Magento Multi Store & Great Plains Integration Ignite Skincare Business

Planning future services and features for your online business is always a smart practice, but sometimes a change in the economy forces you to act faster. Our client, Innovative Skin Care, found themselves in this position recently. Fortunately they were able to adapt and redevelop their online business to fit the new online shopping demands of their customers.

iSC is a company that supplies skincare products to medical spas, also known as medi-spas, or med-spas. Med spas provide general treatments like facials, massages and mud baths, but also more enhanced treatments usually found at a dermatologist. These same med spas look to iSC as a source and find unique products to treat their own customer’s skincare needs.

With iSC’s success, they were ready to make improvements to automate accounting, sales tasks and orders but were facing hurdles with their overseas developer. The lack of communication and progress left iSC wondering if they could even get the job done. iSC needed help getting back on track. That’s when they found us.

They approached us with hopes of finally landing a winning team they could trust. We got started right away with a Microsoft Great Plains software integration but with a pandemic growing, we had to rethink our strategy. The result was a Magento multi store system that turned their company into a more efficient and scalable business.

iSC’s big development project began with the Microsoft Dynamics – Great Plains (GP) integration with their Magento 2 ecommerce platform. Great Plains is a financial software used to track accounting data for businesses. It can store and track all the financial records a business needs, and even some they might not have considered.

In this case, a Great Plains integration was necessary to automate the large number of order updates needing to be transferred from iSC’s Magento store into the GP software. Sometimes, transferring online orders to your accounting software takes manual work.

It’s a series of downloads and uploads between your ecommerce platform and accounting software – frankly, a lot of back-and-forth. And in a growing business, this method goes from a minor responsibility to a seriously inefficient job. iSC was ready to move on to bigger and better.

With their new Great Plains integration, iSC doesn’t have to worry about a sales data issue. Now, their Magento 2 system automatically sends sales data to the Great Plains software, and vice versa. Once Great Plains receives the order update it also alerts the fulfillment warehouse to process the order.

After it’s fulfilled by the warehouse, GP sends a status update to Magento, which also confirms the order to the final customer. This process assures accuracy, efficiency and increases the happiness of iSC customers – that’s the biggest win.

With the Great Plains integration running smoothly, the next step was to quickly pivot into an online model that could survive the new 2020 economy. The answer was the Magento multi store approach which allows iSC to create new online stores with different URLs but under iSC’s original Magento installation.iSC’s core sales revenue had to be re-examined and restructured.

This is where the idea for the implementation of Magento multi-store arose. Because iSC was selling products to medi-spas that couldn’t remain open under the new circumstances, the answer was to expand new ecommerce channels to the same spas they were previously supplying. And for iSC, the multi store setup was the answer to continue serving the same spa clients and their private customers.

This multi-store setup is better known as an affiliate website(s). These new websites are created to market and sell products owned by a parent company, in this case iSC. From our client’s original Magento install, iSC can create new websites for any medi-spa to sell the same iSC products to their own patients and customers. Simply put, each affiliate site has their unique brand, URL and owner, while iSC fulfills orders through their supplier on the backend.

This provides even more flexibility and ease for iSC to administer everything under one log-in.So now, instead of iSC only selling directly to medi spas through their website, spas can become affiliates for iSC with their own online storefront for their customers. This is a bonus for iSC, but also for spas who don’t have to worry about the time and cost of building a new viable website:

• Planning

• Building

• Maintaining

They can consult their customers, and direct them to the new affiliate site at an instant.

The good news doesn’t stop there. For spas that don’t need their own affiliate site, we developed iSC’s new Concierge site that falls under the general multi store idea. Medi spas can now order their customer’s products and have it delivered directly to customers. This saves both spa owners and customers time and money.

This process is known as dropshipping, and it’s a growing concept in the ecommerce world. What it means is the spa owner can sell skin solutions without ever handling products and still have it shipped to the end user. It makes the need for inventory space obsolete, which frees up resources on many levels.

And because customers couldn’t physically visit a spa, the medi-spas can process their customer’s orders through iSC’s new Concierge site. This Magento multi store Concierge site gave new life to iSC’s core services and their customers needs. A win-win!

With a Great Plains integration automating orders for their new Magento multi store system, iSC turned a possible disaster into a blessing in disguise. Their proactive approach (and guidance from an expert development company), put them in perfect position to transform their business structure.

iSC was able to quickly pivot to not only continue offering their core services, but also expand their ecommerce opportunities. The Magento multi store strongly positioned iSC for the future, but also the med spas and their customers to make this a success story in every sense!