Blue Sky Energy
Blue Sky Energy engineers and manufactures components of solar products, and sells these items to a network of OEMs, distributors, and retail clients.
The Challenge
The complexity of customer and role-based pricing, accounting, and shipping policies created a series of impediments to accepting and fulfilling online orders from the B2B customer base.
The Solution
Blue Sky engaged us to architect and implement a highly customized, integrated, and automated online ordering process that could handle the sophistication of their business without sacrificing ease of use.
The team selected WooCommerce, the e-commerce plugin for WordPress, as the basis for this new platform. A hybrid of off-the-shelf plugins and custom business rules were combined to implement functionality which:
- Allows customers to register and be approved for role-specific pricing
- Accepts orders through a sortable one-page order form
- Facilitates the modeling and creation of custom products
- Processes payments via credit card (Stripe) or invoice (QuickBooks)
- Orchestrates shipping (ShipStation) via multiple carriers, drop ship locations, and accounts
- Transmits orders for remote fulfillment
The Result
Blue Sky Energy has dramatically streamlined its business-to-business operations, from customer onboarding through order delivery. Blue Sky has successfully automated:
- Highly custom B2B pricing based on client, role, and quantity
- Invoice creation and customer balance checks with Quickbooks
- Shipping labels creation and order tracking with ShipStation
- Creation of custom product firmware via a proprietary software package
- Fulfillment with an external partner
