Project History

WebCrane has been partnering Castleberg Outdoors for over 6 years. Castleberg had an Actinic website that was built on Microsoft Windows software and then uploaded to the web server. There was no back end to speak of and updates had to be done on the Microsoft Windows computer running the Actinic software. WebCrane re-platformed the website onto Magento 1 and handled the data migration whilst maintaining the existing look and feel of the original site. The re-platforming was successful and made it much easier for Castleberg Outdoors to perform product and pricing updates.

Castleberg Outdoors had a number of systems in place to handle their day to day business workflows. One Stop Order Processing (OSOP) was used to manage orders and shipments, running on a Microsoft Windows machine. Cybertil was their shop ePOS system running on a Microsoft Windows machine and Seller Express was the system they used to feed Amazon and eBay shopping channels. The systems were not integrated and much manual effort was required to keep the inventory synchronised.

WebCrane introduced an integrated electronic point of sales system into the Magento 1 platform, enabling this ePOS system to run on any number of computers whilst sharing the Magento 1 product catalogue and stock record. WebCrane also replaced Seller Express with Magento’s M2EPro extension which feeds and synchronises Amazon and eBay automatically from Magento. The net result was that Magento handled web sales, shop sales, and Amazon and eBay sales from one central place, resulting in far fewer stock errors and over sells. Advanced stock adjustment and stock taking functionality was implemented to further improve stock control.

Once orders from all sales channels were flowing through Magento the final task was to replace OSOPs order processing functionality. WebCrane introduced an automatic feed from Magento to Royal Mail’s click and drop system, and bespoke enhancements to the Magento orders grid to effectively turn it into an orders to do list. Functionality was added to allow orders notes to be made available on the grid, colorisation of the rows based on the order status and columns to indicate the picking status of orders. Eventually OSOP was turned off and Castleberg’s entire system was running on Magento 1.

The full integration of the Castleberg systems reduced manual effort enormously and has also resulted in better and more accurate reporting, allowing energy to be focused on marketing and selling. The overall effect is that sales volumes have increased significantly.

Fast forward to 2022 and WebCrane has rebuilt the Castleberg Outdoors Magento 1 system on Magento 2 and is due to put it live in the first quarter.