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Metrin Skincare
Streamlining and automation allow you to move forward.
Project highlights
Supporting the needs of your franchise and membership networks is paramount. Meeting those needs efficiently takes digital solutions.
Building a digital offering that allows your business to automate is key, leveraging systems such as:
- Subscriptions, auto-payments, and account adjustments.
- Sales team commissions.
- Customer rewards and loyalty programs.
- Regional management.
- Reorder features.
The right digital solution for your wholesale business considers your entire ecosystem and builds for the future.
Our work with Metrin Skincare showcases how we can build a flexible and versatile ecommerce solution that supports the unique needs of a franchise and wholesale distributor network that includes the customer and the sales teams.
Background
Building the right ecommerce platform for franchise and distributor networks.
Metrin Skincare specializes in the production and sale of high-end skincare products. Metrin sells to both affiliates (franchisees), who resell the products and directly to consumers.
Initially, Metrin did not have a public-facing shop. They were in the process of having a website built on Drupal 7 when the agency undertaking the build closed its doors, leaving Metrin with a half-built site.
After losing the agency, Metrin set out to find a new one that could take on the existing build, finish it and successfully launch the new website.
Objective
Part rescue project, part building a scalable platform to promote growth and efficiency.
The first part of the project involved diving into the code and understanding what was built, half-completed, or not even started. This was challenging because we had to interpret code written by other developers, which was not structured as efficiently as it could have been. We began with a ground zero audit to document and review all broken pieces and amend them.
From there, the focus became integrations that would help their established distributors. Modules and systems needed to be built to handle the unique account requirements needed for franchisees and the tools Metrin needed to correctly and efficiently manage commissions. Taking the manual effort out of calculating and paying those valuable network members was a big priority.
Another objective that we identified in this build was to simplify the fulfillment and shipping process. Read on to see how the integrations Acro Commerce built achieved that goal.
Solution
Custom-built modules for handling unique business operations.
We developed two different modules called Affiliate and Legacy, which created a system for managing the different levels of users and their commission percentages.
- Affiliate — Created to serve Metrin’s existing clients as this system previously required commissions to be calculated manually.
- Legacy — Created to automate commission payments for new and future customers.
Creating these modules was a heavily logic-oriented process. The final product ended up being unique to Metrin’s business, not least of all, because of the company's multiple warehouses.
Multi-warehouse fulfillment, shipping and tax automation.
One of the big challenges of the build was mapping out the logic for fulfillment and shipping. With inventory allocated over multiple warehouses, there needed to be a consistent, centralized view of what was where.
From there, Metrin had to send out product labels, as needed, to each franchise quickly. This was initially a manual process; all labels were produced and shipped from head office and would have to go to each shipping company directly to get dimensions and prices.
- FedEx, UPS and Canada Post integrations — Automatically generate shipping labels, calculator shipping cost based on pre-set variables in the product set up. We also created the functionality to allow for international shipping in the future.
- Tax cloud module — Allows automatic daily updates of tax changes for each state in the U.S. This was another big time-saver that significantly simplified the shipping process.
Also, PHP7 was implemented to increase the site's speed, which was particularly important for mobile users. With PHP7 powering the site, the average server response time was 2.5x faster than the previous PHP5 install.
Outcome
An ecommerce site that improved functionality for a unique set of members, and a flexible backend that streamlined accounting and fulfillment operations.
Once the build was complete, Metrin’s site allowed it to streamline its processes, resulting in a dramatic reduction in man-hours needed to operate the company. This created a more profitable business than they were experiencing before moving to Drupal.
Project features & statistics
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