Case Study:<br/>Plustar

Hundreds of thousands of price combination in this E-Commerce

Overview

Plustar sells tape products B2B. They offer every tape and adhesive 3M, Intertape, and several other manufacturers make. Offering 35,000 SKUs online creates many challenges. They also wanted a customer portal that would make viewing past order and invoices possible and streamlining reorders. Since they are B2B, they also wanted a managed purchase order process for approved customers.

E-Commerce · Accounting · ERP · CRM

Problem Statement

There were specific problems we solved for Plustar:

Product Photography: If you have a few dozen products in your catalog, you probably haven't considered photo uploading to be much of an issue. If it takes you 30 seconds to open the product record, find the correct photo, upload it to the server, and then save, it would take you an hour or two to upload you entire collection of product photos. With 35,000 SKUs, Plustar was facing a much bigger challenge: one person, full time, 7-8 weeks.

Quantity Discounts: Reduced pricing for large orders are an essential part of working B2B. Discounts, batch orders, quantities-specific discounts, pallet discounts and so much more.

Data Integration and Customer Portal: Customers signup to Plustar's website but all their information is in third party systems: ERPs and CRMs. They don't talk to each other and what's more, it's crucial for big customers to be able to manage their information in the same place where they place their orders.

Product Refresh: Thousands upon thousands of SKUs are constantly updated from huge export files sent by multiple providers. These files contain price changes, discount updates, new and updated product lines. All this data needs to be safely and efficiently updated with the E-Commerce system so the website is up-to-date.

Objectives

To address the challenges of an E-Commerce of this magnitude, Dialogs needs to:
Create a platform where the customer can sign in and ultimately place an order for products on Plustar's website.
Integrate with third party systems to pull data in real time to be shown accurately to customers and Plustar staff members.
Stay within the client's budget and provide an effective solution to handle the large volume of data.

Solution

Our approach centered on creating a platform focused on safely updating product and pricing information using data from vendors in conjunction with third party systems. The platform provides the client tools so ingest data from vendors and compare with existing inventory to. At the same time, customers can login to the platform where they are able to see information such as contact, billing and previous orders information that are hosted in external ERPs and CRMs.

Key features of the platform include:

We added a photo management dashboard that quickly tags products as related so they can share photos, plus we rendered all various image sizes needed by the design. The entire image library upload took a couple days
We built a pricing dashboard that applies a complex formula to the wholesale cost, automatically setting the each prices as well as four quantity breaks for all 35,000 SKUs. Plustar can see which SKUs fall above or below a specified threshold, plus they can manually adjust prices at each of five levels of product categorization
We integrated with APIs from Infor (ERP) and Insightly (CRM) to pull and display customer data in the platform

Results

The client is operating with an efficient and effective platform that can handle hundreds of thousands of prices and SKUs without skipping a beat. Delivering top-notch service to their customers, recently Plustar reached out to Dialogs after decades of professional relationship to engage in a new re-design effort for Plustar.

References

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