A Web Portal to Automate Manufacturing Tool Distribution for 300+ Partners

Amitech, a BigCommerce development agency, delivered a solution for manufacturing tool distributors to automate B2B e-commerce operations

MANUFACTURING | BIGCOMMERCE

A cutting tool producer turned to Amitech to build a solution for local distributors to facilitate B2B e-commerce operations, ensuring scalability and high availability.

The customer

Based in Japan, the customer is a leading manufacturer of cutting tools, components, and machine accessories. The company is part of a multinational conglomerate with a revenue of $3.9 million as of 2023 Q3.

The need

In North America, Canada, and Mexico, the company sold its products through partner distributors. To efficiently source products, the manufacturer built a custom portal based on NopCommerce for distributors to order and ship items to a local store. At that moment, the customer partnered with about 100+ distributors intending to further onboard 200+ new ones. Due to technology limitations, though, the custom-built portal could no longer sustain high loads, as well as had issues with integrations, functionality extension, and cloud adoption to support a complex B2B logic.

Relying on profound e-commerce expertise at Amitech, the customer wanted to develop an optimized and performant distributor portal on top of BigCommerce. In addition, the delivered solution had to feature the necessary B2B functionality to enable business growth.

The challenges

It was crucial that the system could process a broad product catalog with 29,000+ items and thousands of specifications (e.g., the size, material, etc.).

The existing ERP imposed character limits in the product name and description fields, which led to data inaccuracies and search difficulties.

The solution

The team at Amitech analyzed the requirements and delivered a new distributor web portal on BigCommerce. The platform represented a single source of truth across all stages in the e-commerce process: product search and selection, ordering, shipment, and backorders.

To optimize operations, the team integrated the system with 3 core components: the existing ERP to retrieve order, inventory, and customer data, Catsy to accurately organize product descriptions, images, and specifications, and BundleB2B for customer account management.

The developers at Amitech then enabled essential B2B features, such as quick orders and requisition list creation.

For better website efficiency and customization, engineers delivered a headless storefront, using NextJS and Tailwind CSS. With WordPress, the team ensured flexibility in content management and a modernized user experience.

Elasticsearch was used as a database to handle large volumes of item records. The tool also helped to enable filtering and advanced search (by product identifiers, by billing or shipping address, and wildcard search).

To provide scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance, the developers employed the tooling available in BigCommerce. In addition, the team employed Amazon Web Services to host some mission-critical workloads: a headless storefront, content management, a database, etc.

Finally, the developers used Mailchimp for e-mail campaigns and enabled Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track marketing performance.

The outcome

Collaborating with Amitech, the customer delivered a modernized web portal for partner distributors in just 6 months. The company optimized the e-commerce process on its end to further extrapolate it across the rest of conglomerate’s functional entities.

B2B functionality for e-commerce automation

Now, it is possible to automate e-commerce operations, reduce human error, and save time on customer interaction to focus on business growth.

300+ partners and thousands of product items

The system can sustain the loads serving 300+ partners in the network. Thanks to the engineering efforts, the company can now easily manage 29,000+ product items with thousands of parameters in a single place.

Highlights

A fully functional, modernized e-commerce solution delivered in just 6 months