Do it Best eCommerce, buying group eCommerce, Orgill eCommerce, Emery Jensen, Home Hardware, hardware store eCommerce, lumber yard eCommerce
Do it Best eCommerce vs your own store: who owns the customer
October 29, 2026
Do it Best, Orgill, Emery Jensen and Home Hardware online programs for members, side by side, and what changes when the store and its customers are yours.
Executive summary
Do it Best eCommerce is the co-op's central platform, powered by Adobe and launched in 2023, where each member gets a microsite with member-set prices and, as announced, a per-sale service fee instead of setup or monthly fees. The co-op runs the site and sets the terms. Your own store keeps your domain, customers and contractor accounts yours.
Ask your buying group how to sell online and you get one of two answers: a store that runs on the group's platform, or no dealer program at all. The questions worth asking sit in what the announcements leave out.
I run ToolSwift, and ToolSwift sells the other option: a store the dealer owns, with the buying group's catalog live inside it. Weigh what follows with that in mind. This piece works from the groups' own releases and websites and from trade press, all read on October 29, 2026 and linked in the Sources section. Where a page is silent, the article says so.
Do it Best's program gives a member a microsite on a shared site, with the co-op doing most of the work. Orgill's IMPACT program does something similar on Orgill's own platform. Emery Jensen and Home Hardware describe no dealer storefront program on their public pages at all. None of the four says on a public page that the shopper, the web address and the contractor relationship stay with the dealer.
A program store puts your yard on the co-op's map. Your own store puts the co-op's warehouse in your yard.
The program store charges no setup or monthly fee as announced in 2023 and lets you set prices; the address, the contractor side and the exit are the co-op's to define.
What Do it Best eCommerce gives a member store
Do it Best eCommerce is one central website, launched in 2023, with a microsite for each member store, built on Adobe and run mostly by the co-op.
Do it Best announced the plan at its spring market in Orlando, reported on March 13, 2023 by The Hardware Connection: a main platform "partnered with Adobe," plus a microsite for each store. Members control their own landing page; Do it Best merchandises the categories for them. Brianna Wells of Do it Best put the pricing rule plainly: "The price is set by the member."
The platform went live at the 2023 Fall Market. Hardware Retailing reported on September 11, 2023 that Phase 1 was a customizable platform "powered by Adobe," and that Do it Best content specialists used AI to curate content for 1.6 million SKUs, all proofed by staff before going live. Retailers can submit local items, which then become available to every member. Same-day pickup followed, and Best Rewards points can be earned and redeemed online.
As Do it Best described it in 2023, online shoppers are attached to the nearest member store by geolocation. If they order an item the store doesn't stock but the warehouse has, the member still gets the sale. On doitbest.com's FAQ, online orders ship free to a participating store, trucked from the closest of eight regional warehouses, and the shopper gets an email when it is ready. Items not in that warehouse can ship by UPS but lose free ship-to-store. The same FAQ says online prices apply to the website only, because stores are independently owned.
What it costs and what it requires
When the program was announced in March 2023, Do it Best's Allison Flatjord said there would be no setup or monthly operational fees, and members would pay a small per-sale service fee instead: "You pay only for what you sell online." None of the public pages cited here states the fee amount, or whether those 2023 terms still hold today.
The requirement is real work on your side: a compliant point-of-sale system and live inventory online. In March 2024, Hardware Retailing reported 1,900 members on the platform, with Do it Best taking on "the vast majority" of the website work, including sign-up, POS compliance and inventory accuracy. The same piece reports that members who moved from the co-op's previous platform saw a 40% to 60% sales lift, a company figure with no baseline given. New features then included a rental module and instant rebates, and in March 2025 Do it Best chose HawkSearch for search on its consumer site.
What the public pages don't say
Member store pages sit as paths on doitbest.com, for example /fulton-hardware/ship-to-store/, sharing the central site's navigation and catalog. None of the public pages cited here says whether a member can run its microsite on its own domain, export its customer list, or leave with its site and content. Those are the questions to put in writing before you sign up, and they are the whole difference between the two options in this article.
True Value members are now part of the same family: Do it Best announced on November 22, 2024 that it had completed its purchase of True Value, and truevalue.com's FAQ uses the same ship-to-store and pricing terms as doitbest.com.
Contractors are where the program store stops
Do it Best eCommerce is a consumer site, and for contractor accounts the co-op offers its lumber dealers pricing on a separate platform, Toolbx.
That matters because contractors are most of the business at a yard. Hardware Retailing's August 21, 2025 report states that pros make up over 60% of sales at independent lumberyards. The same report says Do it Best now offers its LBM dealers "exclusive pricing for Toolbx," a B2B platform where contractors approve quotes, place orders and pay bills online, connected to each yard's ERP. The discount isn't stated. The most recent published Toolbx price in the sources for this piece, in Digital Commerce 360 in January 2024, was Commerce Pro "monthly subscription fees starting at $1,299." I compared Toolbx with ToolSwift in detail in my Toolbx comparison.
So a Do it Best yard that wants both homeowners and contractors online ends up with two systems from two vendors: the co-op's microsite for one group of buyers and a pro platform for the other.
One store, two front ends
On ToolSwift, homeowners and contractors buy from the same catalog through two front ends. The retail storefront on your domain serves walk-in and online shoppers. A separate contractor dashboard, with a native app branded as your yard, serves your trade accounts.
The contractor side is built around how a pro buys. One company account carries several logins (an owner, a purchasing lead, a foreman), each with its own role. Each pro account can carry a credit limit, and checkout enforces it, so nobody at the counter has to catch an over-limit order by hand. Custom pricing and discounts follow client type and order volume. Invoices sit in one place with a "Make a Payment" button, and the contractor sees his limit, available credit and balance.
Quotes start from whatever the contractor has. The Takeoff Agent, which is live, turns a voice note, a photo, a scan, a takeoff or a file into a draft quote against your catalog, with that account's pricing, for your staff to review before it goes out. ToolSwift Rewards lets contractors earn points on orders they place in the portal or the app, earn more for paying faster, and spend the points at checkout. Documents that need a signature go out from the dashboard and get signed in the portal or the app.
None of that requires a second vendor for your pros. The homeowner who found you on Google and the framer ordering from his truck are buying from the same store.
What Orgill, Emery Jensen and Home Hardware offer
Of the other groups, only Orgill runs a dealer storefront program; Emery Jensen's eCommerce program serves online retailers, and Home Hardware's dealer page describes no online store program. Across the four, two groups run a member storefront on their own platform, two describe none, and none of the four publishes what a member keeps if it leaves.
Orgill IMPACT eCommerce
Orgill's IMPACT eCommerce is a B2B2C program on Elastic Path where Orgill manages integrations and product data centrally, in tiers from a catalog-only site to a fully POS-integrated one, according to Orgill's May 1, 2024 release. I compared it with ToolSwift section by section in my Orgill eCommerce comparison, so I won't repeat that here.
Emery Jensen Distribution
Emery Jensen's home page lists 100K+ stocked SKUs, 15 distribution centers and 900+ in-network dealers and pro customers, and its programs (SAVINGSource, paint, drop-ship building materials, tool repair, conversions). None of them is a dealer website or online store.
Its e-commerce page is written for online retailers: Emery Jensen restocks their warehouse, or picks, packs and blind-ships orders straight to their customers. The application form asks whether you sell on Amazon, Walmart, eBay or your own website. For an Emery Jensen dealer, the online store is something you bring yourself.
Home Hardware
Home Hardware's dealer recruitment page describes a "100% Dealer-Owned and Operated" co-op with more than 1,000 stores and four regional distribution centres. It says dealers face no long-term commitments and choose which marketing, analytics and operational tools to use and when. It describes no dealer website or online store program and lists no fees. Hardlines reported that Home Hardware launched buy online, pick up in store in spring 2014.
For context on how banner sites work in general, Ace Hardware said in November 2022 that over 90% of its digital orders are picked up in store or delivered by the local store. The banner site takes the order; the store does the work.
Your own store, with the group's catalog live in it
The alternative is a store on your own domain whose catalog holds your stock and your buying group's stock together, live, with distributor items shipped from the DC.
ToolSwift has a native PIM, so the product record lives in the platform. We integrate directly with Orgill, Do it Best and Emery Jensen. Items you don't stock but your distributor does appear in your storefront, read live by API and labeled "Available Online Only." 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. The screen above shows the setting behind that label: an online-order-only product offers shipping and delivery but no pickup, and it skips per-store inventory tracking because your stores don't hold it.
You can connect more than one distributor at a time. A member of Do it Best who also buys from Orgill or Emery Jensen sells all of it in one store. Special-order items can be listed with no price, so the shopper requests a quote instead of adding to cart.
Distributor data arrives thin: truncated descriptions, missing specs, one weak photo. Enrichment is work we do. We clean up descriptions, specs and images and map the data to your ERP or POS item file, your part numbers and your items. The enriched catalog is yours to keep. Details are on the products page.
The parts a program store doesn't give you
The web address is yours, so the links and search rankings you build stay with your business. The store selector uses geolocation to send each visitor to their nearest location, with that location's prices and stock, which is the same convenience the co-op site offers, under your name.
Your catalog goes where shoppers search, on your own merchant accounts: Google Merchant Center, Microsoft Merchant Center and Meta for Facebook and Instagram. The shopper who finds a product there lands on your site, and the customer record lands in your dashboard.
Behind the store, ToolSwift connects to sixteen named ERP and accounting systems, including Epicor BisTrack and Eagle, ECI Spruce, DMSi Agility, Paladin and Profit Master, and builds connectors for others. The platform is headless and API-first, so if you change ERPs later, you swap a connector, and your storefront, catalog, customer accounts and URLs stay where they are.
That last point is the one I'd weigh hardest. A program store is tied to your membership. A store you own is tied to your business, and it keeps working whichever group you buy from next year.
What each path costs a member
Do it Best's program, as announced in 2023, costs nothing up front and charges a per-sale fee it doesn't publish; ToolSwift charges a flat monthly price with no transaction fees.
ToolSwift's price is $399 a month for the first store, $250 a month for each additional store and $99 a month for the branded mobile app, one price per business. There are no transaction fees. It's month to month with 30 days notice; two-year and three-year agreements save up to 10% and 15% on the total bill. Onboarding is a separate fee, and a five-year agreement can eliminate it.
Divide $399 by the per-sale rate the co-op quotes you; above that much online revenue a month, the flat fee costs less, before onboarding, which ToolSwift quotes separately. Ask for the rate, and ask whether it applies to ship-to-store orders filled from the warehouse.
The fee comparison leaves out the bigger number: what the store builds for you. A per-sale fee on a co-op site buys sales. A monthly fee on your own site buys sales plus an asset: a domain with search history, a customer list, contractor accounts with credit and order history, and an enriched catalog you keep.
Seven questions to ask your buying group in writing
Before you put your store on a buying group's platform, get these seven answers in writing, because none of them is answered on the public pages cited here.
- Ask whose name the web address is in, and whether you can use your own domain.
- Ask whether you can export your customer list and order history, and in what format.
- Ask what happens to your site, your local items and your content if you leave the group.
- Ask for the per-sale fee as a percentage, and which orders it applies to.
- Ask whether contractors can buy on account with credit limits on the same site, or need a separate platform.
- Ask whether you can sell another distributor's items next to the group's.
- Ask who answers the phone when an order fails to reach your POS.
If the answers to the first three are "the group's," "no" and "it goes away," you are renting a shelf in someone else's window. It is a poor fit for a yard whose contractors carry most of the sales.
Run your own store if contractors carry your sales
My rule: if contractors are over half your sales, or you might change buying groups within five years, run your own store and bring the group's catalog into it. A program store gets you listed. Your own store gets you customers who are yours.
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If you want to see your buying group's catalog live in a store on your own domain, book a ToolSwift demo.
FAQ
Does Do it Best charge members for its eCommerce platform?
When Do it Best announced the platform in March 2023, it said there would be no setup or monthly operational fees and members would pay a small per-sale service fee. The fee amount isn't published, and no public page cited here confirms the 2023 terms still apply, so ask the co-op directly.
Can one online store sell Do it Best, Orgill and Emery Jensen items together?
Yes, on ToolSwift. It integrates all three catalogs live and can connect more than one distributor at a time, with distributor items labeled "Available Online Only" and shipped from the DC.
Does Home Hardware give dealers their own online store?
Not according to its dealer recruitment page, read October 29, 2026, which describes no dealer website or online store program and lists no fees. It says dealers choose their own marketing, analytics and operational tools. Home Hardware launched buy online, pick up in store in spring 2014, according to Hardlines.
Is Emery Jensen's eCommerce program a website for dealers?
No. Emery Jensen's e-commerce page is for online retailers: it restocks their warehouse or blind-ships orders to their customers. It describes no dealer storefront.
Sources
All pages read on October 29, 2026.
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