Gesswein Stays on the Cutting Edge of B2B Ecommerce with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Leveraging BigCommerce tools to build a B2B machine.

Because the team at Brilliance Business Solutions knew how streamlined it was to integrate Acumatica with the BigCommerce back-end, they recommended BigCommerce over other ecommerce solutions for Gesswein’s digital transformation.

The Gesswein team had integrated their original ecommerce site with their ERP to pull in data like shipping information, pricing, product variations and more. After switching ERPs and migrating to BigCommerce, that connection was lost and had to be re-built.

“Instead of managing all of that within the BigCommerce dashboard, we set it up so that Acumatica could bring all that information into the back-end,” said Eric Dingeldein, Director of Project and Product Management at Brilliance Business Solutions. This allows Gesswein to manage all of their key information from one single source of truth.

“Integrating BigCommerce with Acumatica allows us to spend time on things that will drive more revenue and value versus having to spend time keeping the platform up and running,” he continued.

BigCommerce’s native promotions manager has also allowed Gesswein to enhance promotions that allows them to better compete within the market. Not only that, but they are also able to compete on more sales channels by leveraging BigCommerce’s native omnichannel integrations, like those with Facebook Marketplace and Google Shopping.

Using B2B Edition to maximize efficiency and improve workflows.

After deciding on a platform, they began work on building a solution that maintained feature parity with the customized site Gesswein had been using for more than two decades. To accomplish this, they turned to B2B Edition.

Gesswein has been able to use B2B Edition to expand on BigCommerce’s already robust B2B feature set to add in even more functionality to improve customer and sales team experience. This has proved especially useful when it comes to checkout. Gesswein is allowing its customers to choose from an extensive list of payment methods and purchase orders, and has even installed a quick order pad to make reordering products simple.

They have also leveraged B2B Edition’s roles and permissions feature to give certain individuals different user permissions within their companies, giving some the option to only add items to a cart, while others have full purchasing authority.

Additionally, as Gesswein began adding more and more products into their inventory, it became clear that a detailed search tool was necessary.

“They’re selling to jewelry manufacturers and metalworkers,” explained Dingeldein, “so the specs on their tools might go in quarter-inch or eighth-inch increments. There are a lot of SKUs involved, so they needed a very specific, detailed search tool.”

They scoured the BigCommerce app marketplace and found the perfect tool to meet their needs: Searchspring. “That’s something about BigCommerce’s Open SaaS approach, is that it enables businesses to get something up and running quickly, and then leverage different applications from the marketplace over time, depending on the need,” McDonald said.

Next, came recreating some of the custom functionality that made the Gesswein site so popular among its customers. Because of the vast amount of SKUs and products, customers often used the custom “Compare” tool to look at similar products on one screen. Brilliance Business Solutions took that idea and expanded on it.

“We created a comparison tool, but in a different way,” Dingeldein explained. “We put it into an almost schematic table format, so that way customers can see all of the products side-by-side.”