Caster Central / Deluxe / WT Hight
9:30 AM CDT
Tim, Scott, Brandon, Vicki, Josh, Colleen
The big one this week: we benchmarked the full Hamilton line against six competitors and rebuilt the pricing math from Hamilton's own list-price file. The headline is the opposite of what the bad draft prices suggested. We are not too expensive across the board, but the reseller market is genuinely thin on most of the line. There is a clean recommended price for every SKU now, which is what finally unblocks publishing the 432-product Pronto catalog. Also this week: CG-MAX pricing is uploaded and those 40 wheels are a photo away from going live, the B&P starting scope is locked after Tuesday's call with Shawn, and the rewritten product descriptions are now going live, highest-revenue products first, at 300-plus a week. On Deluxe, the store is now cutover-ready, redirects are done and verified and the industry pages are rewritten.
To price the 432-SKU Hamilton Pronto catalog before it goes live, we benchmarked it against six competitor sites (CasterHQ, Access Casters, Caster Connection, Caster Depot, Service Caster, Grainger) matched on Hamilton part number. 430 of 432 SKUs are now benchmarked, 99.5% coverage. Where three or more competitors carry the same SKU, the independent prices agree within a tight band, so the data is trustworthy. Access Casters is consistently the cheapest in the market.
The full cost-vs-market workbook went to your inbox Thursday afternoon (June 4), built on Hamilton's authoritative list file and your confirmed formula. Using the real cost basis, here is the honest trade-off on the line if we match the cheapest competitor:
| Bucket | Count | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy | 93 | 20%+ margin even matching the cheapest competitor |
| Thin | 252 | under 20% margin if matching the cheapest, the bulk of the line |
| Underwater | 19 | a competitor already sells below our cost, can't match and profit |
| Discontinued | 65 | Hamilton marks these superseded, should not publish at these part numbers |
Rather than one blanket policy, the workbook now picks the best price per SKU: as competitive as possible, but never below a 20% margin floor. At that floor, 261 of the priceable SKUs land inside the competitor range. Deliverable for the call is Hamilton_Competitor_Price_Matrix_2026-06-03.xlsx plus the cost-vs-market workbook, with a Recommended Prices tab and the raw policy options side by side so Tim and Brandon can compare.
The 40 CG-MAX 3" drafts are loaded in the "CG-MAX Max Efficiency Wheels" collection, and Brandon's pricing is uploaded to Shopify as of last weekend. The only thing left before these flip from draft to live is product photos. A CAD render works fine as a launch placeholder if real shots aren't ready. Quick yes on the call and all 40 go active in one pass.
Good call Tuesday with Shawn at B&P. We landed on a sensible starting point instead of boiling the ocean: 5 to 10 A-runner hand trucks plus a couple of platform carts to test the water, with replacement parts and the wider catalog following only once those move. Shipping runs on a request-a-quote model with an assembled-versus-unassembled option on the listing. Josh is now on the B&P email thread, so spec sheets, photos, and pricing flow straight through. Next steps are Shawn sending the product data and your B&P discount so we can set sell prices.
The top-plate and dimension cleanups from two weeks ago are live and reindexed. One set is still queued and waiting on a quick yes: 158 Albion products on the 110 Kingpinless and 28 Maintenance Free series list their bearing as "Pedestral," a typo. The correct entries on the same series read "Pedestal Precision Ball." Quick confirm on the call and it goes.
We started pushing the rewritten descriptions to the live store this week, prioritized by revenue so your best sellers get the upgrade first. The first wave of about 135 products is live, spanning Albion, Blickle, Colson, Pemco, and the smaller lines (Shepherd, Medcaster, Faultless, Revvo, and more). From here the pace is 300-plus products a week until the catalog is done. Every description is hand-curated against the new pattern and run through a quality gate before it ships: genuinely unique content on every SKU (no copy-paste filler), correct specs, and the right house style. It's staged so any single product is easy to roll back if something reads off on the live page.
Following the direction you set last week (solutions-first, limit what we sell, lead with request-a-quote, add a quick-ship section), here's the progress on the build. It's all behind the scenes with redirects already in place, so there's zero SEO risk and nothing is customer-visible until you sign off.
We crawled the live WordPress site and reconciled every indexed URL against the new Shopify catalog so no search ranking drops the moment DNS flips. The good news on the heavy lifting: 1,058 of your 1,131 products keep the exact same URL on Shopify, so they need no redirect at all. We created 86 new redirects for the ones that changed and, more importantly, found and repaired 37 broken redirects left over from a prior effort that would have thrown 404s after cutover. The store now has 267 clean redirects and zero broken targets. In plain terms: when you're ready to point the domain over, the SEO equity comes with it.
Rewrote the core content pages for material handling and the industry landing pages (aerospace, automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, warehouse, food service, retail, office, entertainment, and more), plus About, Brands, FAQ, the buyer's guide, and Why Us. These are the pages that carry the solutions-first message and the request-a-quote call to action you wanted to lead with.
Published the collection structure, sorted products into the right categories, and built the nav menus so the catalog is browsable the way your buyers shop, not the way the old WooCommerce site was organized. Header, footer, and contact page updated to match.
Deluxe's June social posts, the newsletter, and a fresh set of branded photos (racking aisles, wasted-cube storage-density themes) are drafted and ready to schedule.
Sales are strong. Shopify had us close to the $30,000 mark for May and held up well through Memorial Day weekend, which is usually a soft spot. Quote quality picked up noticeably the back half of the month, fewer one-off "I need two casters" inquiries and more real business RFQs.
On the RFQ button question from last week: the read is holding. Form submissions are essentially flat (72 to 70) while the drop you felt was lower-intent button clicks and bot traffic falling away, not real inquiries. Revenue moved the other direction, transactions up sharply over the same window. The recommendation stands: leave the button where it is. We'll put the current clean week on screen during the call to confirm now that Memorial Day is fully out of the window.
Nothing's been dropped. These roll forward unless we close them on the call. Happy to walk any of them.
If we have 5 extra minutes