Impact Office Supplies eCommerce Website (B2B & B2C)

Overview

Impact Office Supplies is Australia's leading independent office supplies company, Queensland-owned and delivering nationwide. In 2018 they were running a Magento website with ongoing bugs, an unreliable sync to their Options ERP, an outdated design and a poor user experience. We were engaged as their exclusive development partner to redesign and rebuild the site from scratch as a custom Laravel application.

The new website handles both B2B and B2C ordering and is fully integrated with Options ERP. We've kept developing it since launch, adding contract pricing, order approvals, account hierarchies, recurring orders, online accounts payable and eProcurement catalogues for university and government customers.

Challenges

1. Existing Site Issues: The Magento site had ongoing bugs, an unreliable ERP sync and a dated design, which made ordering harder than it should have been for Impact's customers.

2. Replacing A Live Store: Impact take orders every day, so the new site had to cover everything customers relied on in the old one and launch without interrupting ordering.

3. ERP Integration: Products, customers, pricing, contracts, invoices and orders are all managed in Options ERP. The website had to stay in sync with it and send orders and payments back without staff re-keying them.

4. B2B Pricing: Pricing varies by customer, contract, customer category and quantity, with GST inclusive or exclusive display depending on the customer, and some products are only available to certain customers.

5. Order Approvals & Procurement: Larger customers have staff who place orders, managers who approve them and head offices that pay for their branches. Universities and government departments order through eProcurement systems such as Unimarket.

6. Search With Customer Pricing: The catalogue needed fast, filterable search, but a search index can't store a different price for every customer.

Solution

1. Custom Laravel Platform: We designed and built a custom Laravel application covering B2B and B2C ordering, payments, customer accounts and a control panel for Impact's team.

2. Options ERP Integration: A nightly sync imports over 10 million records from Options, including customers, contracts, products, price breaks, stock locations, invoices and sales orders. Webhooks from Options update products, customers and contracts on the website in real time, and orders and payments are sent back into Options every five minutes. Every sync is logged in the control panel, so the team can see what came through and re-run anything that failed.

3. Custom Pricing Per Customer: Each customer's prices are calculated from their contract pricing, customer category pricing, quantity price breaks and GST settings. Products can be restricted to specific customers or customer groups.

4. Order Approvals & Account Hierarchies: One user can belong to multiple customer accounts and switch between them. Head office accounts can handle billing and pricing for their branches. Orders can go through multi-level approval with approvers set per account, and managers can approve and pay in one step. Access to accounts payable and user management is set by customer type.

5. Product Search: Search runs on Algolia or Typesense. The search index holds product data only, and each customer's own pricing is added to the results as they load, so one index serves every customer.

6. Recurring Orders & Product Recommendations: Customers can schedule recurring orders with skip dates and reminder emails before each order is placed. Product recommendations are based on what Impact's customers buy together, calculated nightly from their invoice history.

7. Payments & Accounts Payable: Card payments go through Westpac PayWay with 3D Secure 2. Customers can also pay outstanding invoices online, and those payments are sent back to Options automatically.

8. eProcurement & Product Feeds: The platform generates three Unimarket eProcurement catalogues for university and government customers, plus product feeds for Google Shopping and Commerce Connector.

9. Control Panel: Impact's team manage orders awaiting approval, order leads, recurring orders, customer exception reports, product reviews, surcharges, shipping zones, carrier rates, bulk user imports and security settings from the one admin.

Key Features Implemented:

• Custom pricing per customer and product
• Contract and customer category pricing
• Quantity price breaks
• B2B and B2C pricing based on customer type, with GST inclusive or exclusive display
• Products restricted to specific customers
• Multiple customer accounts per user
• Head office billing and pricing for branch accounts
• Multi-level order approvals
• Online accounts payable
• Online quotes
• Recurring orders
• Product wish lists
• Persistent cart across devices
• Algolia and Typesense product search
• Product recommendations based on purchase history
• Westpac PayWay payments with 3D Secure 2
• Shipping zones and carrier rates
• Nightly Options ERP sync of over 10 million records
• Real-time ERP updates
• Orders and payments sent to Options every five minutes
• Unimarket eProcurement catalogues
• Google Shopping and Commerce Connector product feeds
• Klaviyo email marketing integration
• Two-factor authentication
• Technical SEO audit and implementation

Results

1. More Orders Online: Over 60% of Impact's business orders now come through the website, with a 33.5% conversion rate for B2B customers.

2. Website Sales Up 200%: Website sales have grown 200% since launch, with an average order value of $250.

3. Less Manual Work: Orders and payments go straight into Options, and product, pricing and customer changes come through from the ERP automatically, so Impact's staff don't re-key orders.

4. New Types Of Customers: Order approvals, head office billing, online accounts payable and Unimarket catalogues let Impact sell to corporate, university and government customers with formal purchasing processes.

5. Ongoing Development: We've worked on the platform continuously since 2018, with more than 5,500 commits so far. It runs on current versions of Laravel and PHP and is covered by over 950 automated tests, as part of our ongoing maintenance and development.

Project Services Breakdown

• Custom Laravel eCommerce Development (B2B & B2C)
• Magento Migration
• Options ERP Integration
• B2B Pricing & Order Approval Workflows
• Payment Gateway Integration (Westpac PayWay)
• Product Search (Algolia & Typesense)
• eProcurement & Product Feeds (Unimarket, Google Shopping, Commerce Connector)
• Email Marketing Integration (Klaviyo)
• Technical SEO
• Ongoing Maintenance & Development Since 2018

Technology Stack: Laravel 13, PHP 8.4, Livewire 4, Filament 5, Vue 2, React 17, Tailwind CSS 4, Blade, MySQL 8, Redis, Laravel Horizon, Laravel Scout, Algolia & Typesense, Westpac PayWay, Klaviyo, Google Tag Manager & GA4, AWS S3, Vite, PHPUnit 12 & Larastan

Services provided

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