About the client

A B2B US-based food distribution company with over 70 years of history.

During the pandemic, they sought the opportunity to strengthen their leading position with an e-commerce solution that would replace their legacy online ordering solution..

The challenge

1. A limited budget
2. ERP integration with custom code
3. A sleek design, a fast website but no budget for PWA
4. The need to go live before thanksgiving (only 7 months)

The solution

Limited budget

Despite the need for B2B modules and different other features of Adobe Commerce, due to the limited budget, together with the client we decided on a custom implementation of Magento Open Source.
We managed to offer a fixed-pricing for a project of over 1400 hours of work.

ERP integration

The client uses a custom ERP solution, developed specifically for the B2B sector for wholesale food suppliers. A bespoke connector was designed and built from scratch by Ancor’d:

• Product static and dynamic data, including customer-specific pricing and availability from ERP to Magento
• Completed orders from Magento to ERP

The client has a very specific logic on the pricing in the ERP, with a lot of custom conditions, for example:

• the product prices depend on specific delivery dates, when ordering with shorter delivery dates, prices will rise.
• the product pricing also depends on the customer, so there is variable pricing based on the user who is logged in on the shop and the company they belong to.

Therefore a specific integration logic was needed to fulfil all these conditions and show the correct behavior on the shop frontend.

Some extra features were implemented concerning pricing and products:

• sometimes there are items in the ERP that have no price because the product needs a custom offer from a sales representative, so when the price from the ERP is zero in the synchronization to Magento, the price is replaced by a text showing “Contact Sales Representative”.
• some products have special conditions like a longer delivery time because of being stocked in another warehouse, these conditions will be synchronized as well to inform the customer when they try to add this product to the cart.

Design/Frontend

We recognize the power of PWAs, but we believe that most merchants do not need it to achieve 99% of their business goals. A great alternative to PWA that brings similar benefits but it’s also budget-friendly and much quicker to develop is Hyvä.

”One could say that Hyvä is the version of Luma we wished Magento had built. Or the frontend that Luma potentially could have become. It is an alternative to headless PWAs, for those that choose not to venture into the Javascript-only web.”

Timeline

In our solution, we not only fixed the pricing, but also the timeline. We offered, and delivered, this project within the budget and timeline that we initially forecasted.

Our team of only senior developers and our continuous integration methodology (we will explain more about this in a follow-up article) allow us to give precise estimations that we can commit to, both Time and Budget wise.

Get in touch

Do you have similar challenges? Which point would you like to know more about?

Contact us to understand more about how we tackled it, and how we can help you.