Overview
GWS Connect is a wholesale brokerage, co-owned by CS2, that connects retailers, marketplace sellers, and manufacturers with verified suppliers of closeout and overstock inventory. CS2 built and operates the public-facing site and the membership application layer: buyer and supplier authentication, deal feeds, demo-booking flows, and a content structure that fits a managed-transaction business model.
The challenge
What the business needed
GWS Connect is a gated marketplace: prospects get qualified before they ever see pricing or inventory, and suppliers onboard on a different path than buyers do. Every flow has to reinforce trust (escrow, verification, managed logistics) because closeout wholesale is a category where strangers wire each other real money. A generic template couldn't handle two audiences with two login paths and a demo-book-apply conversion funnel on the same marketing site.
The build
What CS2 shipped
CS2 delivered a custom Next.js site with separate buyer and supplier login portals, an "Apply Now" plus "Book a Demo" dual-CTA pattern, a /deals feed for gated inventory browsing, and newsletter capture for prospects who aren't ready to apply. The information architecture walks cold traffic through what the platform does, how it works, and the FAQs before asking for the application, which is the right pace for a high-consideration B2B offer. The public site is statically exported and served from AWS S3 + CloudFront, so pages stay fast globally despite the content weight. The buyer and supplier portals run on a Java 17 Spring Boot API with Spring Security and JWT auth, PostgreSQL under Flyway migrations, and document tooling (iText, PDFBox, Apache POI) for the paperwork a managed transaction generates.
Highlights
What's on the site today
- Separate buyer and supplier authentication paths
- Gated /deals feed for member-only inventory
- "Apply Now" and "Book a Demo" dual conversion funnel
- Newsletter capture for top-of-funnel leads
- Statically exported, served globally from CloudFront
Tech stack
What it's built on
- Next.js (static export)
- Java 17 + Spring Boot API
- Spring Security + JWT
- PostgreSQL + Flyway
- PDF & Excel document generation
- AWS S3 + CloudFront + Secrets Manager
Outcome
How it operates today
GWS Connect now has a credibility-first public site that qualifies prospects before the sales team ever sees them. Buyer and supplier paths split from the first click, and pages load fast enough to support paid acquisition without Core Web Vitals penalties. The platform sits between retailers hunting discounted inventory and the manufacturers liquidating it, with verification, managed-transaction signals, and gated access built into the funnel. In closeout wholesale, trust decides the deal.
What this proves
How CS2 ships a two-audience B2B marketplace site, gated access and segmented auth included, on the same stack that serves a brochure site and without the platform tax of a SaaS marketplace builder.