How Celigo Helped AFG Distribution Grow their Multi-channel Ecommerce Business

About

AFG Distribution, formerly known as All Fun Gifts, Inc, was founded in 1999 and has grown rapidly in the past few years as an “Original One Stop Alternative” wholesaler. The company carries more than 8,000 products and are constantly sourcing and adding more unique items.

Background

In 2015, the company decided to modernize their ECommerce order fulfillment and inventory updating processes. The plan included: moving to a new ERP system, switching from Magento to the Shopify marketplace platform, as well as setting up integrations with other marketplaces, which would require an integration solution.

The challenge

When AFG Distribution moved from a legacy ERP system to NetSuite in 2015, they also selected Celigo as the integration solution to connect to marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, and their own business site.

Prior to the switch, they were always tied up with a lot of manual processes for inventory updating and other Ecommerce processes. The team was forced to spend anywhere between four to eight hours a day, fixing website errors and reconciling inventory. As a result, customer service suffered.

The solution

A key benefit that AFG Distribution has seen from using Celigo integration solutions is that they have been able to reduce a lot of that manual work from before. The process of automation has also been easy to handle, thanks to the many flow customization options that can be done even by staff without a specialized tech background.

“There are a lot of small new things that we have done during the implementation just to make sure that our orders are coming in customized using forms. And departments and other things that we use to segment our business and that are needed for processes, fulfillment, and such. It’s easy to say, okay, I want to go from here to here, and find a way to make that connection.”

With Celigo, they have been able to solve the issue of spending too much time on manual tasks as well, a big advantage when handling a large volume of orders. The team goes through the system for errors every day, but the number of issues sent out to be resolved has reduced significantly ever since Celigo was brought on board. AFG notes that it takes them just about 10 minutes daily to go through at least seven marketplace platforms.

Bottom line

AFG’s business has grown since 2015, with a current order volume of about 3,500 orders in one week. “Our company has grown between 15% and 30% a quarter for the last four or five years, starting just before we switched over to NetSuite, and it’s continued on since we’ve worked with NetSuite and Celigo.”

AFG Distribution says that they would have been unable to continue scaling without the automation that Celigo has provided them. “One admin spends 10 to 20 minutes a day looking at orders. We have an ECommerce admin team of three people and a fulfillment team of maybe six to eight folks in the back that process all the orders. We wouldn’t be able to do that alone, not with the volume that we do.

Now that the migration project is nearly done, AFG Distribution can continue with plans for growing the business with new online marketplaces on growing platforms, while adding new brands to their catalog. “We’ve got that one last site to move over from Magento to Shopify, and then I think our Ecommerce team is talking about selling on Wish later this year. And there’s another platform they’re looking into the following year. So, who knows how long it’ll be before we’ll need to do another website?”