Omnichannel Solution Enables Online Veterinary Retailer to Streamline B2B, B2C and Call Center Sales with a Single Commerce Platform
Sydney, Australia—20 August 2013—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that online veterinary supplies and pet healthcare retailer Vet-N-Pet Direct, has adopted the NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform to streamline its end-to-end business operations, including B2B and B2C sales, Ecommerce, financials, order management, inventory management, fulfilment, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing and third-party shipping partnerships—all without a dedicated IT staff and in one unified cloud software solution. Vet-N-Pet Direct replaced X-Cart shopping cart software, MYOB and a number of manual spreadsheets with NetSuite SuiteCommerce, giving it real-time visibility and control of its entire business to support timely inventory refreshes and seamless interactions with customers. With NetSuite SuiteCommerce, Vet-N-Pet Direct now delivers a complete, unified commerce shopping experience for B2B and B2C customers, a main driver of its 120 percent increase in profitability since going live in 2009.
NetSuite SuiteCommerce addresses key omnichannel challenges and delivers critical business advantages, including a 360-degree view into customer relationships, real-time data visibility and analytics, real-time inventory management, a dynamic web storefront, efficient order management, and multi-language and multi-website management. It allows one instance of NetSuite to support multiple websites across B2C and B2B customers and national boundaries.
Founded in 2005, Vet-N-Pet Direct sells and ships veterinary supplies and pet health care products via a single Ecommerce site to customers ranging from individual pet owners to large scale commercial enterprises. As Vet-N-Pet Direct rapidly expanded, its previous piecemeal infrastructure could no longer support its growth and it turned to NetSuite's cloud-based commerce platform to provide the flexibility, scalability and efficiencies required to future proof its business. NetSuite's SuiteCommerce platform enables Vet-N-Pet Direct to manage interactions with its B2C and B2B customers through one single commerce site, directly on the core NetSuite ERP/CRM business management application. SuiteCommerce transcends the limitations and complexity of first-generation Ecommerce systems to deliver new efficiencies for retailers like Vet-N-Pet Direct and a superior experience for customers.
"Before we deployed NetSuite SuiteCommerce, we had zero visibility into our business and were essentially flying blind—NetSuite has given us the ability to think, analyse and plan like a large retailer," said Belinda Geissler, managing director of Vet-N-Pet Direct. "The knowledge and insight it gives us on a daily basis is phenomenal. It has also saved us from having to purchase and manage expensive IT infrastructure, so I don't need to employ an IT person—NetSuite is our IT function. It gives my team the freedom to work from home if they need to and I can add users to the system in an instant."
Key to Vet-N-Pet Direct's business operation is the SuiteCommerce inventory management system, which has significantly improved the company's control over its inventory as it automatically calculates reorder quantities and how much should be kept in stock. It also allows the online retailer to plan for adequate levels of inventory with demand planning and forecasts on sales and inventory levels based on historical or manual data. Since switching to NetSuite, the retailer has gone from 3,300 SKUs in 2009 to 9,500 SKUs in 2013, and has also experienced a 50 percent increase in order volumes. Despite this growth, the efficiencies provided by SuiteCommerce have meant that Vet-N-Pet Direct has only had to add one extra staff member to manage orders.
"In our old system, the pressure on our inventory and warehousing increased whenever our SKUs did," said Ms Geissler. "NetSuite has enabled our inventory to remain largely static. Our entire inventory system is now smarter and more effective."
Vet-N-Pet Direct has also significantly improved its order management since making the switch to NetSuite SuiteCommerce. NetSuite's Order Management System (OMS) offers an array of billing options including invoice, usage-based, and recurring billing as well as the associated payment capture and refunds, to support the wide range of business models required to serve customers today. In addition, NetSuite OMS provides a robust, rules-based workflow to manage the lifecycle of a transaction—order-to-fulfilment-to-payment capture-to-repurchase. It provides Vet-N-Pet Direct with powerful back-office technology such as warehouse management capabilities, including bin tracking, pick/pack/ship fulfilment process, and the ability to support multiple warehouse locations. SuiteCommerce is integrated with most major and regional carriers such as Australia Post, UPS and FedEx to generate real-time rates, print shipping labels, and automatically send package tracking information to shoppers.
"The ability to trace an order to its precise location in the supply chain in real-time has significantly improved the service we offer our customers," said Ms Geissler. "NetSuite also gives us the ability to source courier freight estimates using a network of third-party partners to source the best shipping options. We have so much more flexibility now."
Vet-N-Pet Direct's marketing activities have also undergone a transformation, allowing the retailer to segment and target customers for the very first time. SuiteCommerce enables it to set the right price and incentives to buy, giving the online retailer pricing rules to apply to specific customers, products and categories. Previously, it was unable to record who customers were, what they were buying and how often. As a result, the retailers' customer satisfaction levels have elevated due to the transparency it now has from NetSuite.
"We now have game changing insights into our customers' behaviour and we can respond accordingly," said Ms Geissler. "These insights can now be shared with our manufacturers so we can engage in strategic co-marketing activities with them. Our professionalism, return on investment and confidence across the marketing spectrum has made a giant leap."
Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC for NetSuite, commented: "Vet-N-Pet Direct is a textbook example of one of the increasing number of emerging retailers that NetSuite has helped both refine and transform their operations. NetSuite is able to give business owners the tools they need to foster and facilitate continued growth in a cost-effective and scalable way."
About SuiteCommerce
NetSuite SuiteCommerce enables B2C and B2B merchants, manufacturers and distributors to seamlessly connect every step of a multi-channel, multi-location business—from Ecommerce, POS and order management to merchandising, marketing, inventory, financials and customer support. Featuring an advanced Webstore that allows the creation of uniquely branded and personalised shopping experiences optimised for multiple devices, SuiteCommerce empowers businesses to run across multiple touchpoints—web, brick-and-mortar stores, social, mobile—all from a single, unified cloud-based commerce system that provides unprecedented visibility into your business and customers. Please visit www.suitecommerce.com for more information.
Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission–critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud financials/ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing financial management software vendor on a global basis. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.
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