Are you wondering how to scale WooCommerce to hit those lofty revenue targets? We tell you how.
In today’s market, it’s important to not only do something that your end customers see value in – it’s also important to build strong brands. Porter’s basic rule of marketing strategy applies to everyone, and brands that can differentiate themselves, that stand out and that people relate to do better in a world where it’s easy to order cheap knock-offs from low-wage countries.
Most people who start working with WooCommerce do so as early entrepreneurs realising an idea and using the power of WordPress and WooCommerce to show how to differentiate. The strength of WordPress and WooCommerce is that it democratises the tools of production, as Chris Anderson would describe it when describing the coming market of the Internet and its“Long tail“. With WooCommerce, people today sell everything from funerals and mobile phone cases to electric guitars.
However, as your e-commerce business starts to grow, you need to let go of the reins and hand over control to others who have specialised rather than doing everything yourself. By focusing on your business, you can be more efficient with your time to focus on what really matters – the core product you provide to your customers and the marketing of it. To get to where you want to be, however, it’s important to realise that you don’t just need a nice e-commerce store – you need serious IT support in the form of an ERP system ( among other things) for WooCommerce to continue to deliver and scale. Without this, it is difficult to reach the billion-dollar goals. It’s time to let go of your existing system puzzle (often with fortnox as a central part) and make an investment in your future.
What is headless e-commerce?
Headless e-commerce is a concept that technically separates the business-critical software from the software that drives e-commerce. The ERP system takes care of all the complicated bits behind the scenes and serves simple answers to the e-commerce. The answer is usually not “42” but perhaps rather from which of the 4 international warehouses a specific item should be sent to streamline shipping. The ERP system ensures that everyone involved in the organisation gets the information they need, and as an owner you can sit and watch when all parts of the machinery do exactly as intended. Nothing feels as good as when everything just works, does it?
Having this arrangement between the systems means that you can have different development rates in the different systems. In the business-critical systems, you need to be very, very careful because if something there breaks or goes wrong, you get big problems and angry customers. In e-commerce, however, you need to be able to move forward quickly and cost-effectively to create value for your end customers and thus be able to stay ahead of your competitors.
An ERP system combined with WordPress and WooCommerce provides such an approach. The advantage of this is that you can also own all parts of the system and have total control as business systems can be operated with any operating partner or within your own IT infrastructure. It is of course also possible to rent a SaaS solution such as Centra or Storm, with all the pros and cons this entails.
Headless WooCommerce with Sage X3
By converting your e-commerce with WooCommerce to a Headless WooCommerce, you can achieve this vision in a very cost-effective way. We have experience working with a couple of different ERP systems to achieve this vision, and some obviously work better than others. One of the ones we are happy to recommend and where we also have ready-made solutions is Sage X3 (Sage Business Cloud Enterprise Management).
With this solution, order management, product data, individual price lists, inventory management, stock status, etc. are managed from Sage, and WordPress/WooCommerce is transformed into a marketing platform where you can very quickly build and test new features and publish content.
Before a project like this, don’t forget that the government has tasked the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth with distributing state aid for digitalisation projects – this means that you can get a large part of your project funded. How great is that?
Case: Sage X3 for Strandberg Guitars
Strandberg Guitars has a strong brand with people who love guitars. When we started working together, they had more than 100,000 customer contacts who volunteered that they wanted new products. The problem for Strandberg was that the majority of their sales went through one or sometimes several retailers, which put a lot of pressure on margins. But it was also convenient: they received larger orders of products through their resellers. How to manage huge volumes of orders without drowning in administration?
They decided to invest in the digitalisation of their business processes and to build an e-commerce to access their worldwide following who already loved their products – but were not really accessible today.
System Support was responsible for implementing the Sage ERP system and we for WooCommerce. The result was a website that started driving sales – without any marketing – the day after launch.
What does it cost?
E-commerce
We have turnkey solutions for e-commerce that will get you far with your project right from the start. However, this is only the general starting point of your project, because no two projects are the same – and neither is its budget. However, we want you to have at least 300tkr to spend in a project where we will integrate with Sage.
We always start by conducting a workshop where we find out together what is the right thing to do and decide the scope of the project. The workshop has a fixed price of 20tkr.
Contact us to get a demo of our starting solution and to book a workshop.
Sage
To implement a project with Sage, the following is needed:
- Sage X3 implementation project – normally 250-300tkr
- Sage X3 licence cost – around 80-100k (one-off cost)
- Sage X3 annual maintenance cost – about 15-20tkr / year
- Sage X3 operation (Private cloud) – about 5tkr / month (can handle 3-4 orders / second – more orders means more expensive operation)
Contact System Support to see if Sage is the right solution for you and to get a more complete quote.