We developed a B2B e-commerce platform for a large chemical company to simplify ordering and reduce the risk of related errors

Client

The Russian division of one of the world's largest chemical industrial companies, a manufacturer of cleaning and detergents, adhesives, cosmetics and personal care products. It has 12 offices and 11 plants in different regions of the country. The company's Russian division's revenue in 2022 amounted to more than 91.5 billion rubles.

The project customer is one of the company's business segments that produces professional cosmetics for beauty salons and specialty stores.

Problem: Ordering errors and high workload of sales representatives with routine operations

To work with professional cosmetic products, appropriate qualifications are required, so only distributors who act through sales representatives distribute the client's professional cosmetics. Only beauty salons, beauty parlors, professional cosmetics stores and private craftsmen with proven qualifications can buy from a sales representative.

At the time the customer contacted KT.team, the product distribution scheme was as follows.

1. The manufacturer's sales representative, assigned to a certain territory, found potential buyers, provided them with catalogs, talked about cosmetics and offered to place an order.
2. The buyer could choose goods directly at the first meeting or place an order later — during a visit by a sales representative or remotely by emailing him or dictating an order by phone.
3. The sales representative then manually placed an order into the manufacturer's Distributor Management System (abbreviated. DMS), from where the order was sent to the CRM system of a distributor operating in the region.

Consequently, the buyer could place an order only through the nearest available sales representative, as well as get acquainted with current offers, discount programs, statuses and order history — only by contacting their sales representative or distributor's customer support service.

This way of distributing products has become a problem for businesses for a number of reasons.

• The complexity of the process of placing and tracking an order for both the buyer and the distributor. All communication was carried out via email or phone, and any data had to be searched and transferred manually.

• Increased risk of errors when the order volume increases. Each item added increased the risk of the human factor having a negative impact on the correctness of ordering: the buyer could confuse the product name or specify a quantity different from the plan, and the distributor could hear something wrong, write it down, or reschedule something. All these omissions were discovered only when the buyer received the finished order.

• Most of the sales representative's time (up to 80%) is spent manually processing orders, rather than finding new customers and increasing sales. The result is a significant slowdown in the growth rate of the customer base.

• The low effectiveness of promotions. Customers could find out about current offers only upon request through a sales representative, and it took a long time to explain the terms of each promotion.

• Inadequate realization of sales potential. If a company did not have sales representatives in a region (generally or temporarily), the company lost its local market.

The client wanted to automate the checkout process in order to eliminate these obstacles to the desired growth in the professional cosmetics segment and made a corresponding request to KT.team.

Objective: to digitize the processing of B2B transactions, minimizing the dependence of the process on the human factor

The KT.team had to create an adaptive mobile application and web portal for easy work with B2B deals: the buyer had to be able to independently place and send orders to the distributor through a special showcase with the function of collecting applications.

In addition, the designed functionality of the platform implied the availability of convenient tools that allowed:

• track order statuses;

• view the full order history and repeat any of them, including those placed offline through a sales representative;

• learn about current distributors' promotions and personal product prices;

• receive information about the stock balances of the right goods.

At the same time, it was necessary to integrate the application with the client's systems and all 40 distributors, each with its own CRM, its own payment schemes, and its own business process logic.

The KT.team has created a single platform for online work with B2B orders that does not require the participation of sales representatives

Together with the client, we developed a B2B portal and a mobile application for placing and tracking online orders.

After the introduction of the B2B portal, sales representatives focused on finding new customers, while the customers they had already attracted are still assigned to their distributors, and the distributors themselves still have the usual bonuses and reward system.

In turn, customers were able to add the necessary items to the cart on their own, place orders and track their statuses online without the intermediary of sales representatives. The functionality of the application provides users with unhindered access to information about current prices for professional cosmetics, current promotions and actual inventory balances.

To create the B2B portal, KT.team used Saleor, an e-commerce platform written in Python. This platform is a set of tools and an administrative panel for setting up an online store. While working on the project, we modified Saleor to meet the customer's business needs. The store's front-end logic was implemented in the form of PWA (abbreviated from English progressive web application, Russian. “progressive web application” — adapts to both desktop and mobile devices, does not require separate development for each operating system and can be uploaded to app stores) written in React.

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To distribute orders between distributors, we integrated the application with DMS, using the WSO2 data bus with the RabbitMQ message broker, thus ensuring the reliability of information transmission. According to the new logic, orders from the application go to DMS and from there are redistributed to the distributors' internal systems.

In addition, the KT.team has set up integration with the company's training platform, where certified industry specialists are registered. Only registered users of the training platform can log in to the application and place an order. When trying to log in, the app accesses this platform through the API to confirm or reject the login.

Each customer gets access to personalized offers on delivery terms, price and quantity

• Price

Product prices differ for new and regular customers, and also depend on the volume of previous purchases. This logic applies to the B2B portal: it automatically displays a personal price for the client, taking into account their past activity. Data on all orders are stored in the system and displayed in the user's personal account.

The KT.team also implemented from scratch the logic of automatically applying multi-level promotions, taking into account the specifics of the client's business. For example, promotions can be either centralized — for all customers from all distributors — or valid only for customers from one particular distributor. Distributors were able to launch various scenarios of complex promotions and discount programs with many nuances: the new price or changed purchase conditions are automatically displayed in the shopping cart.

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• Warehouse balances

The application allows each user to see the available quantity of goods in warehouses in the nearest settlements. Customers can adjust the content of their orders themselves, taking into account information about balances.

For example, a customer wants to include 15 bottles of a specific shampoo in their order, but only 12 bottles are in stock. He used to send an order to a sales representative, who checked inventory balances, called back to the buyer to clarify how to replace the missing items, etc. — at this time, the order was still being processed and the deadline for its execution was delayed.

Now the buyer also sees information about the balances and therefore can independently remove items from the order or reduce the number of items in the cart by placing an order here and now without further adjustments.

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• Product delivery

In the Saleor dashboard, the KT.team implemented a logic for determining delivery conditions that is customizable through the administrative panel, which allows calculating the cost and time of delivery based on the customer's location. For example, if you need to deliver goods to Murmansk, but the nearest warehouse does not have the required items, for example, in St. Petersburg, the system will automatically take this into account and calculate the actual delivery times and costs.

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Purchasing companies were able to set access rights for employees and automate the process of internal order approval

The new B2B platform allows you to create user accounts with different levels of access within one legal entity.

For example, an administrator and salon owner can see individual prices, inventory balances, and previous orders, and can place and track new orders. And the stylist of the same salon sees only products and basic prices (or does not see prices at all) and can add items to the cart. After completing the order, the employee sends it to the administrator for confirmation, and only after that the order is registered and sent to the distributor.

Thanks to the quick order features, it takes much less time to fill the cart

Large customers work with large volumes of products and therefore, each time they placed an order, they had to dictate by phone or reprint the entire list of necessary goods into a letter, which complicated the process for both distributors and customers themselves, especially since the order packages were usually similar.

We have equipped the B2B portal with automated basket filling functions.

• Quick order via an external file. The buyer was able to upload their own Excel spreadsheet to the system, the data from which is automatically converted into the desired set of items in the basket, which saves the user from having to manually place an order.

• Repeat any of the previous orders in one click. The new platform made it possible to save in the customer's personal account the entire history of his orders made both through the portal and with the help of a sales representative. Each of the previously placed orders can be repeated in one click.

Results

• Each customer can independently, without the help of a sales representative, place an order in the app, based on information on available balances and personally calculated costs and delivery terms.

• The customer's sales representatives spend more time selling, marketing and promoting products.

• The company was able to take orders even from regions where its sales representatives are not available.

• The effectiveness of promotions has increased due to timely notification of customers about current offers through a special section in their personal account.

• By reducing the volume of offline communication, introducing quick ordering functions and automatically transferring orders to distributors' systems, the time spent processing each order has been significantly reduced.

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