage compounds quietly.

What EvolutionX documents

ECI's SEO Support section covers meta titles and descriptions, a robots.txt, Google Search Console verification and a Google Merchant Center feed, and ECI's docs say product pages include Product structured data in JSON-LD. The sitemap article has you click a button to generate the sitemap. I found nothing in the SEO section or release notes on AI crawlers or agent protocols. One EvolutionX reviewer on the Spruce integration reports that the vast majority of their items aren't being pulled into Merchant Center.

Impact

ToolSwift renders server-side, generates sitemaps from the catalog automatically, lets AI crawlers in by default, and has implemented the Universal Commerce Protocol so AI assistants can read and act on your products. EvolutionX documents the SEO basics, with a sitemap you generate by button and nothing written on AI agents. The customer searching for decking three towns away has never heard of you. Whether they find you is a rendering decision somebody made years ago.

Mobile: a native app for your customer

Where your customer actually is

Your contractor is not at a desk. They're in a truck at 6:40 in the morning, or standing in mud with a tape measure in one hand, or sitting outside a supply yard deciding whether to drive to you or to the box store eight minutes further on.

That's the context every ordering decision in this industry gets made in. It's worth asking what each platform puts in that person's hand.

What the ToolSwift app does

ToolSwift built the customer-facing native app first. It's downloaded from the App Store or Google Play under your brand, and it carries everything in the contractor dashboard: quotes, orders, invoices, statements, the catalog and messaging. A contractor can place an order on site, check an invoice from the truck, or reorder between jobs.

Because the app is native rather than a web wrapper, it can send push notifications to the lock screen even when it isn't open: an order status update, a quote ready for approval, an invoice due, a message from your counter. Contractors respond faster, which means quotes get approved, invoices get paid and orders move sooner. We're also developing an admin app so your staff get the same native experience.

Why an app is a different thing

Responsive web and a native app are not two routes to the same destination.

An app has an icon on the home screen, sitting beside the tools that person uses all day. A website is a bookmark they have to remember, a login they have to retype, in a browser with fourteen other tabs open. That difference alone changes how often something gets used, and frequency is the whole game in repeat trade.

An app can also reach hardware a browser can't reach cleanly. The camera, in particular. A phone's camera is the single most useful input device on a job site, because it can see the thing the contractor is standing in front of: the broken bracket, the profile that needs matching, the label on an empty box.

Our native app is where our buyer-facing work goes, and the camera is the reason. A responsive storefront can show a contractor your catalog. An app can let them show you what they're looking at.

That is a genuinely different relationship with a customer, and it's not available to a platform whose mobile answer is a responsive website.

What ECI offers

ECI's mobile app in building supply is AnyWare, an extension of the Spruce ERP for creating orders, compiling purchase orders, viewing documents and tracking deliveries. It's for your staff. In January 2026 ECI also announced a Spruce mobile delivery app for drivers and dispatch, rolling out later in 2026. For the contractor, the EvolutionX storefront is mobile responsive; I searched the iOS and Android stores and found no native EvolutionX or Spruce eCommerce app for a dealer's customers.

Impact

ECI's mobile work in building supply goes to your staff and your drivers. Its answer for the contractor is a responsive website. We ship a native, branded app for the customer, with push notifications and the camera, because the difference between an icon on a home screen and a bookmark in a browser decides how often you get used.

Delivery and payments: trucks, zones and your processor

Lumber isn't a parcel

A lumberyard doesn't ship cartons. It sends a boom truck to a site with restricted access, on a day the framing crew is actually there, with a load that has to be placed rather than dropped. The cost depends on distance, vehicle, crew time and how many times you have to go back, far more than on weight. And what the customer cares about most is the date.

How ToolSwift handles fulfillment

ToolSwift's shipping module has three fulfillment methods, Pickup, Delivery and Shipping, and each can be switched on or off down to the individual product. Your lumber can be delivery-only, your fasteners can ship, and your special orders can be pickup at the branch.

Delivery pricing for your own fleet is configured on an interactive map. You build zones by zip code, city, state or country, draw your actual delivery radius, run several zones at once, and give each its own pricing tier, all visible on the map as you build. It matches how your yard really charges rather than approximating it with weight tables or flat rates.

Around that sit the rules a yard needs. Delivery policies set shipping methods and rates, handling times, delivery windows, cut-off times for same-day orders, and customization by region or zone. Buy online, pick up in store and curbside pickup run alongside scheduled delivery. Parcel shipping for small goods connects through Shippo or ShipStation, with automatic tracking IDs, real-time tracking statuses and a timeline of each shipment. Items from a distributor can drop-ship from the DC. Each location can be enabled for fulfillment, so orders go where the stock is.

How ToolSwift handles payments

We're gateway-agnostic: Stripe, VersaPay, Clover, Square and Moneris. You connect your own processor, keep your rates and your banking relationship, and funds settle directly to you. We're not in the flow, we don't hold a balance, and there's no settlement delay introduced by the platform. And we charge no transaction fees.

Payments are tied to AR and credit. ToolSwift supports credit cards, cash, net terms, ACH, credit balances for prepayments, and credit-card-free bank payments through Konek, including Interac Direct. Checkout enforces each account's credit limit automatically. For Canadian dealers, native card vaulting through Moneris tokenizes a contractor's card so repeat orders don't need a new payment link every time.

On the AR side, your team monitors overdue balances in real time, sends bulk payment requests, shares payment links by SMS and email, and tracks each request's status. Every invoice for every B2B client sits in one place, marked paid, pending or overdue, and contractors see their credit limit, available credit and outstanding balance with a "Make a Payment" option in their dashboard. Return and refund policies are set per product or category and applied to eligible orders automatically.

How EvolutionX handles delivery

EvolutionX's shipping zones are built by country, state or zip code, with rules by weight, price or custom conditions, UPS and FedEx rate integration, and pickup zones that your Customer Success Manager sets up and activates.

On the Spruce integration, the delivery date on an order comes from the Spruce parameter "To Be Delivered Days," which defaults to the next day; ECI calls it a placeholder the merchant changes based on trucks, routes and requests. A customer-chosen date passes through only on Spruce version 31 or later with that setting enabled, and ECI's docs say there's no way in Spruce to set a preferred date from the delivery notes. One EvolutionX reviewer describes setting up a 30-mile local delivery area by adding rules zip code by zip code.

How EvolutionX handles payments

EvolutionX's documented gateways for the Spruce integration are BlueSnap, Opayo, Nuvei and card on file held in Spruce, and the docs say Global Payments Cayan isn't supported. Opayo is a UK gateway. Moneris, Square and Clover don't appear on EvolutionX's lists. ECI did add Moneris in April 2026, for RockSolid MAX, its other building supply ERP, in Canada. Stripe is on EvolutionX's wider provider list, marked as available when required, but not on the Spruce list. The Spruce docs add that convenience fees apply to invoice and account payments but not orders, aren't supported on ACH, and that an ACH payment can show as successful in both systems before settlement fails days later. ECI also sells payment processing as its own product.

Impact

On ToolSwift, delivery pricing follows zones you draw around your trucks' real routes, fulfillment is set per product, and your processor stays your own with no transaction fees, credit-aware checkout and AR in one dashboard. On EvolutionX's Spruce integration, the delivery date on an order starts as a next-day placeholder unless you're on Spruce 31 or later, and the gateway list doesn't include Moneris, Square or Clover. If you're a Canadian dealer on Moneris, check that list before anything else.

Reporting and multi-location: one dashboard

What ToolSwift analytics shows you

ToolSwift has a dedicated Analytics section built into the platform. It tracks total sales over time with period comparisons, top products and categories, gross margins and average order value, revenue by location, by payment method and by customer type (Pro versus Regular), and the impact of returns and refunds, with trend forecasts.

It goes deeper where a yard needs it. Order analytics cover POS and online orders together, fulfillment and processing times, repeat order rates and abandoned cart recovery. Customer analytics show growth, top spenders, order frequency and lifetime value. Product analytics show margins by item, return rates, bundle sales and demand forecasts. Pricing analytics compare sales before and after discounts and measure time-limited offers and bulk order discounts. Inventory analytics flag fast-moving and dead stock, turnover rates and restocking suggestions. Site analytics show visits, conversion rates, top landing pages, bounce rates and traffic sources.

Running several yards from one place

ToolSwift is built for multi-location operations. You add physical and online locations, enable fulfillment from each, and keep every store synced in real time. Sales, orders, returns and products sold compare by location across POS and online, so you can see which yards are pulling their weight. Staff accounts are added across locations with role-based permissions, limited by role and store, and activated or deactivated as people come and go.

How EvolutionX compares

ECI's Spruce eCommerce page lists reports among its marketing tools, and its AI Agent adds a dashboard chat for sales, order and customer questions. Branch-driven inventory counts and pricing come from Spruce.

Impact

With ToolSwift, sales, margins, customers, products, pricing, inventory and site conversions sit in one dashboard, by location, next to the orders that produced them. That's the view an owner of three yards needs on a Monday morning.

Implementation: one team, live in weeks

How a ToolSwift launch runs

A ToolSwift launch is measured in weeks. We run the whole implementation ourselves, with one project team and one dedicated account manager from discovery to go-live: requirements, data migration, the ERP or POS integration, the design of your retail and contractor portals, catalog and pricing configuration, staff training and launch. The team sets milestones with your staff and works to keep disruption at the counter to a minimum. The dashboard's guided setup covers shipping rates and payment options, and you test before going live.

Onboarding runs $3,000 to $9,000 depending on catalog scope, and you know that number before you start. After launch, you get 24/7 human support from people with full-stack access to your platform.

Live and selling are different dates

A storefront goes live the day it accepts an order. It starts earning the day customers can find what they want, understand it well enough to buy it, and trust the price.

Between those two dates sits catalog work. Distributor data arrives thin: truncated descriptions, missing attributes, one poor photo, categories that don't match how anyone searches. A launch on an unenriched catalog produces a site that technically works and doesn't sell, and the dealer concludes ecommerce doesn't work in this industry.

That's why enrichment is part of our project rather than homework issued afterwards. When you compare timelines, compare the same thing: ask how many products will be properly enriched on launch day, who does that work, and what it costs if it isn't included. A three-week launch followed by nine months of someone at your branch writing product descriptions in the evenings is not a three-week project.

What ECI says about launch

ECI's Spruce eCommerce page says you can "go live in just weeks" with templates, product imports and the direct Spruce integration. Its EvolutionX page tells the story of Wiseway Supply, a distributor, beginning to sell in 100 days. Two things are worth asking about on the Spruce integration. Several EvolutionX features are tied to specific Spruce releases, from 26.6 up to 33 and later, so an older install can turn part of a storefront project into an ERP upgrade. And some pieces, pickup zones for example, need ECI's Customer Success team to set up and activate.

Impact

ToolSwift launches in weeks with one team doing the integration, the design, the catalog and the training, for $3,000 to $9,000, and hands over a storefront built for your business with the catalog work done. Whatever platform you evaluate, ask what's true on the day after launch: how much of your catalog is enriched, who does the rest, and whether your ERP version is current enough for what you saw demoed.

The bottom line: a store you own on the ERP you run

What ToolSwift gives a Spruce dealer

Keep Spruce, and put this in front of it: a custom retail storefront on your domain and a separate contractor dashboard with a native, branded app, on one catalog you own. Distributor stock from Orgill, Do it Best and Emery Jensen sold online and drop-shipped from the DC. Quotes that start from a photo, a voice note or a takeoff and end as orders without re-entry. Credit-aware checkout, AR and your own payment processor. Delivery zones drawn around your real routes. Pages that search engines and AI assistants can read. Analytics across every location. And a price you can read today: $499 a month per store, $250 per additional location, $3,000 to $9,000 to onboard, month to month.

What EvolutionX's own customers report

Reviews show you a platform's ceiling more honestly than a demo does. On TrustRadius, a lumber dealer writes that windows, doors and other custom items will never be part of their online store, for lack of SKUs. An administrator at a building materials company on the Spruce integration reports that the vast majority of their items aren't being pulled into Google Merchant Center, calls shipping a difficult pinch point that stops customers completing orders, and describes setting up local delivery across a 30-mile radius by adding rules zip code by zip code. TrustRadius's own summary says half of reviewers want expanded integration options and half want refinements to product management and theme customization.

Read those together and a pattern appears. The complaints are about reach: what you can list, where you can be found, how you can deliver. Those are the three things ToolSwift is built around.

The actual choice

EvolutionX is a templated platform built for distribution first, administered largely through your ERP, and sold to Spruce dealers as a trade account portal. ToolSwift is built for this trade, where the storefront is yours, the catalog isn't bounded by what's set up in the back office, and the AI work points at your customer rather than your admin screen.

The question I'd ask before signing anything

Skip "which has more features." Ask which platform lets you do something nobody else in your market is doing, five years from now.

On one, that's a support ticket and a place in a roadmap shared with every other industry it serves. On the other, it's a build.

Impact

If you want to sell more than you stock, be found by people who've never heard of you, quote from what a contractor actually sends you, and keep your ERP and your payment processor exactly where they are, that's the work we do, and we publish what it costs. The question isn't which platform does more today. It's which one is still saying yes in five years.

If you run Spruce and want to see a contractor quote built from a photo against your own catalog, book a ToolSwift demo.

The full comparison, group by group

Each table below matches the sections above: ToolSwift covers the LBM ERPs, owns the catalog, quotes from what contractors send, ships a native customer app, keeps your processor and publishes its price.