Grain and Grape
Grain and Grape
eCommerce
Integration
Web development
Wordpress / WooCommerce/ ABM
An ABM integrated Wordpress/WooCommerce website.
Melbourne’s premier home brewing and winemaking supplier wanted a new online store to extend out their selling reach, connect with new audiences and showcase their products over the internet. This eCommerce site needed to be visually appealing, east-to-use and SEO friendly, as well as fully integrated with their Advanced Business Manager (ABM) accounting platform. Kobe Creations was tasked with designing, building and integrating this new storefront; all whilst tailoring it to Grain and Grape's unique business requirements and customer base. The brewers they supply make purchases with specific recipes in mind and so shopping carts had be highly customisable, with decimal-level item quantities, pre-milled options for grain and the ability to mix items together in bags prior to shipping.
Unique challenges in this project lay within the full automation of previously manual tasks. Grain and Grape's 'Grain Book' system allows its customers to bank store credit (measured in kilos) when they purchase certain grains and then redeem this credit as discounts later on. This system, maintained through increasingly unwieldy and unreliable spreadsheets, needed to be brought in and made a core function of the new site, along with other modern eCommerce features such as promos and sales. Furthermore, all payments on the site had to be synced and reconciled within ABM almost immediately, with no need to do manual data transfers between the site and the ERP.
A design for the desktop, tablet and mobile views was quickly produced and workshopped with Grain and Grape for use in their new store. This layout was implemented on a Wordpress / WooCommerce site; a platform chosen to allow Fernland to easily administrate the store themselves whilst also providing compatibility with Kobe's pre-existing integration plugins and modules. The Kobe team's rich history of Wordpress development allowed us to quickly set-up an instagram section, email marketing options and a template system for grain purchases to allow customers to save their favourite recipes. Once the new site was in staging, we could quickly connect it ABM through the MyIntegrator platform and begin syncing Products, Orders, Inventories and Customers, with an administrator dashboard allowing for user-friendly control and scheduling of the integration. The Grain and Grape site was then further customised with Kobe-built plugins to include 'traffic light' stock availability indicators, customer credit terms, out-of-stock notifications and product pricing tiers. Finally, we migrated across existing data from their old website, set up a secure payment system with Westpac PayWay and then enhanced the site for Search Engine Optimisation and Google Analytics measurements.
Benefits
Expanded online presence through a modern responsive and friendly WooCommerce website with built-in fast-search, social media and email marketing solutions
Business operations made more efficient with a customisable, automated integration of products and customers between ABM and WooCommerce, including tiered B2B pricing, inventories, and attachments
Menial work eliminated as online orders are automatically synced into ABM from WooCommerce, with an integrated customer credit system, freight calculator and consignment creation at checkout.
Continuity with a data migration of old products, documents and articles into a brand-new website
'Grain Book' discount system for customers with store credit built-in to the site, made more approachable and understandable
Outcomes
At the project's conclusion, we had produced fully integrated eCommerce website with unique features that support their customers, an appealing and responsive design and power automations that save cost and effort whilst speeding up business processes. With this new website, Grain and Grape were able to greatly advance their online presence and increase their online sales and consumer reach. At the same time, the automated integration shaved off hours of previously menial busywork and greatly simplified business accounting. In these ways, Kobe Creations delivered digital transformation for Grain and Grape, enhancing their online store whilst also saving time and money through integration.
You can see the result of our work at grainandgrape.com.au.
