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The Trade Chem Story
Trade Chem was founded in 2012 to serve the trade industry with chemical, cleaning and pet care products, before moving online in 2016. Eight or nine years ago, the business adopted eDesk to bring every sales channel into a single inbox.
Since then, Trade Chem has grown roughly 20% year on year, reaching £9M in online sales last year. The business now sells through more than 20 channels, including Amazon, eBay, TikTok Shop, B&Q, The Range and its own websites — with a small team of just four agents handling both support and order processing of 3,000 orders a day.
But that growth brought a flood of customer messages the small team couldn't keep up with by hiring alone. Every new marketplace added its own message stream, rules and customer expectations to juggle.
The Challenge
As Managing Director Stuart Haines put it, agents were constantly switching modes between channels — and the success of Trade Chem's pet brands on TikTok Shop only added another wave of questions on top.
The most common question was always 'Where's my parcel?', even though every customer gets tracking details at dispatch. Damaged-parcel claims were worse still, often taking four or five back-and-forth emails, with hours between each reply while agents re-read the whole thread every time.
With the office closed from Friday afternoon, agents started every week with three days of backed-up queries, all against marketplace response deadlines of around 12 hours.
“It's very hard as a person to switch in and out of being an Amazon, eBay, or TikTok representative.”
As a chemical manufacturer, Trade Chem also fields plenty of specialist product questions — customers sometimes weigh a litre of isopropyl alcohol, find it's 830 grams, and assume they've been short-changed. On top of that, platform automation tends to issue refunds without question, so the team wanted to keep control: helping frustrated customers properly, and weeding out fraudulent claims, while still following each marketplace's own procedures.
By the time Trade Chem turned to eDesk's AI Agent, the challenge was clear: free up the team from repetitive, time-consuming queries, without losing the human judgement needed to protect customer relationships and the bottom line.
The Solution
Trade Chem had already used eDesk for eight to nine years to bring every channel into a single inbox, with its AI sorting incoming tickets into folders and routing them to the right agent. The next step was letting eDesk's AI Agent answer customers directly — using procedures built around the team's own real-world workflows, rather than a generic script.
Within its first months live, AI Agent was already automating more than 20% of tickets.
20+ sales channels now run on automated, always-on support.
eDesk's AI implementation team worked with Stuart to turn his descriptions of how the team handles each query into step-by-step procedures — and showed him exactly how each one was built, so Trade Chem could start creating its own over time. They began with Trade Chem's most common question, 'Where's my parcel?', before expanding to damaged parcels, returns and refunds. Every answer is accurate, on-brand, and written in a friendly tone, with a clear handoff to a human agent whenever a query needs one.
The Result
20%+
Within its first months on eDesk AI Agent, Trade Chem is automating more than 20% of support tickets — with just two procedures live and a third newly launched.
“The main thing about it is it's saving us time. Time is money, and time is also stress for the staff. By the time our agent sees a ticket, a good half an hour's worth of work has been completed already.”
Growth without new hires has saved the business real money.
At least one full-time admin hire saved — worth £30,000–£35,000 a year.
Tracking queries now close at the first response, and damaged-parcel tickets arrive with around 30 minutes of work already done by the AI Agent.
Four or five back-and-forth emails per damaged-parcel claim now happen automatically, and tracking queries close at the very first response.
A Calmer, More Focused Team
With routine and rude emails handled or triaged first, Trade Chem's agents now spend more time on order processing, where mistakes cost real money. The to-do folder no longer feels overwhelming, even on Mondays.
When a ticket does reach a human, the context, photos and order details are already there, so customers never have to explain themselves twice. The team is better prepared, and customers get a faster, more complete answer the first time.
What's Next
Trade Chem plans to expand AI Agent to pre-sales and technical questions on its own websites and marketplaces, turning product questions into sales opportunities across its 25-fragrance Fresh Pet range and related listings.
The business will also use eDesk's upcoming image fraud detection to flag edited or misleading damage photos for human review — keeping the team one step ahead of fraudulent claims.
For Trade Chem, automation isn't about replacing people — it's about giving a small team the time back to do its best work.
Trade Chem continues to grow its multichannel business from its UK base, with eDesk's AI Agent handling more of the routine work every month.
We're grateful to Stuart and the team at Trade Chem for sharing their story with us!