The founder of Wellness Within Reach (WWR), Peter Seymore Howe, has been a holistic health practitioner for more than 30 years. Peter’s approach to health and wellness includes therapeutic techniques, all-natural nutritional supplements, herbal formulas, and more to provide comprehensive, personalized wellness plans for his clients. As a wholesale practitioner for a leading supplement manufacturer, Peter has been offering supplements to his clients for many years.
When Peter began to plan for a new website for his Wellness Within Reach practice, he wanted to offer supplement sales to his clients on the new site. After evaluating several options, Peter and his team selected ArgonDigital to enable his online supplement sales.
Focus on clients
Like all health and wellness practitioners, Peter wanted to focus on caring for his clients, not technology and website maintenance. In practical terms, that meant we would need to create a low maintenance, easy to manage online store for Peter and his team.
Online store
For starters, we recommended a BigCommerce store for Wellness Within Reach. BigCommerce had all the essentials we would need to make the project a success: a low-maintenance SaaS platform with a comprehensive API and an easy to use interface for managing the site. In addition, the low start-up cost for launching a new BigCommerce store made it an easy choice for Peter and his team.
To get the ball rolling, ArgonDigital started by creating a middleware application bridge to facilitate communication between the new BigCommerce store and the manufacturer’s website store APIs. The application bridge would allow Peter some flexibility in the product offerings from the manufacturer, as well as some convenience features for scheduling product, inventory, and order updates from the manufacturer.
Meanwhile, the Wellness Within Reach team got started on the setup for their new Big Commerce store. To save both time and budget, WWR did most of the configuration, static content, and styling for the new store. Since WWR does not have a development team, ArgonDigital helped with a few code customizations to the theme.
Catalog Integration
The first step towards enabling online sales was getting the product catalog online. ArgonDigital worked closely with the supplement manufacturer’s development team to define a set of product catalog APIs that would enable Wellness Within Reach to retrieve the entire line of products. After a few enhancements, the teams developed a set of endpoints that can be used by any wholesale practitioner to request the full product catalog, including product descriptions, pricing, instructions, images, and videos.
While the manufacturer refined the the product catalog endpoints, the ArgonDigital team worked in parallel to build out the calls into BigCommerce from the application bridge. For Wellness Within Reach, we utilized the new product catalog endpoints to retrieve the product catalog from the manufacturer and populate the BigCommerce store with the entire line of products.
To further enhance the product offerings, we created a few configurable options that would allow Wellness Within Reach to exclude certain products from the website and automatically handle the display of special order products. To ensure the products are always up-to-date, we also developed services to update the product catalog nightly and inventory levels more frequently.
Order Fulfillment
To manage order fulfillment, ArgonDigital developed a few services to listen for new orders from the BigCommerce store and push them over to the manufacturer’s store via API calls. Thanks to the new integration, the orders are automatically sent to the supplement manufacturer and then drop-shipped directly to the Wellness Within Reach client. Peter and his team don’t have to lift a finger for online order fulfillment.
The last service we incorporated listens for shipment updates from the manufacturer on the order. Once the shipment information is available, the application bridge will update the BigCommerce order, and the client is notified that their Wellness Within Reach order is on the way.
Online Success
Together, ArgonDigital and Wellness Within Reach achieved the ultimate goal of launching the new site and enabling online supplement sales. The automated synchronization of the supplement manufacturer’s product catalog coupled with drop-ship order fulfillment by the manufacturer, means that WWR can stay focused on health and wellness.
The ArgonDigital people we’ve been involved with have been easy to work with, very skilled, responsive and customer-focused. They have a focus on understanding our business and our needs, and more experience and expertise with e-commerce and the underlying technology than we could ever realistically gain ourselves. The costs have been reasonable and that is important for a new, small business like ours. We have always felt we’re in good hands.
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