Making hundreds of machines findable for a heavy equipment dealer
US Equipment Sales & Rentals sells and rents aggregate, environmental and recycling equipment across the Midwest: crushers, screeners, trommels, conveyors and the parts and servicing behind them. Its website had outgrown its structure. Customers could not filter a large inventory down to the machine they needed, and staff were updating listings by hand. We rebuilt it as a Webflow platform fed from an Airtable database, with real filtering on the front and automation behind it.
Overview
The challenge
A dealer's website is its yard, and this yard had grown past what the site could hold. US Equipment carries hundreds of machines across sixteen categories and dozens of manufacturers, for sale and for rent, across five locations.
The old structure made that inventory hard to use. A buyer who knew they needed a jaw crusher, or anything by one manufacturer, had no way to filter down to it. Inventory changes meant manual updates, so listings lagged what was actually in the yard. And nothing about the site's architecture helped a buyer in Iowa or Wisconsin find the machine sitting in the nearest yard.
The team also spent real hours re-keying the same inventory into third-party marketplaces, because the website could not export what it already knew.
Our approach
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Strategy
We treated the inventory as data first and pages second. Once every machine lives in one database, filtering, exports and per-state pages all come from the same source.
- One Airtable database as the single source of truth for the whole inventory
- Site architecture built around how buyers search: by category, by manufacturer, by state
- Sale and rental treated as first-class paths, each with its own browsing structure
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Design
Designed for a buyer who knows machinery and wants the spec, the price signal and the next step.
- Listing pages lead with photography, key specs and a request-a-quote action
- Clear status badges, so a sold or incoming machine is never mistaken for available stock
- Mobile layouts that survive a site office or a cab, not just a desk
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Development
Built in Webflow on a CMS structure sized for the real inventory, with the manual work automated away.
- Category, manufacturer and model filters over the full listing set
- Semi-automated exports feed third-party marketplaces from the same data
- Programmatic category-by-state and brand-by-state pages for regional search
Technical deep-dive
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Filtering built for machinery buyers
The listing pages filter by the axes buyers actually use, against live inventory.
- Dropdown filters for category, manufacturer and model, plus new and used
- Sixteen equipment categories, from crushers and screeners to trommels and washing systems
- Free-text search across the listing set for buyers who know the machine
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An Airtable-backed inventory
The website reads from the database the team maintains, instead of being a second copy of it.
- Inventory history and price tracking held as data, not memory
- Semi-automated CSV exports push stock to marketplaces like Machinery Trader
- A monthly payment calculator gives buyers a financing signal on the spot
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Structured data at inventory scale
Every listing publishes machine-readable product data, so search engines see the stock too.
- Product and offer schema generated per listing
- Around 1,400 pages in the live sitemap, most of them inventory, model and regional pages
- A plain-text llms.txt describes the business to AI assistants in their own format
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Built to serve a multi-state footprint
A machine is only relevant if it is near enough to buy or rent.
- Per-state equipment pages for the thirteen states the dealer serves
- Category-by-state and brand-by-state pages catch regional searches
- Location pages for each yard, with directions and contacts
Results and impact
The counts below are structural, taken from the live sitemap in September 2026. No traffic or lead figures are published for this project.
- 1,400+
Inventory, model and regional pages
- Counted from the live sitemap, not estimated
- 16
Equipment categories, filterable
A buyer filters hundreds of machines down to the one they need by category, manufacturer, model and condition.
The website now works like the business. Stock lives in one database, the site presents it, marketplaces receive it, and staff stopped re-keying inventory they had already entered. A buyer anywhere in the footprint can filter to the right machine and ask for a quote in a couple of steps.
The same platform has since been rolled out for the dealer's sister operations, which is its own kind of result. A structure that survives being applied three times is a structure that fits the industry.
Key takeaway
Inventory businesses do not have a design problem first. They have a data problem, and the design has to sit on top of it. Putting the whole yard into one database gave US Equipment filtering for buyers, exports for marketplaces and regional pages for search, all from the same source. That is why the platform now runs three dealerships instead of one.
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