Gasgoo Munich- CATL is moving energy storage cells online.
CATL recently launched a B2B direct sales platform dubbed the "Online Store." The initial lineup features three mainstream energy storage cell models: 100Ah, 280Ah, and 314Ah. Once corporate users pass a qualification review, they can place orders for as few as three boxes, with product prices and specifications fully disclosed.
On its own, this is just a new online sales channel. Yet viewed against the backdrop of the broader energy storage industry, the signal sent here matters far more than the storefront itself.
For years, trading in energy storage cells has relied heavily on offline networks. Large energy groups and system integrators typically sign annual supply agreements directly with manufacturers, while the vast number of smaller integrators depend largely on agents and traders. This creates significant disparities in pricing, delivery times, and supply stability across different customer segments.
For CATL, the launch is about selling cells. For the energy storage sector, it could upend a distribution system that has persisted for years.
Energy Storage Channels Have No Choice but to Change
The launch appears to be a natural result of CATL's shifting business priorities in recent years.
Power batteries have long been CATL's primary revenue driver and the engine behind its rapid growth. But as the electric vehicle market matures into a phase of mass adoption, the competitive logic of the power battery industry has shifted.
While the market continues to expand, growth rates have clearly cooled compared to the breakneck expansion of previous years. At the same time, automakers are increasingly prioritizing supply chain security, moving away from reliance on a single supplier to actively building "second-source" and "third-source" networks.
Image Source: CATL
This does not imply a decline in CATL's competitiveness. On the contrary, the company remains an industry leader in product performance, manufacturing capability, and global footprint. However, for a company already commanding over 40% of the market, sustaining high growth solely by grabbing more market share is becoming increasingly difficult.
Data from the China Automotive Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance shows CATL has long held the top spot in domestic power battery installations. Its domestic market share peaked at 52% in 2021 but has since retreated, hovering around 40% in 2025.
Meanwhile, rivals like CALB, EVE Energy, Gotion High-Tech, and SVOLT have been expanding their supply footprints, creating a more competitive landscape. This means CATL can maintain its lead, but it must adjust how it grows.
With the ceiling for power batteries approaching, CATL needs a new growth curve. The rapid expansion of the energy storage market in recent years offers just that.
Energy storage has grown even faster than EV batteries. Globally, grid-side, commercial and industrial (C&I), and residential storage are all scaling up, making energy storage CATL's second growth curve. According to past financial reports, revenue from energy storage systems has consistently hovered around 15% of total revenue, making it one of the most critical business segments outside of EV batteries.
Image Source: CATL
However, the energy storage market is also entering a new phase. Years ago, large-scale projects dominated, with buyers primarily energy groups, grid companies, and major system integrators. Orders often ran into hundreds of MWh or even several GWh—a structure that aligned perfectly with CATL's long-standing key account sales model.
The past two years have brought a shift. Rapid growth in C&I storage and the surge in overseas distributed storage mean more projects now measure just a few hundred kWh or a few MWh. The number of projects is rising, and purchasing demand is becoming increasingly fragmented. Unlike large projects, these smaller orders involve a far larger number of companies but are difficult to capture through a traditional key account sales system.
This highlights a long-standing structural disconnect in the industry. For top battery manufacturers, small orders mean high sales costs and complex negotiations, making it uneconomical to dedicate significant resources. Conversely, smaller system integrators, with their limited purchasing volumes, struggle to establish direct ties with manufacturers and are forced to buy through layers of agents.
The result is a distribution system plagued by inefficiency: prices for identical products can vary significantly between buyers; project schedules are hostage to agent inventory levels; delivery times lack stability; and assigning responsibility for quality issues becomes a complex ordeal.
Peers have experimented with online models in recent years, but most attempts remained "semi-e-commerce" efforts that failed to fully digitize the direct purchasing process. CATL aims to be the first to truly bridge that gap.
The Store's Real Value
When the store launched, many assumed CATL was simply getting into e-commerce.
That understanding is inaccurate. Consumer e-commerce addresses the fragmented shopping needs of individuals, whereas the core of an industrial B2B platform is to improve transaction efficiency between businesses.
For the energy storage industry, the store's greatest value lies not in moving batteries online, but in standardizing fragmented transaction processes that once relied on repetitive manual communication, replacing that work with system automation.
The online store drastically slashes communication costs. Product parameters, public pricing, purchasing thresholds, logistics rules, and qualification requirements are all standardized and disclosed online, allowing small-batch orders to be fulfilled at low cost.
Image Source: CATL
This means that long-tail, fragmented orders previously ignored by manufacturers due to high sales costs are regaining commercial value at scale.
For CATL, individual orders may be small, but the sheer volume of downstream small and medium integrators is massive. As C&I and overseas distributed storage continue to expand, these customers have become one of the market's most active participant groups. Profit margins that once flowed to various layers of agents can now be converted directly into revenue for CATL.
Revenue is one thing, but a more critical shift lies in the customer structure. The EV battery business naturally suffers from high customer concentration; a handful of top automakers can account for more than half of revenue. While this offers pricing leverage during upturns, it exposes the company to risks of price pressure and supplier switching during downturns. If the energy storage sector replicates this structure, its long-term resilience will be weak.
By using the online store to onboard thousands of small and medium integrators, CATL can build a more fragmented and resilient customer base.
CATL's global market share in energy storage is approaching 40% in 2025. However, with competitors like BYD in close pursuit and industry capacity expanding far faster than demand, the pressure to defend existing market share is intense.
Beyond massive long-term contracts, the online store can specifically handle small to medium purchases ranging from a few hundred kWh to several MWh. This allows CATL to establish a dual-track channel: "exclusive direct supply for top clients" and "online direct sales for smaller customers."
Furthermore, the transaction data accumulated by the store will gradually become a hidden core asset—revealing which regions have the fastest-growing demand, which cell models have the highest repurchase rates, and which niche industries are significantly expanding their energy storage investments.
Once all transactions form an online closed loop, order data can reflect market changes in real time, guiding product iteration, capacity scheduling, and inventory planning. This helps alleviate structural mismatches between supply and demand and mitigates periodic overcapacity.
Image Source: CATL
Thus, CATL's store launch is less about adding a new sales channel and more about completing a long-missing piece of its distribution puzzle. With its manufacturing capacity and product technology already leading the world, the next stage of industry competition will depend not just on cell performance, but on the operational capability to efficiently reach massive numbers of downstream customers.
Cao Guangping, a partner at Chufu Consulting, believes several practical factors drove CATL's decision to launch the store at this moment.
The energy storage market is shifting from dominance by large projects to an explosion in distributed, small-batch demand. The number of small and medium integrators is rising rapidly, yet traditional manufacturers only engage in GWh-level mega-contracts. The pain points for smaller customers—difficulty sourcing goods, high premiums, and supply uncertainty—have remained unresolved.
For CATL, energy storage is already the second-largest business segment. The store can aggregate fragmented small-scale demand nationwide, unleashing idle capacity and finding a new outlet for shipments amidst stagnant competition. At the same time, industry competition is forcing a push into lower-tier markets. With second- and third-tier manufacturers catching up, CATL needs digital channels to lower the cost of handling fragmented orders to defend its market share.
Additionally, stricter regulations on the cascade utilization of EV batteries have pushed some smaller customers to purchase new batteries instead—a demand the store is well-positioned to capture.
Forcing an Industry Shakeout
Once the channel opens, the first to feel the impact will be the players along the entire distribution chain.
The old circulation path for energy storage batteries typically ran: Manufacturer → Primary Agent → Secondary Distributor → System Integrator → End Project Owner. With CATL's store offering a minimum order of just three boxes and transparent pricing across the web, small and medium integrators can bypass middlemen and buy directly from the source.
This implies that the model of profiting from information asymmetry or supply shortages is fading for middlemen. Pure trading dealers who simply hoard and flip inventory must either liquidate and exit or actively transform. The path for transformation is clear: shed the cell-flipping business and dive deep into value-added services such as storage load calculation, system ratio customization, grid connection procedures, on-site installation and commissioning, and long-term power station maintenance.
Image Source: CATL
CATL's store currently sells mainly standardized cell products, but delivery, installation, and after-sales maintenance still require local partners. Service providers that successfully transform can leverage their direct access to factory supply to win more project orders, completing the iteration of their business models.
With barriers lowered, the way small and medium integrators operate is also changing.
Historically, the biggest operational constraint for smaller integrators was the supply chain: purchasing volumes fell short of direct contracting thresholds, supply channels were unstable, and procurement premiums eroded project profits. Companies spent the bulk of their energy on inquiries, price comparisons, and scrambling for inventory, leaving little capacity to focus on market expansion or technical optimization.
With the implementation of online direct sales, the purchasing threshold has dropped from GWh-level contracts to small-batch spot orders. Transparent pricing, stable scheduling, and traceable authentic products have drastically reduced uncertainty on the procurement side. Now, companies compete on comprehensive capabilities: load calculation, peak-valley arbitrage model design, system configuration optimization, end-to-end project delivery, and long-term maintenance management.
The industry will accelerate the elimination of "shell" integrators who merely flip cells, while players with genuine technical expertise will find it easier to emerge.
A deeper impact lies in the pricing system. Previously, a dual-track pricing system existed for energy storage cells: large long-term contracts had lower quotes, while scattered small orders were subject to supply fluctuations and middleman markups. This lack of pricing transparency hindered the industry's standardization.
Image Source: CATL
CATL's public online pricing effectively anchors a benchmark for the industry, forcing competitors like BYD, EVE Energy, and Hithium to re-examine their own strategies for reaching lower-tier markets.
If competitors do not follow suit with online direct sales, they risk gradually losing their base of massive small and medium customers. If they collectively rush to build online procurement systems, channel premiums across the industry will be compressed, and quotes for terminal energy storage systems will steadily decline.
A sustained decline in the cost per kilowatt-hour is a core prerequisite for the mass commercialization of energy storage. Transparent pricing, flattened channels, and improved supply-demand matching will, in the long run, drive the return on investment for storage projects back to a reasonable range. This benefits the large-scale promotion of residential and distributed C&I storage, raising the ceiling for the industry's long-term growth.
At the same time, the comprehensive order data accumulated on the online platform can intuitively reflect demand differences across regions and niche categories. This data can subsequently guide cell specification iteration and capacity scheduling, helping to alleviate the structural supply-demand mismatches that have long plagued the industry.
Ultimately, CATL's store launch is, on the surface, a new B2B direct sales channel. In essence, however, it is a strategic layout by a leading enterprise to secure profit growth, optimize customer structure, and consolidate industry clout as EV battery growth peaks and energy storage enters a cycle of stock competition.
For the entire energy storage industry, this channel transformation is not just about one company's revenue or status. It is a landmark step toward channel flattening, pricing transparency, and standardized competition. The energy storage sector is shifting from a resource-based business to a market-driven one—and that is the change most worth watching.
