LA-based Four Seasons General Merchandise, a wholesale distributor of more than 10,000 items in at least 50 categories, including housewares, health and beauty, stationery, toys, and baby items, ships hundreds of orders out to customers every day. Company management sought to improve its B2B e-commerce platform to meet growing B2B buyer expectations.
Its outdated legacy platform couldn’t keep up with today’s customer requirements.
Manufacturers and distributors are experiencing a tidal wave of change in how they satisfy customer needs. Many are moving from a transactional, product-focused relationship to a longer-term relationship based on a subscription offering — coined as Anything as a Service or Everything as a Service, XaaS.
What is XaaS?
XaaS is another one of those buzz words we’re hearing more about lately and it makes sense. A research article in TechTarget defines XaaS:
“XaaS is a general, collective term that refers to the delivery of anything as a service. It recognizes the vast number of products, tools and technologies that vendors now deliver to users as a service over a network … rather than provide locally or on-site within an enterprise.”
“There are countless examples of XaaS, but the most common encompass the three general cloud computing models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).”
With XaaS options, companies can pay to use software offerings and scale them up and down rather than making high-cost investments in hosted infrastructure.
QAD Digital Commerce is a critical component for facilitating XaaS. The best-in-class solution, a part of the QAD Complete Customer Management capabilities, delivers tools to increase sales, reduce upfront and ongoing costs and respond to rapidly changing supply and demand signals. It promotes an omnichannel strategy for B2B and B2C sales.
The leading e-commerce solution delivers order management, migration tools, Google Analytics support, a content management system (CMS), administration management including a business rule builder, integration via APIs, and SEO management — which all appealed to Four Seasons General Merchandise.
e-Commerce Challenges
Four Seasons General Merchandise faced challenges common to distributors reacting to the seismic changes the industry has seen in e-commerce and customer demands in recent years. Most of all, management needed seamless B2B e-commerce, optimized for mobile devices.
Before leveraging QAD Digital Commerce, Four Seasons General Merchandise couldn’t offer the mobile device shopping experience customers now expect and demand. It needed better inventory visibility, the ability to customize product fields/attributes/prices/deals, and a means to expand its payment options. In addition, the company desired website upgrades and improved website security, all in a solution that would integrate with its ERP and financial software. Finally, Four Seasons General Merchandise sought a business rule builder tool to deliver flexibility and an extensive library of APIs to customize its capabilities.
“Two things attracted us most to QAD at the outset: the out-of-the-box solution that would allow us to launch quickly and affordably, and the human capital — that is, the knowledge, experience and support the QAD team brought to this project,” said Four Seasons General Merchandise Vice President, eCommerce and information systems, Mahmoud Paridehpour.
QAD Digital Commerce Delivered
Four Seasons General Merchandise now operates its e-commerce and website with QAD Digital Commerce. Among the various results, the company gained:
- Mobile optimization enabling online shopping
- Improved website security
- A bundle feature that allowed the company to offer package deals
- Unlimited product fields and attributes for complex products and product configurations
- The ability to build a kit and sell by unit and case
- Business rule builder tools that automated business workflows
- Simplified data import and export to CSV or Excel capabilities
- Inventory visibility technology and notifications/alerts
- Quick order and re-order forms
“It was clear right away that QAD was the best fit for our needs,” added Paridehpour.
The platform now fully integrates with the company’s ERP and financial software. In addition, QAD guided the needed website upgrades and expansions, adding multi store capabilities, advanced sales and promotion tools, marketing automation and more. Workflows and processes are streamlined, saving time and resources. The fast launch of QAD Digital Commerce using its out-of-the-box capabilities gave the company the ability to offer its customers an optimal online shopping experience, plus the flexibility to customize options as the company grows.
“The QAD platform is great for any company that’s looking for out-of-the-box features and wants to go live fast,” added Paridehpour.
Read the full Four Seasons General Merchandise customer success story. Learn more about QAD Digital Commerce and its more than 100 features that support B2B companies and retailers in maximizing sales and reducing costs.
