OUR CLIENT

Our client is a B2B e-commerce business selling bearings. They also sell offline, at their warehouse. They were trying to expand their online reach and optimize their processes, and a local company we had previously worked with recommended us as the best partner to help them with this task.

CLIENT'S NEED

The client’s main request was a B2B, controlled access system, through which signed in users could order industrial components (bearings) online.

SOLUTION:

We chose Magento as the e-commerce solution and implemented custom access permissions for the users – new accounts need to be approved by the platform’s admin before being able to place an order.

We set up a smart search system based on Solr and we provided custom implementation: the search function is faceted and error-tolerant and it also recommends similar searches and retrieves suggested products with identical or similar features, but from a different manufacturer. We also covered the setting of their private Solr server.

As an interesting marketing feature, an integrated bidding system has been implemented, allowing the client to set up and manage auctions for some of their stock.

We connected Magento with the client’s ERP of choice, SoftOne, enabling them to manage stocks, orders and customer relationships. The system automatically imports products and stocks and exports orders to the SoftOne.

The project team was made up of a project manager, a developer and a designer. The consultancy and development totaled 3 months.

A challenge we encountered was related to certain ERP operations not being documented to their complexity, but fortunately the client leveraged their access to their database and supported us in configuring the necessary helpers.