Maddies Pet Foods
“Our customers repeatedly acknowledge the Maddies’ commercebuild solution to be the finest in our industry.”
“We recognized we were missing out on the opportunity to provide our customers with an easy, efficient way to interact with our company 24/7. Our competitors were offering eCommerce, so we knew we wanted to add that service as well.”
“We haven’t needed to expand our team despite experiencing substantial growth,” says Prevost. “And our customer service team is able spend more than half of their time upselling, not just reselling.”
—Dale Hardy, Vice President – Sales, Maddies Pet Foods
Maddies Pet Foods
Maddies Natural Pet Products started as a family owned business in 1997 and today they are one of Western Canada’s leading pet product distributors.
“We’ve been using Sage as our ERP system since 2005, and while we’ve always had a website, we didn’t have eCommerce capabilities,” explains David Prevost, president of Maddies Natural Pet Products. “We recognized we were missing out on the opportunity to provide our customers with an easy, efficient way to interact with our company 24/7. Our competitors were offering eCommerce, so we knew we wanted to add that service as well.”
The company’s Sage business partner recommended they look at commercebuild as it integrates seamlessly with Sage. “It was a pretty easy decision,” recalls Prevost. “We didn’t want to consider custom integrations; we wanted something ready to go and that would integrate with our accounting software. commercebuild is ideal for that.”
With commercebuild, Maddies’ revenues are up, they are seeing more lines per order, as well as a higher average order value. Today 48% of their orders and 52% of their order lines come through commercebuild.
ONE STOP SHOP
Previously, the company had a second, separate website to provide customers with detailed product information that didn’t have a place on its main site. “Our main site is designed to serve as a marketing tool for our customers; they share it with their retail customers, so we didn’t want to clutter it,” says Prevost. “But having the two sites was confusing and cumbersome. We need to provide that additional data to our customers, so we wanted a way to integrate it all into a single, cohesive website.”
commercebuild provides the single, one-stop shop the company wanted. In addition to high level, consumer-facing product data, the customer portal provides wholesale customers with in-depth product data such as suggested retail pricing, quantity discounts and ingredient lists. They can also place new orders, find the status of existing orders, track shipment, check available quantities, and more.
“There’s even an auto order option, that generates a list of products that the customer has ordered the most frequently,” explains Prevost. “It makes it fast and easy for customers who purchase the same products frequently to quickly repeat the same order.”
UP TO DATE
The continuous, bi-directional synchronization of data between commercebuild and Sage keeps all product, customer, and order related data current. Changes made to item pricing in Sage, for example, instantly flow to the webstore, and as orders are completed in commercebuild, they immediately flow into the accounting software for processing.
RICH FUNCTIONALITY
When Maddies sales representatives pay visits to their customers’ retail stores, they will bring along a laptop or tablet to enable them to share product data from the eCommerce site, and to place orders while on site.
“commercebuild has a feature that allows our reps to enter orders on behalf of the customer,” explains Prevost. “It works great. We don’t have to give our reps access to the accounting software since it all occurs in commercebuild.”
GROWING REVENUES WITHOUT ADDITIONAL STAFF
commercebuild is proving a success by any metric. “We’re getting about 1,000 logins every week. Our customers tell us they love it. It’s a win all around,” says Prevost.
Automating such a substantial portion of its order taking tasks has allowed Maddies to grow its business without adding additional personnel.
“We haven’t needed to expand our team despite experiencing substantial growth,” says Prevost. “And our customer service team is able spend more than half of their time upselling, not just reselling.”
A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
With commercebuild, Maddies has a modern, user-friendly webstore that promotes the company and its products full time, saves labor costs and promotes additional revenues.
“We think commercebuild helps distinguish us from our competitors by offering our customers a personalized experience and providing them with everything they need to do business with us in one friendly place,” concludes Prevost.