Though Papaya sells directly to retail customers, a large portion of their business is done as wholesale. Running a wholesale site has different purchasing rules than a retail site, such as minimum order amounts, payment and shipping systems, and of course, price. Thus Papaya had two websites PapayaArt.com and WholesalePapaya.com. While making it easy to establish different workflows, this created additional problems in stock management, running reports, and doubled the necessary web development maintenance. Their sites were also built on the Magento platform, which though incredibly robust, is:
- Not very easy to use for shop owners
- Can be difficult to customize
- Requires ongoing assistance from Magento specialist developers, which we found hard to find available in the United States.
While working at the agency 7/Apps, I proposed merging these two sites into 1 master WordPress site running WooCommerce. One of my fundamental operating values is that at any point possible, I should empower my clients to take greater control of their online presence. With that in mind, we developed the theme and backend in such a flexible way in which the lead branding designer exclaimed “I can finally bring my website design desires to life on my own!” In addition to the wholesale management problems solved by integration, we identified a whole host of product/site/order workflow inefficiencies and created either automated or bulk modification systems to free up valuable time for their staff to work ON the business, not IN it.
I hope to be writing more on this later, including a case study focusing on Papaya’s ROI & a technical development post outlining our software solutions, technical challenges, and clever solutions.
