Wholesale Business Automation - ANZ Pharma

THE PROJECT

As a large wholesaler, ANZ Pharma supplies the major supermarkets and pharmacies in New Zealand with approximately 5000 SKUs. Their website aims to support their marketing and sales activities for the brands they represent, both Business to Business and Business to Consumer.

THE CHALLENGES

We love challenging projects and ANZ Pharma was one of them. We faced several integration challenges that we successfully accepted.

• Warehousing Software The wholesaler has been using MYOB Advanced for both accounting and warehouse management for years. Although it is a great product, MYOB does not integrate with any of the ecommerce platforms we were considering. Fetching the product and inventory data for 5000 SKUs manually was not an option.
• B2C and B2B Capabilities Consideration of a platform should include the ability to cover both B2B and B2C markets. It is not possible to treat these differently when building a custom integration.
• No Centralized Information The product information like product description, images, product codes etc which are very critical factors for SEO came from hundreds of different suppliers. This information was split across multiple sources. In order to manage this ecommerce efficiently, we had to think of getting information from suppliers in the smartest way possible.

THE SOLUTION

• BigCommerce With careful consideration of different platforms, we settled on a BigCommerce Enterprise solution that offered B2B and B2C capabilities through two different storefronts that can be customized. We could manage stock and inventory effectively by using the same backend for both customer segments. As an added bonus, BigCommerce also integrates customer segments.
• Custom Integrations BigCommerce API enabled us to complete a custom integration with MYOB Advanced to retrieve real-time stock and inventory data. Invoices will be automatically fed back into their accounting software for every sale made on the website, eliminating any manual work.
• The Brand Portal We created a brand portal to facilitate the collection and storage of product descriptions, images, and other brand information from various suppliers. All available brands and products will be synced into the portal from their inventory. The ANZ Pharma ecommerce manager only needs to create a link to the brand manager via this portal. The link would request specific information from the brand owners, which would not be automatically pushed into the website and would also be stored to use later.