Lighting distribution
AI quote automation for lighting distributors
Lighting is where the matching problem is hardest. A customer writes “panel 60x60 4000K, and the usual driver”. Somewhere in a four-thousand-line catalog there is exactly one right answer, plus an accessory that has to come with it. That is the job.
Sample data
What that looks like at Aronlight.
A lighting distributor with companies in Portugal and Spain, running Ettore in production today. Measured from their own data to September 24, 2026.
~780
Requests read in 30 days
614 orders and 166 quote requests, in Portuguese and Spanish.
2.4×
Weekly volume in five weeks
From 105 requests in the week of August 10 to 256 in the week of September 14.
4,300+
SKUs in the Odoo catalog
Deep enough that no rep holds it all in their head.
2
Companies, Portugal and Spain
Each with its own pricelists and VAT rules: the right price depends on who is asking.
Why lighting resists the obvious approach.
The specification hides in free text
Wattage, color temperature, IP rating and beam angle arrive inside a sentence, not in fields. A keyword search on the product name finds the wrong half of the catalog.
Accessories have to follow the fixture
A driver, a bracket, a dimmer. The customer names one item and expects the line that makes it work. Missing it turns a won quote into a return.
Codes are close enough to be dangerous
One transposed digit is a different product at a different price. Ettore flags a near-miss as Check match rather than quietly picking the neighbor.
Price depends on the customer
With dozens of pricelists, the list price is almost never the right answer. The draft carries that customer’s real price, so review is a check rather than a rebuild.
Questions from lighting distributors.
Our catalog has products from a dozen manufacturers. Does that matter?
That is the normal case in lighting and it is the reason matching is hard. Ettore indexes the catalog you actually hold, whatever mix of brands it contains, and resolves requests against it.
Customers ask for discontinued items constantly. What happens?
The line is marked No match rather than silently swapped for a successor. A person decides whether to offer the replacement, because that is a commercial call and not a lookup.
Do you know lighting, or are you a generic tool?
Our anchor client is a multi-brand lighting distributor and the product was built against their catalog and their requests. The pattern generalises to other distribution, but lighting is where it was proven first.
What about projects — a whole bill of materials in a spreadsheet?
Attachments are read, including spreadsheets and PDFs. A long line list is the case where the time saving is largest, because it is the case a rep most dreads.
Send us a lighting RFQ.
A real one, with the free text and the awkward lines. We will show you what Ettore drafts from it.