For Us There Was No Other Choice
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are a women's apparel wholesale company
and FocusPoint eCommerce is our primary front-end ordering solution
and eCommerce platform. Our sales reps use the website to look up
inventory quantities and place all of their customer's orders. Our customers also
login and are able to place their own orders. The ordering portal allowed us to
replace our previous website, which was hosted by Shopify. Making the change
allowed our reps to use the website as their ordering solution. We had very
specific requirements on our sales rep's customer visibility and FocusPoint eCommerce was
the only solution that checked every requirement. When we chose FocusPoint eCommerce we
were also implementing SAP B1, which replaced our previous warehouse management
system and accounting software (Cin7 & Xero). With the SAP integration
we now have real-time inventory. This was a major issue that we no longer
have to worry about with FocusPoint eCommerce. With our old system, one of our sales
reps would say I’m “selling air” because they couldn’t count on the inventory
to be accurate. That is no longer the case! Our business is now much more streamlined,
and we have reduced a lot of manual work that we were doing before. Our
sales reps and customers love using our website now because the ordering
process is so simple. That is a huge win for us!
Pros
- They find solutions to challenging problems. They solved our sales rep's customer visibility issue when all other eCommerce solutions that we reviewed/demoed could not.
- They take the time to understand your business and the workflows that are needed. They added custom features that we had in our previous system that we needed to have for our sales reps.
- Their customer service is beyond superior to other companies that I've worked with. Even after 3 years! Honestly, it's only gotten better!
Cons
- I'd love to see continued improvements to administrative tools, particularly for managing product images and performing mass updates to sales rep customer assignments. Streamlining these tasks would save time and make site maintenance even easier.
- It would be helpful to receive a brief summary whenever new features or enhancements are released. Knowing what's changed and how it could benefit our business would help us take advantage of new functionality more quickly.
- Occasional webinars highlighting new features, best practices, and customer use cases would be a great way to help customers get even more value from the platform.
Return on Investment
- FocusPoint eCommerce has had a significant impact on our internal/administrative day-to-day operations. With the integration of SAP and implementing custom workflows, our processes in the warehouse, accounting, customer service, and sales departments are more efficient and streamlined. A conservative estimate is that we've reduced administrative labor by approximately 8–10 hours per week! As an operations manager, this has made my work days less stressful and our employees happy.
Usability
Other Software Used
SAP Business One, Microsoft 365
