"Doubled Online Sales"
With 60% of his day tied up in stock data entry and duplication -- and a two month overseas holiday looming on the horizon -- the General manager of Mt Meru Wholesale, Steve Allbury, had to come up with an automated solution fast.
Mt.Meru Wholesale is a giftware and general merchandise importer that sells to retailers countrywide. The company has over 500 active retailer accounts on the go at any one time – including customers like Paper Plus and other specialist giftware shops. There are also well over 3500 stock items to maintain.
“It was very frustrating because we were having to enter stock data twice. It was tying up most of my time and it’s very tedious, mind numbing work,” says Steve. “In particular we had to come up with something fast because we were going to be out of the business for two months.
“Without changing to an automated system we would have had to employ someone to enter orders while we were away. All orders taken at that time were handled multiple times starting with our sales reps - even our website orders came through on email back then"
“Adding new products was also very time consuming as we would need to maintain databases in three separate locations and as a result I even researched changing our accounting package,” says Steve.
Mt.Meru’s website development provider at the time had some automation solutions, but they were templates which would force the company to fit in with what everybody else was doing.
Steve says he also did some research with the company’s clients and discovered that customer frustrations included:
- The shopping cart: When selecting one item, the website would take customers to the shopping cart check-out. If they were buying bulk, they were forced to go backwards and forwards between the shopping cart and other pages. It was tedious and time consuming.
- Speed: Customers complained the website was too slow.
- Getting lost: Customers had problems finding some products.
Steve researched the problem on the Internet and came up with four or five possible solutions. He emailed three companies and two replied. The fastest response was from Datum Connect’s Loren Astridge.
As a result, Datum Connect created a custom website and solution for Mt.Meru Wholesale which integrated their MYOB package seamlessly – all in record time.
“Having a detailed brief before we started really helped in reducing implementation time,” says Steve.
“At the same time our sales reps switched to hand held data capture units with barcode scanners and the output from these is also loaded directly into MYOB.
“With these and the web orders downloading easily into MYOB, it’s completely eliminated data duplication and now I spend virtually no time on data entry”.
“The seamless integration with MYOB has almost completely freed me up to work on the business. We went away on holiday and didn’t have any hiccups while we were away.
“Prior to working with Datum Connect our website orders were between 8 – 10%. We’ve already doubled that and I expect to do better as we go into our busy months,” says Steve.
He says he has put 450 new lines through MYOB in the last month alone – it takes just 30 seconds to upload a hundred stock items, complete with photographs, on to the website and it’s live and ready for customer orders straight away.
“It’s super quick.
“Previously customers would place an order, enter their credit card number and then discover their purchases had to go on back order if there was no stock available. Now, if an item is out of stock the web site will not allow customers to purchase it.
“I am a firm believer in making it easier for the customer to buy. It is all about the customer and it’s very satisfying to have eliminated their frustrations. Instead of customers spending 90 minutes shopping for bulk items, it now takes them just five minutes.
“Loren and the Datum Connect team pulled this solution together in just one month, which is extraordinary when you consider the complexity of the site and the features I wanted.
“I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner,” says Steve.
Print Page