The original Greyville website was built in Ruby On Rails. Then it was ported to WordPress, but left in an unfinished state. It was capabable of listing products and making transactions, but in terms of being a B2B website, it was lacking. So the team at Greyville decided on a revamp.
The choice to use WordPress instead of Shopify came as in order to use Shopify as a B2B platform – ideally you need to subscribe to Shopify Plus, which is roughly £2k+ per month. Not particularly feasbile if you’re trying to minimise costs and maximise profit.
WordPress is a free platform and open-source, and with the right level of security can be incredibly power as a stand-alone or B2B.
The revamped Greyville site included the following features (before the company went into administration):
Xero Integration:
Allowing B2B customers to pay off their credit loans without having to ring the office. They would access this from their menu after they log in as a customer.
Unleashed to Woocommerce integration
Unleashed was used as a CRM and also as a catalogue of where all products and SKUs were listed, as well as stock levels. There was a plugin specifically made for Greyville which automatically ‘pulled in’ the products from Unleashed into Woocommerce, along with featured image, prices, product descriptions, skus and etc. Tide originally provided this functionality for £1k per year, but it was limited and costed more to have features added. With the new integration plugin, it could pull in *anything* that was within the API, as well as update stock levels, prices, images. It also didn’t cost £1k per year as it was developed ‘in-house’.
Stock Feeds
Various brands associated with Greyville needed automated stock-feeds to be sent out to suppliers each week to maximise sales.
