Smithers-Oasis is a leading global manufacturer and marketer of floral foam, floral design tools and accessories, cellular growing media, postharvest products, temperature-controlled packaging, and specialized foams. With multiple divisions targeting the floral, horticultural and postharvest, and specialty foam markets, they have been working on improving their eCommerce presence for the past few years. As their longtime ERP partner, the Smithers-Oasis team tapped Briteskies to assist in creating their wholesale B2B eCommerce site, smithersoasisnorthamerica.com.
Like many of our B2B eCommerce clients, Smithers-Oasis wanted to create a wholesale site to keep up with the expectations of modern B2B customers. As eCommerce continues to dominate the B2C space, users have come to expect the same ease of ordering in the corporate, B2B realm. Smithers-Oasis knew that to meet their customers' needs, they had to implement a user-friendly B2B wholesale site. While they considered other eCommerce platforms, Adobe Commerce was the only solution that met their B2B needs and integration specifications.
As their longtime JD Edwards service provider, our team was familiar with the constraints around their ERP and how that would impact the integration with an eCommerce site. The corporate Smithers-Oasis IT policy dictates that their JD Edwards system does not push out any data, which deviates from a typical eCommerce and ERP integration. This parameter was the main challenge for our team when creating the Smithers-Oasis wholesale B2B eCommerce site.
Smithers-Oasis ended up with a B2B Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 site that is integrated with their legacy JD Edwards ERP, sharing the required information between systems while maintaining their corporate IT standards. While the integration points were challenging compared to a standard integration, our team was able to achieve as close to real-time communication between systems as possible given the constraints.
The Smithers-Oasis team had a unique go-live strategy that was very successful. They did a slow rollout; going live with just a handful of customers each week or so before adding additional groups of customers. Our team found this to be an effective, smart way to release a B2B site, which requires customers to create new accounts before they can shop. By going live with a few customers at a time, Smithers-Oasis was able to interface with their customers more, walk them through the new site and set up, and get feedback about the live site from real customers.
Since going live, Smithers-Oasis has entered into a managed services contract with our team, allowing us to maintain their new wholesale site and help with some additional projects as well.
"We were thrilled to once again work with our longtime client, Smithers-Oasis, to bring their North American wholesale site to life."
Bill Onion
Briteskies Owner
Contact us for additional information about how we can get your project off the ground.
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