Caster Central / Deluxe / WT Hight

Friday, May 29

9:30 AM CDT

Tim, Scott, Brandon, Vicki, Josh, Colleen

Big week. On Caster Central: the catalog gap analysis (delivered Friday after last week's call), the product description rewrite is 89% drafted and ready to push, and a 264-SKU B&P launch with a live PDP preview waiting for you. On Deluxe: the new Shopify build is in — theme rebranded, 1,126 products migrated, Wirecrafters integration done. Walk it on the call.

What shipped between last Friday and this one

Caster filter cleanup

You flagged the duplicate "Top Plate" rows in the filter sidebar this week. Ran the same audit across every spec field on all 4,074 caster products and found three flavors of the same root cause. A lot of what looks like a typo in the sidebar is actually an invisible non-breaking-space character that got into the data somewhere along the way. Shopify reads "Ball Bearing" and "Ball [invisible space] Bearing" as two separate filter values, so you get two rows. Same story on Plain Bore, Roller Bearing, and most of the durometer rows. 1,313 fixes pushed to production this week:

Shopify takes a few minutes to reindex after a bulk push. Should be visible by the time you scroll the filter on the call. One more set is queued and waiting on you: 158 Albion products on the 110 Kingpinless and 28 Maintenance Free series have their bearing listed as "Pedestral", a typo. The 8 correct entries on the same 28 Series read as "Pedestal Precision Ball", so that's the best guess at the canonical. Quick yes on the call and it goes.

Catalog gap analysis, delivered Friday afternoon

Cross-referenced our catalog against Access Casters, Caster Specialists, and Next Day Casters by brand + manufacturer part number. Multi-tab workbook with one master view per side (opportunities CC could add, moat CC already holds), plus per-competitor missing tabs and pivots by vendor / type / series. Methodology and caveats in the README. Email went out 4:59 PM Friday.

The headline: 3,463 distinct SKUs we don't stock that others do, and 3,677 SKUs we stock that none of the brand-comparable retailers do. The expansion side and the moat side are roughly the same size, which is why the strategic question is interesting.

B&P Manufacturing launch prep, 264 SKUs scoped

Pulled the full B&P price guide and 8 product ZIPs, built the SKU inventory (264 rows), normalized 188 product images, and locked the hand-truck metafield schema. Sell at B&P list, CC cost is list × 0.65 on hand-truck components and × 0.70 on everything else, drop-ship fulfillment. Phase 1 covers Liberator standard / disc brake / tread brake / convertible / specialty, Xcelorator, Crusader Tubular, route delivery carts, platform trucks, curb defender ramps, dock boards, DEFENDER walk ramps. U-boats and flat-bed carts deferred to Phase 2 pending portal scrape. Content batches and the Matrixify import are the next two steps once you greenlight.

Colson CG-MAX 3" wheel release scaffolded, 40 SKUs as draft

40 Albion part numbers pairing the 370 / 470 / 310 / 410 rigs with the new 3" CG-MAX polyurethane wheel are now drafts on castercentral.com, attached to the "CG-MAX Max Efficiency Wheels" collection, with full titles, descriptions, SEO copy, vendor (Albion), and 24-25 metafields each (Mfg part, series, capacity, durometer, temp range, hub, axle, bearing, AX-round vs AK-crown decode). Tags auto-include them in the right size / series / type / kingpinless / automotive / trash-container collections. Pricing + CAD images are the last piece before we flip from draft to active. Admin filter to review them in bulk: vendor:Albion status:draft tag:CG-MAX.

Product description rewrite, v3 — 3,179 of 3,564 SKUs ready to push (89%)

The full catalog rewrite is built, hand-curated against the new pattern. Coverage by vendor: Albion 762, Colson 1,036, Pemco 594, Blickle 499, smaller vendors (Shepherd, Revvo, Faultless, Medcaster, Foot Master, Jarvis, Albion 28) 288. Two deliberate calls: SEO titles and meta descriptions on Shopify are left untouched (only product bodies change), and the generic "pairs with" filler lines were stripped — only specific pair recommendations that point at real sibling products were kept. Preview 10 random SKUs side-by-side, two per vendor bucket, at cc-product-pilot-v3.pages.dev. Want your read on the preview before we stage the push to production.

Cloudflare Turnstile Worker built

Three WAF rules over the last two weeks (no-referer, threat score, country block) and a handful of spam submissions were still leaking through Tor exits each day. Cloudflare's free-tier WAF can't inspect request bodies, so we built a Worker that does what the WAF can't: server-side Turnstile validation, honeypot field check, geo allowlist, and a 7-day request log so we can see exactly what's being blocked. Code is built. Recommend a canary deploy this week in logging-only mode for 2-3 days, then flip Turnstile to required and patch the three forms. Spam should go to ~0.

RFQ button + lead-volume check

Headline: lead activity is healthy. RFQ form submissions are essentially flat week over week (72 → 70, -3%) and Shopify transactions are up 67% (18 → 30). The -33% drop in RFQ-page sessions sounds bigger than it is — paired with flat submissions, it just means lower-intent traffic stopped landing on the page. The 5/21 WAF rule also shows up in the lead numbers: Contact Form -100%, B2B Account Registration -67%, which is exactly the bot vectors we wrote the rule for. Recommend leaving the RFQ button where it is and watching one more clean week (Memorial Day Monday is inside the current window).

Trustpilot review

Short version: skip it for now. Anonymous reviews are supported on every Trustpilot tier, and they're supported on our custom review system too. The metaobject + review carousel + AggregateRating schema we shipped 5/21 covers the on-site outcomes (PDP social proof, rich snippets) at $0/mo, versus Trustpilot's $319-$799/mo with vendor lock-in. The two things Trustpilot uniquely provides — the Trustpilot trust badge and Google Seller Ratings in Ads — don't carry meaningful weight with B2B procurement buyers right now. Worth revisiting if a buyer specifically asks for a Trustpilot profile, or if review volume crosses ~50/mo.

Deluxe Systems — what shipped this week

Big week on Deluxe. We migrated everything over to the new Shopify build. Theme is rebranded, catalog is in, blog is in, Wirecrafters is in. Walk it on the call and pick a cutover date.

The full Shopify build

Take a look: deluxe-systems.myshopify.com. New theme, all 1,126 products migrated from the WordPress / WooCommerce site, all the industry pages rewritten for material handling, RMI + OSHA + DEA language in the right places.

Wirecrafters integration

329 Wirecrafters products are in, plus 10 new collections and the old Wirecrafters URLs redirected to your existing taxonomy. wire-cages-partitions is a good one to scan first.

Automotive category page

Rebuilt as the pattern for the rest of the category pages. deluxe-systems.myshopify.com/collections/automotive. If the copy reads right to you and Scott, we replicate the treatment across the remaining ~30 categories.

Contact-form bot lockdown

Same week we hit the Caster Central spam vector, Deluxe was running at 10 of 16 leads (63%) flagged as bot or spam. Cloudflare Turnstile + honeypot lockdown applied across the form stack on the live WP site. Same fix is wired up for the Shopify build at cutover.

What we need from you

Albion 02 / 05 / 71 — deliberate gap or oversight? 02 Light Duty (550) and 05 Medium Duty (564) are foundational lines we have near-zero depth in. 71 ergonomic is missing entirely. Need a read before we scope sourcing.
Blickle strategic call. Depth play or core-only? Answer drives whether 80% of the 1,077-SKU Blickle gap stays on the table.
Quarterly refresh on the gap analysis. Worth auto-refreshing every 3 months so we keep a live view of what's moving in and out of competitor catalogs?
Product description rewrite — v3 preview read. 3,179 SKUs are drafted and ready to push, sample at cc-product-pilot-v3.pages.dev. Yes, or tweaks. Once you give the nod we'll stage the rollout vendor by vendor so it's easy to roll back if anything reads wrong on live.
5 happy customers for the review carousel. The custom carousel is live on PDPs, just needs content. Rafael's 5-star last week is the first entry. Need 4 to 5 more names we can ask.
CG-MAX 3" release — pricing + CADs to flip to active. 40 drafts are live in the "CG-MAX Max Efficiency Wheels" collection. Reply to your Thursday email is in drafts. Pricing sheet (your usual format) plus CAD images (per-SKU ideal, master per series+wheel-code combo also works) unblocks publishing in a single bulk pass.
B&P drop-ship PO routing. Need to wire fulfillment for the 264 SKUs. Your call on whether POs go through the existing portal flow or get routed manually for the first wave.
Greenlight to deploy the Turnstile Worker this week. The Worker will canary in logging-only mode for 2-3 days, then we flip Turnstile to required and patch the three forms. We own the theme patches (~30 min on our side). Spam should go to ~0.
Albion Hamilton-style sprint — pick one. Carry from last week. Gap analysis points at 05 Medium Duty (564) or 02 Light Duty (550) as the real starting points. Skipping 110 — we already have 98% unique moat there, the "gap" is variant noise, not opportunity. Pick 05 or 02 and we kick off.
Headshots for email signatures. Still outstanding from last week. Any square shots, neutral background. Pairs with the selfie ask for the automation emails.
Deluxe catalog spot-check before cutover. 1,126 SKUs landed clean per the importer log (zero errors) but you'll want eyes on the categories you sell most before we go live. Plan is to screenshare 5-10 collections during the call. Async preview link can go out ahead of time instead if that's better.
Wirecrafters integration spot-check. 329 products plus 10 new collections plus 20 legacy URLs redirected to Deluxe taxonomy as of today. Quick eyeball on the consolidations we made (e.g. "cages" merged into "wire-cages-partitions", "shelving" into "shelving-mini-racking") to confirm they read right for your buyers. Redirect map will be on screen during the call.
Read the Automotive category copy. Live at deluxe-systems.myshopify.com/collections/automotive. Specifically the H1 ("Material Handling Equipment for Automotive Service Bays and Parts Counters"), the 3-paragraph body, the 7 key-feature bullets, and the "Built for the floor, not the showroom" sub-section. Yes-or-tweaks unblocks the same treatment across the remaining ~30 category pages.

Quick things to confirm or eyeball on the call

Still parked, not new this week

Nothing's been dropped. These are the open items rolling into next week unless we close them on the call. Happy to walk any of them.

If we have 5 extra minutes