How TopTrading quotes faster and runs its appliance distribution business on Opser

Key takeaways

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• TopTrading is an Italian specialty distributor that imports small and large household appliances and sells them to retail chains and large stores across Italy.
• Quoting used to mean searching a 40 GB archive of thousands of files by hand. Now the team asks an agent, which finds the matching products and pulls their details together.
• Customers and deals live in a CRM that enriches customer data automatically and flags the deals that need attention first.
• Products, catalogs, and stock across several warehouses sit in the same system as purchasing, so a product, its stock, and its supplier orders are one record away.
• In purchasing, agents track every supplier order, ask suppliers for catalog updates, and alert the right teammate before a delay reaches a customer.

TopTrading is an Italian specialty distributor of household appliances, both small and large. It finds the products abroad, manages the import, and sells to retail chains and large stores across Italy.

It's a business built on detail. Every product line comes with spec sheets, photos, prices, barcodes, and a supplier on the other side of the world. Every retail buyer wants a precise quote, fast. As TopTrading added product lines, suppliers, and buyers, the habits that carried it when it was smaller kept working. They just stopped keeping up.

Where the work used to live#

Before Opser, the business ran across four places that didn't talk to each other:

• A legacy management system for invoices and warehouse stock, closed to anyone outside the office, including the logistics partners who actually move the goods.
• A shared archive of about 40 GB, thousands of files of spec sheets, product photos, and price lists.
• A spreadsheet of free barcode numbers, checked by hand every time a new product needed one.
• Email threads, where supplier quotes arrived and were easy to lose.

Quoting meant digging. A retail buyer asks for a product line, and someone searches the archive file by file, copies photos, finds prices, and assembles a spec sheet. Adding a new product meant a similar routine, plus claiming the next free barcode and typing everything into the management system. After a trade fair, with dozens of new products per supplier, it all turned into a backlog.

What TopTrading runs on Opser#

TopTrading didn't want one more app to log into. They wanted the work that fell between their tools to happen in one place they control. Here's what that looks like today.

Quotes without the digging. Instead of searching thousands of files, the team asks an agent. It searches the whole archive, returns the matching products with their specs, photos, and prices, and drafts the spec sheet the buyer expects, flagging anything missing instead of guessing. The request that started it all was a simple one:

"Make me the spec sheet, please."

A CRM that tells them where to look. Every customer and deal lives in Customers: who's buying, what's won, what's lost. Customer records enrich themselves automatically, and the agent flags the deals that need attention first, so nothing quiet slips.

Products and catalogs in one place. The product lines TopTrading distributes, with their catalogs and every detail, live in Products. A new product takes the next free barcode and product code automatically, so nobody scans a spreadsheet by hand.

Inventory across warehouses. Inventory tracks stock movements across TopTrading's warehouses, next to the products they belong to. The logistics partners who move the goods can see the stock data they need, without access to everything else.

Purchasing that chases suppliers for you. Every purchase order and its status lives in Purchasing. Agents work the bottlenecks: they contact suppliers to update catalogs, raise alerts when an order is at risk of running late, and reach out to the right person on the team before a delay reaches a customer.

What changed#

The clearest shift came in the first quote round the team ran on Opser. Their own steps, from search and spec sheet to barcodes, photos, and the product record, stopped being the slow part. The biggest wait left was the supplier's reply. That's exactly why purchasing came next: once the bottleneck sits with suppliers, you want agents that chase them.

Today, alongside faster quotes:

• One system of record instead of a management system, a spreadsheet, a 40 GB archive, and a search through old emails.
• Deals that surface themselves, so the team's attention goes to the buyers who need it.
• Supplier delays caught early, with an agent already reaching out to the right people.

What other distributors can take from this#

TopTrading looks like many of the companies we work with. The products are strong, and the process is the constraint. If you run a distribution business, three lessons stand out.

Your workflow already exists. It's just spread across too many places. Quoting was slow because it lived in an archive nobody could search and tools that couldn't share anything, not because anyone did it badly.

Agents are good at the mechanical middle. Searching an archive, assembling spec sheets, assigning codes, and chasing suppliers is reliable work for an AI agent, and it's exactly the work that wears out a good operations team.

Keep the judgment with people. Pricing, supplier relationships, and what goes out to buyers stay with the team. The agents do the legwork inside a system with scoped access and a full record of what they did.

When operations run in one system, "make me the spec sheet" stops being a wish for some future tool. It's something you say to an agent that already knows your products, your customers, and your suppliers.

Frequently asked questions

How does an AI agent speed up quoting for a distributor?

Instead of searching thousands of files by hand, the team asks the agent. It searches the whole product archive, returns the matching products with their details, and drafts the spec sheet for a person to review.

What does the CRM do for a distributor like TopTrading?

It keeps every customer and deal in one place, tracks what's won and lost, enriches customer data automatically, and flags the deals that need attention first.

Can Opser manage stock across several warehouses?

Yes. Inventory tracks stock movements per warehouse, next to the products and the purchase orders that feed them.

How do agents help with suppliers?

They track every purchase order and its status, contact suppliers to update catalogs, and alert the right person on the team when an order is at risk of running late.

Simone Zamparini

Founder · Senior Software Engineer

Simone Zamparini is a founder and senior software engineer.