Project History
WebCrane had already built Buon Vino a very successful natural wine retail website on a Magento 1 e-commerce platform. However, B2B trade sales were still being taken over the phone, with manual entry of wholesale order stock adjustments, manual entry of transactions into Xero accounting and manual invoicing.
Leveraging previous experience building B2B Magento website solutions for other clients, WebCrane designed and implemented a sophisticated B2B wine solution focused on the specific needs of the wine industry, allowing trade customers to quickly place orders at any time of the day whilst controlling stock inventory across all websites and the epos system. B2B customers benefitted from access to their full order history with a fast reorder capability, as well as the ability for wholesale customers to create an annotated favourites list, again with quick bulk order placement functionality.
Like many B2B websites, WebCrane built functionally to ensure that prices were only available to approved wholesale customers when they log in, but in addition we implemented individual customer discount rules to allow special pricing on selected wines. Payment methods handled were WorldPay, Bank Transfer and On Account and again these could be set on an individual basis.
To cater for customers who prefer browsing through a hard copy price list, WebCrane created a PDF price list generator which was designed specifically for the wine industry. This generated a professional looking price list directly from the Magento 1 product catalogue, with wines ordered by country, region and producer, complete with content pages and indexes and direct links from the pdf file to the website product pages.
WebCrane further improved the standard Magento 1 order placement process to allow B2B customers to leave order comments and references that appear on their invoices, and to choose whether to allow vintage substitutions. Major order processing improvements were achieved through full Magento 1 – Xero Accounting integration.
All in all, the Buon Vino trade website was well received by Buon Vino’s B2B customers, with one customer commenting that it was the best B2B wine website they had seen, and that included some of the large national trade wine suppliers.
With Magento 1 coming to the end of it’s life, WebCrane has rebuilt the B2B wine functionality on Magento 2, and now offers a complete Magento 2 B2B wine solution. For more details, please contact us for a demo.
