How It Began
True Brands manufactures products in the beverage, decor, and kitchen spaces with 30+ distinct brand collections, selling wholesale and direct to consumers.
Growing business objectives and requirements prompted True Brands to seek out a technical partner to make the move to Magento 2. They were particularly interested in the advanced B2B features it would afford – along with integrating with NetSuite.
The right-fit agency would be one that could and would work closely with their marketing, sales and accounting teams to provide expert guidance and development. The objective is clear: better user experiences inside and out, causing less headaches with internal processes.
The Challenge
True Brands was sold on the benefits of using Magento 2 for e-commerce. When New Theory was hired, the new Magento 2 site had been launched, and True Brands wanted our help in scalability and further development.
Now that the new store experience was live, we wanted to shape the new platform into a mission-critical tool – they needed to reduce the distance between B2B and B2C sales, personalize their wholesale customer experience, take advantage of powerful B2B features in Magento and reduce friction in processes for their sales and customer service teams.
The Solution
First, we tackled one of the biggest hurdles – we converged the True Brands B2B and B2C platforms. The store and its varied catalogs, customers, pricing rules, orders and fulfillment now all reside under a single address: truebrands.com.
Second, we executed a powerful NetSuite and Magento 2 integration. This opened up a whole new world of data to access for their internal team and their customers. It gave companies the power to see order history, pay invoices online, add company teams to manage restock orders and much more.
With this integration, we addressed a persistent pain point – customer order history. Now, customers can see all their orders online, regardless of where that order originated (online, over phone, etc.). As a result, their customer service team gets fewer calls from confused customers and they are able to focus on proactive initiatives to ensure their customers continued satisfaction.
Keep scrolling to get details on our work and the improvements we made for the True Brands team and their customers.
Two Stores, One URL, Zero Confusion
Following launch, True Brands found themselves in a new conundrum. Their wholesale and direct-to-customer websites were technically two different websites. This kept things separate, but management of two systems created more headaches than it solved.
To get started, we brought both sites into a single Magento 2 website as stores. With the varied catalogs, customers, pricing and fulfilment, the convergence of the two platforms allows True Brands to offer one destination for wholesale and retail customers without the double work.
All Customer Orders, Visible in One Place
Customers don’t care if they placed an order over the phone, via fax, or via the web. When they log into their accounts on truebrands.com, they expect to see all orders, not just web orders.
New Theory removed a persistent complaint from customers who couldn’t see a comprehensive list of all their orders online – they were only seeing their online orders through the website. So, New Theory connected those orders living in NetSuite to Magento. Now even orders created and fulfilled outside of the website now show up in a wholesale customer’s account. We helped to build a bridge between Netsuite and Magento 2 to combine all orders, regardless of their origin, and put them in a handy location for oversight, review, re-ordering and invoice payment.
Winning Back Accountants
Shifting delivery costs, particularly with large wholesale orders, required flexibility on credit card payments.
Mystifying delivery costs only served to slow the purchase process, and create customer confusion. The website would authorize a card for an order, but it would only be finally captured after a manual follow-up to amend the total with accurate shipping costs.
Their store now keeps the card on file via a ‘token’ to automatically adjust the final price without the required manual follow-up for reauthorization.
Re-Stock with Minimal Clicks
Ordering and reordering with a list of SKUs saves time and cuts down on errors. Adding products to an order with a group of SKUs or a spreadsheet is the best way to take care of restocking without all of the additional clicks of the traditional shopping experience.
Wholesale Company Accounts
Many of True Brand’s wholesale customers contain multiple people managing their inventory orders. We helped bring company-based to life in the B2B upgrade. Each purchasing member of a company’s team can manage and create restocking orders under their user or admin accounts.
An Ongoing Partnership Built on Trust
To be successful in e-commerce, the work is never truly finished. Beyond little enhancements, making things smarter, and fixing bugs – we work closely with True Brands every week to deliver value to their customers.
Daily transparent discussion, weekly calls, and prioritized and estimated initiatives empower us to pursue business objectives together. It results in matching the value of their code to the impact it has on their operation and customers.
