As a manufacturer and distributor, Star Milling works with a number of dealers to market and sell their products. They were utilizing a legacy eCommerce platform that was not user friendly and yielded poor adoption among their partners.
As a result, the Star sales team was heavily involved in a manual order entry process, as some of their distribution partners preferred faxing in handwritten orders over utilizing the eCommerce site. In addition to inefficiencies caused by the platform’s complexity, the system did not have the ability to calculate freight as part of the ordering process, which brought about additional complications. Instead of seeing the full cost of their order up front during the checkout process, customers would have to wait until they received their invoice to understand the total cost, including freight. Trifecta’s challenge was to implement an eCommerce solution that would suit the needs of their 200+ distribution partners, solve inefficiencies, and increase user adoption.
Star Milling was an existing Salesforce customer, utilizing Sales Cloud to track accounts, contacts, and products. Star was interested in leveraging the full power of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, integrating their sales data with a new eCommerce site.
Our team focused on the utilization of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Communities on Lightning. Trifecta’s team kicked off the project with two days of comprehensive discovery to review Star’s existing systems and data flow, as well as the data within their existing Salesforce Org. Our team homed in on specific aspects of Star’s existing sales and ordering process to better understand how Salesforce Commerce could create efficiencies and enable them to reach their goals. As part of the discovery process, Star and Trifecta identified additional functionality that would better serve their operational processes, so we expanded our project implementation to include these capabilities.
Process
Trifecta developed a user-friendly interface, navigation, checkout, and search feature to be used by Star’s 200+ dealers. We built custom logic within the Salesforce platform to determine freight costs and communicate it to users during the checkout process, giving them visibility to total costs up front. We also enabled features such as the ability for grid ordering and options for requesting email notifications when orders are dispatched and delivered. As we moved through the project process, we identified some specialized processes and requirements that were specific to Star’s business operations and could be enhanced through customization of B2B Commerce. For example, Star Milling has a minimum order requirement for delivery and will-call orders based on total weight. Trifecta’s team built a custom solution within Salesforce B2B Commerce to alert customers and distributors whether the items in their cart meet this requirement. In addition to displaying the current weight of their order, the functionality allows users to go back and add more products until they meet the requirement or switch their fulfillment preference from delivery to will-call (or vice versa).
Trifecta’s team launched the Star Milling eCommerce solution in eight weeks. Star soft-launched their new eCommerce solution in May of 2021 with a select group of beta customers.
The full roll-out is happening in phases to maximize user adoption among their distributors. Star was initially planning on meeting and training distributors in person before transitioning them to the new system. However, the training videos filmed by Trifecta’s Salesforce consulting team have enabled some of Star’s tech-savvy distributors to get up-and-running on the new solution without the need for in-person, customized training. Beta users of Star’s new eCommerce solution have delivered positive feedback about the user friendliness of the new site. In addition to ease of navigation, a majority of the feedback has also pertained to the simplicity of the checkout process.
