equinavia gallops towards multi-channel ecommerce on znode
Situation
Equinavia is an innovative equestrian products merchant with a U.S. entity headquartered in Watertown, CT. The merchant operates multiple business models, selling both B2C and B2B, with resellers on most major marketplaces. Equinavia manages its own brand and is the U.S. distributor of Horze, Finntack, and B Vertigo brands, with a total product offering of over 10,000+ SKUs.
Challenge
The merchant wanted to grow revenue by scaling for more volume across channels while balancing multiple customer-type expectations. Equinavia managed a complex technology stack with its B2C channel running on a storefront and its B2B channel managed through a dealer portal. While remaining independent from a customer perspective, Equinavia sought to centralize ecommerce management for multiple channels.
Several of the merchant’s portfolio brands launch winter and summer collections. Equinavia’s retail customers desired the ability to view those collections and pre-book the products. The existing business process dictated that an Equinavia customer service representative (CSR) change orders manually when certain products come in stock and then authorize the customer’s payment before initiating the order.
Lastly, the merchant needed the ability to easily integrate its essential third-party business systems, which included an ERP system, a PIM system, a payment processor, a tax system, and more.
Solution
Equinavia selected Znode to provide the required multi-channel ecommerce capabilities and centralize commerce for all channels. Znode’s native B2B features, multi-catalog, and multi-store ecommerce management allowed the merchant to establish three storefronts (one for B2C, one for B2B, and one for B2B pre-booking). As Equinavia plans to expand sales efforts into marketplace channels and beyond, this centralization ensures the merchant can scale efficiently on a single platform.
By extending native functionality in Znode, Equinavia created a pre-book function for one of its storefronts. Beginning with the native quote, Equinavia enabled buyers to view seasonal selections not yet stocked and pre-book items. A Sales Representative, Sales Director, CSR, or any Znode administrator could check the status of pre-bookings per customer and convert those into orders when a percentage of the products came into stock. Any remaining pre-booked items could be reserved until they came into stock and were available for ordering.
This capability allowed Equinavia to meet the needs of retailers while also incentivizing its salespeople, who receive a commission when converting a pre-booking to an order. The flexibility to compile all pre-bookings into one order, check availability, and tag per-month deliveries, reduced supply chain issues. Equinavia sees excellent growth opportunities with this functionality and plans to use data retrieved from these orders to optimize commerce in the future.
Additionally, using the Znode Commerce Connector, Equinavia integrated business systems, including its Acumatica ERP system, Salsify PIM system, Avalara for tax, Authorize.net for secure credit card processing, Freshchat for messaging software, and ShopperApproved for collecting and displaying customer reviews.
“Znode provides a very scalable and sustainable approach to ecommerce that we did not find in other platforms.”
-Henrik Monfort, Director of Marketing and Ecommerce