bulkbagcompare

The problem

Buying aggregates in the UK — gravel, sand, ballast — is unnecessarily hard to price. Merchants quote 800 kg bulk bags at wildly different rates, delivery is priced by postcode and often hidden until checkout, and nobody tells you how much you actually need for the area you are covering.

So the buyer does the same three jobs every time: find the merchants, compare prices that are not directly comparable, and guess at quantity.

What we built

bulkbagcompare scans advertised bulk bag prices across national merchants daily and normalises them into one comparable table. A coverage calculator converts an area and depth into the number of bags required, so the comparison is on total job cost rather than headline price per bag.

Buyers who want a firm number submit a postcode quote request, which is matched and routed to suppliers.

Decisions

Scan daily, cache aggressively

Aggregate prices move slowly. Scanning on demand would be slower for the user and hostile to the merchants being scanned. A daily scan into a cached table makes every page view instant and keeps the crawl footprint small and predictable.

Coverage calculator before comparison table

The instinct is to lead with prices, because that is the product. But a buyer who does not know whether they need three bags or eleven cannot use a price table. Putting the calculator first means the comparison is answering the question they actually have.

Lead routing, not checkout

The site does not try to sell aggregates. It captures a qualified postcode-matched quote request and routes it, which is worth more to a merchant than a click and avoids owning fulfilment for a product delivered by lorry.