Overview
A South African food supplier required an online store that could take orders around the clock without creating a second set of records for the accounts team to reconcile.
WebAcumen was appointed to build the e-commerce platform and to integrate it with the company's IQ Retail invoicing and stock system, which runs on a server at the client's premises.
Requirement
Product data, pricing and stock levels were maintained in IQ Retail on the client's local server. Any store that duplicated this information by hand would drift out of date and generate orders the accounts team had to re-key.
The platform therefore had to draw its catalogue from the on-premises system, return orders to it automatically, and give customers an account-based buying experience with order history.
Solution Delivered
WebAcumen built the store on WordPress and WooCommerce, with customer accounts, promotions and a catalogue structured for repeat ordering.
An integration layer built on the StoreHub API connects WooCommerce to IQ Retail across the client's local server: products, prices and stock synchronise from IQ Retail to the store, and completed web orders are posted back to IQ Retail as sales documents without manual capture.
The site was delivered on WebAcumen managed hosting with SSL, daily backups and monitoring.
Outcome
The supplier gained a store that sells continuously while the back office continues to work in IQ Retail as the single source of truth, with web orders arriving in the system already captured. The platform has since been re-developed by another provider on a different system.