This is the fifth post in our series on how specific industries can modernize the way they build digital products. We've covered industrial manufacturing, grocery retail, electric and gas utilities, and trucking and freight. This one is about oil, gas and fuel distribution, where gas station owners, fleets and commercial accounts now expect to order from their fuel supplier as easily as they buy from any other business vendor.
On January 27, 2021, Motiva Enterprises, the Houston refiner that supplies more than 5,000 Shell and 76 stations, announced their intention to build a digital fuel ordering platform for its wholesale customers. Its executive vice president of marketing and sales, Bill Spurgeon, summed up the ambition in a single sentence, "Our vision is to create our own version of Uber for the fuel delivery business." The announcement listed six benefits, among them the creation of one app to order a load of fuel and track it from the terminal to the station. He also promised shorter waits at the terminal and fewer drivers loading the wrong product. The goal, Spurgeon said, was to build a digital platform whose value was clear and measurable.
Other than that last line, everything he listed in his announcement was a feature. It described what the software would do. His last line, though, described the actual value delivered to the customer. So the question of what we should build is important but more important is what value are we delivering to our customers and how will they measure it?
The gas, oil and fuel business is built on reliablility and predictability
Refiners, gas wholesalers and fuel marketers run some of the most closely measured operations in any industry. They watch a variety of metrics that ensure they’re providing measurable supply to meet customer demand and making a profit in the process. Specifically, they may measure rack prices that , terminal throughput, inventory days, delivery accuracy, credit exposure and margin per gallon. The people who run these businesses usually came up through the business itself. They’re rarely outsiders. They’ve worked in supply, trading, logistics or sales, where success meant keeping product flowing and customers supplied at a price that made sense for both supplier and customer. The relationship with a station owner, a fleet or a commercial account has run through a sales rep and a supply desk, by phone, fax and email, for as long as anyone can remember.
That model shines during events that limit supply like a refinery outage or a price spike. In these situations, when a customer needs someone who knows the account and can find product, they know exactly who to get in touch with. It also explains why digital tools in these companies tend to be built as a convenience option, not a fundamental part of the customer experience. And once those digital products and services go live that’s often the last time the supplier looks at them.
Digital tools are often not the primary focus of the fuel industry
Despite often being a “nice to have”, most of the big players in the fuel industry have digital products. In Cargas's 2026 benchmarking report on technology in fuel delivery, based on 116 responses from North American fuel dealers surveyed in the fall of 2025, more than 80% offered online bill pay, about 70% accepted delivery or service requests online, and more than 60% had a customer portal or a mobile app. This is a good sign. It still doesn’t mean these digital services provided any real value to their customers.
McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse survey of nearly 4,000 decision-makers in 13 countries found that buyers now use an average of ten channels over the course of a purchase and expect to move between them without friction. A station owner who reorders store supplies from a distributor's app will hold the fuel company’s portal to the same standard. When that portal shows yesterday's price, can't confirm the loading terminal, or doesn't know the account is on a credit hold, the owner calls the rep. Meanwhile the online portal records another login making it seem like the portal works. In reality, the customer buying pattern has shifted.
The gap persists because the operation and the software are measured with different instruments. A supplier can tell you its margin per gallon to the tenth of a cent, but very few can say what share of last month's orders arrived without a phone call, how many customers who tried the portal once came back to use it again, or how many calls to the supply desk the delivery tracking screen prevented. Because of this, shipping the digital product is seen as success. And that’s not enough.
What can a fuel supplier team do to improve their digital experience?
Write down the customer's next decision before the feature. A fleet manager or station operator opens an ordering tool to decide something, such as whether to buy ahead of a price move, how many gallons to take, or whether to warn a delivery site that its load will be late. Before building anything, challenge your team to be specific about the customer decisions a new feature idea supports. Ask them how they will know the customer made it without calling anyone. "A station operator places Thursday's order before the rack price changes and knows which terminal it's loading from, without calling the supply desk" is a testable, customer-centric view of the value the team can bring to the supplier. A list of features that doesn’t mention the customer is a good start but it’s not insufficient at measuring whether this was the right list to build.
Measure how customers order, and review it next to the margin numbers. The digital tools make it easier, in theory, for your customers to order and interact with your company. These interactions are observable and familiar. Every team should be able to list these behaviours and attach them to the features they’re planning on building. Specifically, teams should be measuring the share of orders placed digitally in each customer segment, how many customers who ordered online once did it again within 90 days, calls and emails to the supply desk per hundred orders, and orders that had to be corrected after loading. Any feature that doesn't move one of these human-centric number gets improved or retired. This is also the most direct way to answer the question the Cargas report asks about adoption.
Build with the supply desk and the credit team in the room. The people who answer the phone know every exception a customer can come up with. The happy path of an online experience often ignores many of these edge cases. Software built without these edge cases in consideration handles the easy orders and sends every exception back to the phone at exactly the moment the customer most needs an answer. A product team that includes someone from supply and someone from credit in the product development process, and that spends a week listening to the desk's calls before it builds anything, will have a clear sense of where their priorities should lie for the next quarter at least..
How teams should get started
Start small. Pick a single customer. Unbranded dealers or commercial fleet accounts that still place most of their orders by phone and email are a reasonable first segment. The gap between the tools you offer and the way those customers actually buy is easy to measure. Count orders by channel for that segment today, set a target for the share placed digitally and for calls per hundred orders. Give one cross-functional product team the job of moving both numbers, and review what changed at the end of the quarter. A team that can show fewer calls per hundred orders will earn more credibility inside a supplier than any launch announcement.
At Sense & Respond Learning, we help product, design and engineering teams make this shift from output to outcomes, with practical training in product discovery, Lean product management and OKRs. If your company has built the portal and your customers are still calling the desk, we'd love to talk.