Chris Peterson
Senior Manager of Revenue
eyebobs
Customer
eyebobs
Industry
Ecommerce & Retail / Healthcare
Headquarters
Minneapolis, MN
Products Used
Shopify-NetSuite Integration App, Amazon-NetSuite Integration App, Returnly-NetSuite Integration App, Zendesk-NetSuite Integration App
About
Eyebobs is an eyewear company started by Julie Allinson in 2001 with a vision to make reading glasses fun and stylish. Based in Minneapolis, the company’s fashionable approach to eyewear has helped expand its range of functional products to include progressives, single-vision prescriptions, blue light, all-day readers, polarized sunglasses, and other accessories.
Background
Eyebobs sees several hundred orders a day from retail, Amazon, and its webstore. As the company grew, eyebobs relied on manual data entry of Amazon orders into NetSuite ERP, as well as on a custom integration between its ecommerce storefront and NetSuite.
The Challenge
By selling its products on Amazon, eyebobs relied on a full-time order administrator who would download the orders and the end of every day and manually enter them into NetSuite. In addition to requiring a dedicated resource for data entry, the process was slow and error-prone.
In addition, the company’s previous custom integration between its ecommerce storefront and NetSuite was unreliable, resulting in additional manual processes and expenses for the organization.
“Our previous solution was a beast of an integration that was always breaking,” said Chris Peterson, Senior Manager of Revenue at eyebobs. “Last year we had a Labor Day sale when the ecommerce integration broke. The entire headquarter team of some 30 people was manually entering orders in NetSuite so that it could be picked, packed, and shipped.” To manage the growth in orders, eyebob’s small technical team paid a retainer to a developer agency to build and maintain the integration on a day to day basis. Breakdowns, changes, or customization to their system required the team to go back to these expensive technical developers to make the adjustments.
Finally, eyebobs has always offered a risk-free return policy to its customers. While the customer had an excellent experience, returns management in the background was entirely manual and dependent on the customer service team to process.
“It was incredibly manual and difficult to manage our inventory, and a huge time-suck for us and our customers,” said Peterson. “The team could have been proactively helping customers through more sales instead of processing returns.”
It was critical for eyebobs to have an easy and no-hassle returns management process for both customers and staff responsible for processing the returns.
Our Vision
The Solution
WeTransfer signed a contract with Celigo within a month of procurement, selecting it over Boomi and Mulesoft. They selected Celigo for its powerful functionality, ease of setup and use, intuitive design, and library of prebuilt integrations.
Celigo’s pricing model was a deciding factor as well. “We started with five endpoints. Even though we’ve connected all five between each other, we don’t pay by the flow; we still pay only for five endpoints,” said Katia. “That was quite attractive for me because then I can make my architecture as creative as I want.”
While the team purchased 5 endpoints, the team first tackled the Salesforce-NetSuite integration challenge given the acuteness of the pain point.
“We selected the self-paced implementation for Salesforce-NetSuite,” said Katia, describing Celigo’s guided implementation program. “We are really happy with that decision because it’s documented quite well.”
As the team quickly built their first integration, the intuitive nature of the platform inspired them to expand Celigo’s use to many other areas in the business, including fulfillment data integrations, data warehouse, Stripe, Paypal, and more. If they encountered flows that were particularly complex, they would seek additional help from a small contractor, Multilayer, who were able to provide additional Celigo support as needed.
Soon, the team expanded to an additional 12 endpoints, including additional data warehousing and project management use cases.
“With Celigo, it is possible to connect and automate data from a data warehouse without the need for a data engineer,” said Katia.
Bottomline
The original Salesforce-NetSuite integration was a huge success for WeTransfer. Not only was the complete Quote-to-Cash automation working immediately, it accelerated time to close, while significantly reducing FTEs focused on manual data entry. The revenue accountant can now work on core tasks in the finance department and work together with Sales operations on the process improvements, and no longer worry about completeness issues associated with the sales and financial systems integrations.
“Finally, the sales teams had invoice and payment status data in Salesforce they needed they needed after asking for this functionality for two years. Everything that we promised to the users just worked. It was a huge success,” said Katia.
More importantly for Katia and that finance team was the reduction in risk posed by the implementation of ad-hoc systems.
“To me, this is about saving us a lot of capacity and headache by building additional systems controls and reducing financial statements risks,” said Katia. “With our previous architecture, we could not demonstrate to our auditors high quality data flows between Sales and Finance, and as a finance leader, I can’t afford that.”
“The mission now for my team is to eliminate any points of failure in the architecture. I want to draw a company-wide systems architecture. Clean up the stack. Connect what’s connectable. Replace what’s not scalable. Make things auditable; that’s my dream. I think the whole mission of Celigo marries quite well into my ambitious plans,” she concluded.