Afloral Gains Control and Flexibility Over e-commerce Ops with integrator.io

About

Afloral.com, Inc. (Afloral) is a floral decorating company that provides premier silk flowers, floral supplies, and decorations to DIY crafters, florists, and event planners for weddings and home décor. Beyond its expansive product line, Afloral offers step-by-step DIY guides, how-to videos, a design gallery, a wedding blog, and access to superior customer service.

Background

Afloral became a pure-play e-commerce company in 2007 after closing its regional floral distribution business. The primary sales channel today is the Afloral webstore with fulfillment handled by a third-party logistics provider (3PL). The company has been growing 10% year-over-year over the past decade.

The challenge

To keep pace with the company’s growth, Afloral adopted Shopify as their e-commerce platform. But, with over 3,500 SKUS and counting, they also needed a way to seamless connect and share data between the webstore, 3PL, and Afloral’s own warehouses. This integration needed to give full visibility into orders, fulfillment, and products between the storefront, 3PL, and warehouses.

In addition, Jonathan wanted complete control over and visibility into the implementation, so he could fix any issues himself, immediately. And, looking to the future, Jonathan needed the flexibility to build Afloral’s own ecosystem of applications. He planned to accomplish this by making the storefront as the hub for e-commerce operations, integrating third-party applications such as 3PL, accounting, and inventory management into the e-commerce platform.

Jonathan, was on a mission to find a solution that would not only save

The solution

Jonathan, being quite tech-savvy, realized that it didn’t make much sense to develop an entire application or build an integration from scratch – “I didn’t see a point in developing a brand new app when all we needed was to connect two data points together and map the data from one place to another.”

Jonathan knew about Celigo from past experience and started doing some research. As soon as he saw integrator.io, he was sold. “When I looked at integrator.io, it was exactly what I was envisioning.”

Integrator.io gave Jonathan everything he wanted:

• Control: Integrator.io makes it easy for Jonathan to quickly make updates to the integrations and monitor integrations with integrator.io dashboard
• Cost and time savings: Jonathan does not need to rely on third-party developers since integrator.io provides an easy, do-it-yourself platform for creating, updating, and managing integrations
• Reliability and scalability: Automatic data updates between online storefront, 3PL, and warehouses ensure that data in all the systems is accurate and up-to-date whether Afloral processes hundreds, thousands, or millions of orders
• Flexibility: As the business evolves, integrator.io gives Afloral the flexibility to easily add or update applications that are integrated to its e-commerce operations

Bottom line

Jonathan is very pleased with the integrator.io connections between their e-commerce platform, the 3PL partner, and Afloral warehouses. Jonathan was able to implement the setup himself without the need to hire consultants or bring in outside IT help. And, he knows that integrator.io provides the visibility he needs to address any integration issue as soon as they arise.

“I can’t stress the peace-of-mind we all have knowing that if something goes wrong, we have control over it. In the past, it would take a tremendous amount of time to solve even tiny little errors, but with integrator.io we have full visibility, so we can fix the issue ourselves, immediately!”

Best of all, Jonathan can achieve Afloral’s vision of building its own ecosystem of applications knowing that Celigo and integrator.io will scale right along with Afloral every step of the way.

time but save money as well. And, if he couldn’t find an out-of-the-box solution, he’d build one himself.