Clickstop Streamlines Logistical Operations for its Multi-brand Portfolio with Celigo

About

Clickstop is an ecommerce company based in Urbana, Iowa. Clickstop launched US Cargo Control in 2005, an ecommerce brand focused on trucking and shipping equipment. Since then, Clickstop has grown to a 200-employee company with close to $100M in yearly revenue.

Multiple acquisitions drove this expansion, and today Clickstop encompasses a portfolio of brands across a diverse range of industries. The main brands under their umbrella include EcoFoil, Fasteners Plus, Pepper Joe’s, Clean Laundry, and their original flagship, US Cargo Control.

Background

Currently, Clickstop ships more than 100 orders an hour across their ecommerce brands. And these brands couldn’t be more different, varying widely in terms of the target market, product range, and strategic goals. For example, their smallest brand includes about 45 products, while their largest has around 10,000. Some have been part of their portfolio since the beginning, while others are new additions. Because each brand is so different, each has its own specific goals based on market share, maturity, and growth potential.

Despite managing such high sales volume and a large brand suite, the Clickstop team is “lean and mean.” Kara Roehr, the company’s VP of Technology, and her team of less than 10 are responsible for all things related to the systems used by both supply chain and e-commerce.

The challenge

About four years ago, the Clickstop team decided to separate their ERP solution (NetSuite) from their front-end platform (Shopify). As a result, data had to move seamlessly between two different systems. Unfortunately, the integration tool they were using just wasn’t cutting it. In particular, the team was uncovering multiple issues with custom fields and user access.

After a year of trying to make the combination of the integration platform and various workarounds function properly, Clickstop decided to go back to their previous iPaaS partner: Celigo. “‘If we know they’re the best, why not use them?’ We thought we could cut a corner, and it clearly did not work,” says Roehr.

Because of Celigo’s former relationship with the company and their deep NetSuite expertise, Clickstop returned as a customer about 2.5 years ago. “One of the main reasons that we really chose Celigo over continuing to fight with the first connector solution was that it’s similar to NetSuite. There’s a lot of availability for our team to take that and own it,” Roehr says.

In addition, Clickstop saw Celigo’s potential to help them aggressively pursue their four main business goals: achieving their budgeted GPA and expenses, maximizing automation and efficiency, being exceptional internet marketers, and building a great workplace culture. Celigo’s capabilities around automation, and IT governance in particular, made it stand out from the rest of the pack.

The solution

Right away, Clickstop purchased the Shopify integration and set their eyes on Amazon and eBay next. They got started with 12-14 custom flows, and also took advantage of Celigo’s support services, which saved them from making time-consuming errors during the initial setup. The team even hired a Celigo system admin within Clickstop and built up their own product knowledge through Celigo University.

Almost immediately, Clickstop found Celigo to be far more intuitive and less developer-heavy than other tools. The marketing team, in particular, was able to get onboarded quickly and start adding product information on their own.

“We’re giving teams the ability to move quicker than putting a ticket in our IT queue and hoping it gets done within whatever time frame. But if they want to move and add products fast, they’ve got the tools to do it themselves,” says Roehr.

Clickstop found an unexpected but helpful use for Celigo as well: powering a custom PDF reader. Some of their customers don’t use EDI or haven’t been set up yet, and the Docparser reader takes their orders and converts them into a digital format.

“We’re using Docparser to get PDFs that are sent to us from customers and parse those out, and then through Celigo, they’re creating orders into NetSuite,” Roehr says. “Instead of a sales rep spending however much time putting that in, we’ll just automate it. So we’ll just continue to add those. We have some customers where we’ll get 150 of those in six months. That’s a lot of one person manually touching that. So let’s automate that.”

With that single initiative, Clickstop made significant strides toward their goal of maximizing automation and efficiency.

Bottom line

The new solution has increased satisfaction and confidence within the organization over 100%, estimates Roehr. Clickstop’s Shopfiy to Netsuite integrator is fully launched and the team is already seeing great results. Celigo’s Amazon integration has been set up on three of their e-commerce sites, and the eBay and Walmart integrations are almost complete. About a year ago, they added the Hubspot integrator for CRM, which was an expanding use case for their team.

After the success of the custom PDF reader, Clickstop is also looking for additional areas where Celigo can assist with its automation objectives. They’re also pleased with the increased transparency around orders and their status. “The visibility of errors and getting orders in are nearly real-time,” says Roehr.

This level of transparency isn’t only a benefit for the internal team; customers are happier, too, since they can immediately see when an order ships and set expectations around its arrival. “Getting shipments and information back to our customers that place orders over the web has been a night and day difference from what we were previously struggling through,” Roehr says.