Diamond dealer websites — for the trade, with Rapnet / Nivoda / IDEX feeds, GIA cert display, and proper natural-versus-lab pricing

The diamond trade is one of the oldest and most entrenched ecommerce categories on the planet, and most of the dealer sites look like it. Magento 1 still runs serious volume on 47th Street. PHP-from-2009 is everywhere in Mumbai BKC. The dealers know it; they just have not had a serious modern-stack option built specifically for the trade. This is that option.

The clients I take on for diamond dealer website work tend to fit one of these three shapes:

• Established diamond dealers (NYC, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Mumbai BKC, Hong Kong) selling to retail jewelers and other dealers, needing a B2B portal with live feed pricing
• Growing dealers expanding into D2C alongside the wholesale book — needing one site that serves both audiences with proper gating and pricing rules
• Lab-grown diamond specialists needing a site that respects the unique pricing volatility of lab-grown without breaking the natural side

Per-carat pricing is the unit, not per-stone

Diamonds are priced by the carat. A 1.02ct stone at $4,200/ct is $4,284; the customer is reading both numbers and the conversion. The product card needs both surfaced clearly, with the per-carat price as the prominent figure for trade buyers and the total stone price for retail buyers. Most generic ecommerce templates collapse this to a single price field and lose half the meaning.

Natural and lab-grown need different pricing logic

Natural diamond pricing tracks the Rapaport list with a discount or premium per stone. Lab-grown pricing is wildly more volatile, dropping 5–10% per quarter in 2024 and 2025, and tracks closer to a fixed-margin-over-cost model. The site needs both pricing engines running side by side, with clean visual segmentation so the buyer never confuses the two.

Dealer portal pricing must be invisible to retail

A wholesale buyer paying Rap minus 32 cannot see the same stone listed at Rap plus 8 to a retail customer on the public site. The architecture is dealer-portal pricing gated behind authentication, with a public-facing page that either does not show the stone at all or shows it at the retail price. Shopify cannot do this without significant friction; a Next.js + Supabase setup handles it natively.

GIA / IGI / GCAL cert display has to be inline, not downloaded

The buyer wants to see the cert without downloading it. Embed the cert PDF inline, surface the cert number prominently with click-to-verify on the GIA website, and pull the structured cert data (cut grade, polish, symmetry, fluorescence, measurements) into the product card itself. Trust signals stack here.

• Rapnet, Nivoda, or IDEX feed integration with daily sync and price-list-based markup engine
• Per-carat and per-stone pricing surfaced together, with currency switching for USD / EUR / GBP / INR / HKD
• Natural and lab-grown segmentation with separate pricing engines and visual differentiation
• GIA / IGI / GCAL cert inline display with click-to-verify and structured cert data on the product card
• Dealer portal with Supabase Auth, gated pricing, gated inventory, dealer-specific terms
• D2C and wholesale on the same site with proper gating — D2C never sees wholesale pricing
• 360-degree video and image bundles where the feed provides them (Nivoda strongest, Rapnet patchy)
• Search and filter at scale — Algolia or Typesense over the inventory with faceted shape, weight, colour, clarity, cut, certification

Project range: £15–40k for the build, depending on PIM scope, multi-language requirements, and the size of the existing catalogue. Ongoing retainer optional.

I run a WordPress agency with 5,000+ sites at Seahawk Media — that is the credibility on the agency side. The interesting half is the gemstone domain knowledge: I built and maintain the largest catalog of astrological gemstone content on the public internet at Deluxe Astrology — 125+ gemstones, 30 languages, full planetary and astrological pairing logic. I know what a Pukhraj is, what GIA cert numbers look like, what Rapnet feeds carry, and how to render a parcel-pricing table that the trade actually wants to use.

The retail-jewelry agencies (GemFind, Jewelry Website Designers, Lounge Lizard, WebFX) build Shopify storefronts for B2C jewelers and have done so for 20+ years. The generalist Indian dev shops (Magneto IT, TransPacific) ship volume work but do not speak the language. The intersection of "modern stack" and "actually understands the gemstone trade" is small enough that I am the only person on it I am aware of.

• Rapnet vs Nivoda vs IDEX Honest comparison of the three diamond feeds, when each one wins.
• Gemstone dealer website The coloured-stone parallel — same trade, different product taxonomy.
• Jewelry Next.js headless The modern-stack pattern these dealer sites should target.

You book the 30-minute call, you describe the business, the catalogue size, the timeline. I tell you whether I am the right person; you walk away with a stack pick, a price range, and a realistic delivery window. No deck, no qualification screen.