DTR Electrical Supplies LTD

DTR Electrical Supplies

DTR Electrical Supplies Ltd, https://dtrelectricalsupplies.co.uk, based in Northampton, is an Electrical wholesaler – selling to both the trade and the public. They use WooCommerce for their online website sales and Unleashed for managing their product and stock inventory.

The Problem

Like many companies, DTR have experienced significant growth in online sales, resulting in them investing in the quality and performance of their website.  However, the lack of integration between Unleashed and WooCommerce mean that that a number of key tasks has to be undertaken manually, wasting time and increasing the likelihood of error and overselling. Specific issues were:

  • New product details had to be entered twice, both on their website and then separately on Unleashed.
  • If a price or description needed to be changed, again it had to be done twice
  • If stock was sold online from their website, the change in quantity would have to be manually updated in Unleashed.
  • If stock was sold over the counter, stock levels would have to be updated manually on the website.
  • If an order was received online, details have to be manually entered into Unleashed so that the order could be fulfilled.

Operationally, the lack of integration caused extra work and increased costs:

  • If a customer ordered 10 items when they only had 8 in stock due to sales not being updated quickly enough, they would have to get back in touch with the customer to offer a refund or split a delivery.

When orders came in they had to input them into Unleashed manually, keying in dozens of addresses and loads of items every day which took a lot of time

Implementation

DTR reached out to TIDEConnects, who then quickly deployed TIDEConnects and configured it to handle product management, inventory synchronisation and sales order processing. All product and stock management are now centralised in Unleashed, with data only having to be added once.

TIDEConnects queries Unleashed every five minutes and if there is a new product or stock levels have changed, then the corresponding products are updated in WooCommerce.  Now stock levels are up-to-date, and customers can only order what DTR actually have in stock.

When products are updated, for instance prices change or a new image is added, the website is updated automatically, saving a lot of time and reducing errors.

In addition, when a web order comes in, it now goes straight into Unleashed in real-time, which is a big timesaver.

DTR Electrical also had some extra functionality added so if an account customer places a web order it automatically goes on their specific credit account rather than the generic web sales account that they use for non-account customers.

The Result

“Picking up real-time orders from WooCommerce and posting them in Unleashed is a big benefit as it keeps our online stock levels accurate. This also helps maintain integrity with our customer base, as nothing annoys customers more than a website which advertises products which we don’t have! This is particularly important as we pride themselves on being an honest and reliable business with a fast delivery time.

We now only have to do everything once! The time saving is massive. If we decided to stop using TIDEConnects and go back to our old methods, we would need an extra fulltime employee to get the daily work done. As we continue to grow, TIDEConnects will end up saving us more than one employee. Saving time is saving money so TIDEConnects has been a good investment. We can now confidently scale our business.”

Dean Redmond, Director, DTR Electrical Supplies

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