An OptiFlow data report, 2026. First party data from a live deployment at an anonymised UK builders merchant.
When does a builders merchant actually take enquiries? The instinct says between 7am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, when the branch is open and the counter is staffed. The data says something very different.
We looked at a full year of interactions from a live OptiFlow deployment at a single UK builders merchant, every product question, price check, calculation and trade enquiry handled by the merchant’s AI agent on their website. Across 27,443 conversations, a clear and commercially significant pattern emerges: the trade counter’s busiest hours are increasingly the ones when the branch is shut.
The headline findings
- 60% of all enquiries happened out of hours. Of 27,443 conversations, 16,433 landed outside 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, evenings, early mornings and weekends.
- Out of hours trade is real revenue, not idle browsing. £201,780 of influenced revenue, 53% of the total, came from carts built outside branch hours.
- 55% of all cart adds happened out of hours (1,727 of 3,149).
- The agent answered fast and rarely got stuck: a 5.8 second average response time and a 0% fallback rate across the year, no enquiry went unanswered.
- Half of all questions were product discovery; half were calculations, advice and Q&A, exactly the mix a busy trade counter fields all day.
About this data
In the interest of being straight with you: this is data from one live OptiFlow deployment at a UK builders merchant, covering 2026 to date. The merchant has asked to remain unnamed, so all figures here are anonymised and aggregated. It is a single site, not a sector wide survey, but it is real, first party data from a working trade counter, which is exactly the kind of operational signal the industry rarely gets to see. Where we reference wider market context, it is cited to public sources.
The dataset covers 18,344 website sessions, 27,443 AI conversations, 13,753 product queries and £382,738 of influenced revenue over the period.
Finding 1, The counter is busiest when the branch is closed
Split the year’s conversations by when they happened, business hours (09:00, 17:00, Mon, Fri) versus everything else, and out of hours wins comfortably: 16,433 conversations (60%) versus 11,010 in hours (40%). The gap widens as the year goes on:
| Month | Business hours | Out of hours |
|---|---|---|
| March | 375 | 280 |
| April | 2,380 | 2,228 |
| May | 2,683 | 4,265 |
| June | 2,623 | 4,033 |
| July | 2,756 | 4,265 |
By May, out of hours enquiries were running at roughly 1.6x the volume of in hours ones. For a trade counter, that is a lot of demand arriving at exactly the moment there is nobody there to answer it, unless something is.
Finding 2, Out of hours is where the money is, too
It would be easy to assume that after hours traffic is just tyre kickers browsing from the sofa. The revenue split says otherwise.
- Out of hours cart adds: £201,780.83, 53% of influenced revenue, from 1,727 carts (55% of all cart adds). Defined as Mon, Fri before 09:00 or after 17:00, plus all weekend.
- In hours cart adds: £180,957.53, 47% of influenced revenue, from 1,422 carts.
More than half of the value this trade counter influenced was generated when the branch was closed. A builder pricing a job at 9pm, a groundworker checking sub base quantities before an early start, a contractor placing a weekend order, these are not marginal moments. They are the majority of the commercial action.
Finding 3, What builders actually ask for
Across 27,443 conversations, the question mix broke down almost evenly between finding products and getting answers:
- Product discovery, 50.1% (13,747): specific product lookups.
- Calculations, info and Q&A, 49.1% (13,480): quantities, coverage, specs, general advice.
- Enquiry raised, 0.8% (216): escalations that needed a human.
The most searched products read like a merchant’s core heavy side range: bricks, Type 1 sub base, paving flags, plasterboard, softwood decking boards, gravel, sharp sand, cement, treated timber and timber. No surprises, which is the point. This is bread and butter trade demand, arriving around the clock, that would otherwise go unanswered after 5pm.
Finding 4, Where the counter still needs a human
The agent resolved the overwhelming majority of conversations on its own, escalating fewer than 1 in 100 as a formal enquiry. When it did escalate, the reasons were revealing, these are the moments that genuinely need a person:
- Trade account, 94
- Order problem, 73
- General, 44
- Project estimate, 31
- Quote problem, 5
Note what is not on this list: routine product and quantity questions. Those got handled. What escalates is account setup, order issues and larger estimates, higher value, relationship driven conversations where a merchant’s people add the most value. Automating the repetitive layer doesn’t remove the human from the counter; it frees them for the work that actually needs them.
Finding 5, Speed and reliability
- 5.8 seconds, average time from a customer’s message to the agent’s reply.
- 0.0%, fallback rate. Across the entire period, there were no sessions where the agent hit a question it could not handle.
A trade counter that answers in under six seconds, at 3am, without ever saying “I don’t know,” is a different proposition to a contact form and a promise to call back tomorrow.
Why this matters, the market context
None of this is happening in a booming market. According to the Builders Merchant Building Index, builders’ merchant like for like value sales were essentially flat year on year in May 2026 (down 0.1%), with volumes down 5.8% and the softness driven by price rather than demand growth. Over the most recent 12 months, like for like value was down 1.2%. (The BMBI captures around 88% of GB builders’ merchant sales, so it is a robust read on the sector.)
In a flat market, growth doesn’t come from the market lifting everyone, it comes from capturing more of the demand that already exists. And a growing share of that demand is arriving outside branch hours, from time pressed tradespeople who are estimated to lose the equivalent of ten working weeks a year to admin, much of it squeezed into evenings and weekends, precisely when they are pricing jobs and lining up materials, and precisely when most merchants’ counters are dark.
The merchants who win the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones with the newest ERP or the biggest branch network. They’ll be the ones who are open, and answering, when their customers are actually buying.
What this means for your branches
The takeaway isn’t “replace your systems.” This merchant didn’t. OptiFlow sits on top of the ERP and website they already run, and turns the always on hours from a gap into a channel. The pattern in this data, the majority of enquiries and the majority of influenced revenue happening out of hours, is not unique to one site. It is where trade buying is going.
If your counter closes at 5pm but your customers don’t stop buying, the question is simply who answers them at 9pm, you, or the merchant down the road. See how OptiFlow works for builders merchants →
Methodology & notes
- Source: first party data from a single live OptiFlow deployment at an anonymised UK builders merchant, 2026 year to date.
- “Out of hours” is defined as Monday, Friday before 09:00 or after 17:00, plus all day Saturday and Sunday.
- “Influenced revenue” is the value of carts built through the merchant’s OptiFlow powered widget; it is a measure of commercial activity the agent contributed to, not a claim of attributed net new sales.
- Figures are rounded where shown. Conversation counts refer to AI turns handled by the agent. Wider market figures are cited to their public sources.
Interested in what your own out of hours numbers look like? Talk to OptiFlow.