How do you cut the cost of managing e-commerce orders to zero?
The Gey Cart story
How do you handle orders coming from different parties (sales agents and direct customers) who submit them in different ways?
That situation creates parallel flows of information that make managing stock levels and price changes complicated. As soon as the e-commerce has to be updated manually, delays and inaccuracies follow. All of which costs the company both time and resources.
Updating prices on the e-commerce is a delicate matter too: each product has to be able to display different prices depending on the user. Only then are agents free to send targeted commercial offers, making the most of the sales conversation without interruptions to service.
Hence the need to centralise the data flows and align the SAP management system with the website.
On top of that, the previous web platform had poor usability, making it impossible for agents to search the product catalogue precisely and quickly, which in turn delayed the offers sent to customers.
Is that all? Of course not. Being a B2B e-commerce, the list of problems to solve also included the need to manage agents’ sales commissions, which differ by role and product category.
TIME SAVED
A BETTER BUYING EXPERIENCE
MORE SALES
Who is Gey Cart?
Gey Cart’s strength is the depth of its range of office stationery, combined with a dense network of sales agents. The company considers it essential to maintain direct, personal contact with the customer, which is why it has relied, and intends to keep relying, on the presence of agents as intermediaries between the company and its customers.
The decision to handle all B2B orders through the e-commerce came from the need to combine that attention to the individual and their requirements with the convenience and efficiency that only digital allows.
The company, with offices in Soncino (Cremona) and Reggello (Florence), operates today with a catalogue of around 30,000 products, from printer toner to office chairs, from label printers to school supplies.
The solution we found
The first phase of the project involved our specialists acquiring the know-how needed for the stages that followed. We worked hand in hand with the client to understand how the company operates, grasp its requirements and agree a shared objective.
Projects of this complexity have to be approached by starting from the company’s workflows and from the operational flows it wants. Often the greatest complexity, particularly in B2B e-commerce, lies in mapping business processes. Technology and design are only the consequence of that first phase.
The subsequent design phase for the new e-commerce focused on a number of details that allowed the platform to stand apart from its competitors.
Among them:
- user experience testing to establish which optimisations to implement in order to offer the best possible experience to both agents and customers
- implementing an advanced internal semantic search system, essential for finding a product easily among more than 30,000 records
- mapping the product categories in a way that took account of both the requirements of the company’s management system and how users search online — two things that are often difficult to reconcile.
With those fixed points established, development of the e-commerce began, built entirely in Drupal and customised to integrate website orders, the internal management system and logistics perfectly and in real time.
With the aim of making the agents’ work simpler, two login paths were created, one for direct customers and one for agents, the latter gaining the ability to act on pricing and on any product bundles directly from the e-commerce platform, without going through the company’s own offices.
Results achieved
The solutions adopted have delivered a considerable saving of time in managing orders and customer care.
All the flows have been centralised and simplified so that customers and agents have the best possible buying experience, without friction.
The network of sales agents, already one of the company’s strengths, has been reinforced with a simple, effective tool to take Gey Cart towards further growth.
Thanks to this project the company has not only differentiated itself from its competitors but has also grown its revenue significantly year on year.
DO YOU WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH US?
Our team of specialists is available for any concerns or questions.
Fill out the form on this page; we will get back to you as soon as possible.
The result, honestly
Gey Cart was handling its e-commerce orders through different channels, agents and direct customers, each with their own way of submitting them. The result was a double flow of information that made it hard to keep stock levels and prices under control, with manual updates that were slow and often inaccurate.
Since we have been running the project, B2B e-commerce sales have grown by between 10 and 20% every year, for several consecutive years. Much of the credit still belongs to the entrepreneur who built the business, but a complex e-commerce, well managed, is what allowed that growth to happen without friction.
Success Stories
Learn about our success stories and be inspired by the results achieved by our customers.
