The NSS Mystery Surfer trawls the internet to find the latest website developments by companies involved in the stone industry. This month he visited the new offcuts trading website www.slablink.com

If you read this column in the Natural Stone Specialist magazine (rather than on naturalsonespecialist.com) you will have seen the advertisements for slablink.com, an online market place intended to link stone suppliers, including those who have offcuts or rogue slabs they want to dispose of, with buyers.

As stone processors sometimes want relatively small pieces of stone for a job and could save money by not having to cut them from whole slabs, the idea of putting buyers and sellers of offcuts in touch with each other should be beneficial to both.

Of course, a lot of companies do keep in touch with other processors in their vicinity and will talk to each other if they are looking for a particular piece of stone that they don’t have, especially if they only want a small piece of it.

The idea of putting that theme on the internet is sound enough. If a click on a website can save you an hour or two calling other companies to see if they have what you want (then calling back because your contact was not there the first time) it is worth making that click.

The reality can be different. The difficulty such sites seem to have is attracting enough processors who want to get rid of their offcuts. There is not much point knowing that someone a hundred miles away has what you want because processors might consider it is not worth the cost or time of driving for four hours there and back to pick up a £200 offcut.

Most of those operating the websites also want to make money out of them, which means charging people one way or another. That also puts a lot of people off.

From a buyer’s perspective, if you visit a website two or three times and do not find what you want, it is not going to be long before you don’t bother consulting it. 

Is slablink.com going to be able to overcome these difficulties?

It starts off with an advantage because there is no charge for fabricators to participate and it is mercifully simple to sign up to (the two go hand-in-hand). On the other hand, it is not an e-commerce site, it simply puts buyers and sellers in touch with each other. It is then up to them to buy and sell.

Another difference with Slablink is that it hopes to attract the established stone wholesalers – and, in fact, has started to do so. The Marble & Granite Centre, Stoneworld and Global Granite are already on the site.

Slablink has been created by Paul Mullee of stone processor Chiltern Marble, a major company in the interiors market. He hopes other wholesalers will join in as they appreciate the commercial advantage of being listed.

He says what has now become slablink.com started out as a stock control system for his own company. Including the sizes of slabs and offcuts in stock proved so useful he decided to create the website and open it to others.

He also persuaded his wholesalers to include the materials, with dimensions, that they have in stock. He has found that of enormous benefit because he says the biggest pain for Chiltern Marble was always hounding suppliers for sizes.

So far he has the three wholesalers and about a dozen fabricators signed up, so if you go on to the site looking for something in particular you might not find what you want close to hand – although if it is with one of the wholesalers at least they will probably be able to deliver it.

As a new site, slablink.com does not yet register high on the search engines with general enquiries such as ‘stone offcuts’ or ‘stone slabs’. If it attracts enough of the market it will move up the rankings, although Paul Mullee accepts it is likely to be a slow burn to begin with.

Clearly Slablink faces the same obstacles as other sites attempting to create a market place for slabs and offcuts. But it is an idea whose time you would expect to have arrived. So why not give it a go? At the very least you might clear out some of the old offcuts that have been cluttering up your storage area for so long.