Fernland

To keep pace with its growing business, Fernland called on Kobe to overhaul their existing BigCommerce websites; one, Fernland, for its international business-2-business distribution and another, Garden Superstore, for its business-to-consumer operations. They wanted both of these websites to be fully integrated with their MYOB EXO platform, including product, inventory, payment, order and customer account data syncs alongside customised features such as customer groups, wholesale pricing and invoice generation. Fernland also asked us for customised BigCommerce administrative controls, including the ability to manage payments, reconciliation and invoicing through the site dashboard and a way to serve integrated shipping quotes from their MachShip account, as well as bulky freight and table rate shipping options for their customers. A final challenge lay in setting up quantity-based cross-item pricing for certain product groups, a feature not typically accommodated for in BigCommerce.

This project required Kobe Creations to draw on all of our BigCommerce technical expertise. We were able to quickly create two copies of Fernland's websites in order to begin workshopping customisations and begin the integration. Garden Superstore was given a B2C integration, syncing products, stock levels, customers (with customer pricing ) and orders; Fernland's B2B integration added additional workflows for syncing bulky products, cross-item prices, customer-specific pricing, product documents and wholesale rates. In some cases, the site itself needed to be modified to accomodate the business data, such as additional fields for identifying 'dangerous goods' products, tying wholesale prices to the quantity of product ordered, or an 'information sheets' tab added to the product page to contain APVMA documents. The complete integration was hosted on the MyIntegrator platform, which provides Fernland with a user-friendly administrator dashboard to control and schedule each individual workflow themselves.

Fernland's integration with MachShip, and the advanced shipping options for bulky freight and table rates, were achieved by customising some of our BigCommerce plugins to provide the functionality in a manner personalised for Fernland's business needs. These custom apps were then installed on both sites and selectively configured between the two sites within the BigCommerce Dashboard. This solution worked so effectively, additional apps were built for advanced eCommerce features, such as an app that provides customer account pages with a 'recent purchases' section, and an app that provides a 'pay-on-account' option.

Finally, the sites themselves were directly modified to make them as powerful as possible. Outstanding invoices can be be paid online, all transactions were made PCI-compliant via a PayWay payment system, minimum order amounts were set on certain products and the BigCommerce order view was completely customised to provide order history and support phone orders, fax orders and backorders. In order to achieve, quantity-based pricing, a unique 'cart events' system was developed to update pricing when the cart was modified with a 'tier-priced' product.

Benefits
 Omni-channel customer-reach through two eCommerce sites, one B2B and one B2C, customised for specific business needs

 Easier business operations through a customisable integration of products between EXO and WooCommerce, including pricing, inventory, and information documents

 Manual work eliminated with an automated sync of customers and contacts between EXO and BigCommerce, with customer-specific pricing, debtor groups discounts

 Accounting made simple via order integration, with phone and fax orders, paid-online depositing, invoicing and email alerts as well as a replace of the BigCommerce order view with an EXO-connected order view module

 BigCommerce Customised for precise business needs with quotes, recent purchases, payment reconciliation, pot-levy tax calculations and pay statement modules

 Advanced shipping options for customers, including product and user specific freight methods, custom shipping options, MachShip integration and bulky package support

Outcomes
With their websites enhanced by our integrations and business customisations, we were able to transform Fernland's eCommerce processes, saving them time and money in administrative operations of managing products, orders, payments whilst also enabling them to take advantage of BigCommerce's powerful SEO and experiential features. At the same time, Fernland customers were able to enjoy a smoother, secure and more transparent purchasing and shipping process powered by our MyIntegrator plugins.

You can visit Fernland at fernland.com.au, and find the Garden Superstore at gardensuperstore.com.au.

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