The Challenge

Like many of our B2B eCommerce clients, Smithers-Oasis wanted to create a wholesale site to keep up with the expectations of modern B2B customers. As eCommerce continues to dominate the B2C space, users have come to expect the same ease of ordering in the corporate, B2B realm. Smithers-Oasis knew that to meet their customers' needs, they had to implement a user-friendly B2B wholesale site. While they considered other eCommerce platforms, Adobe Commerce was the only solution that met their B2B needs and integration specifications.

As their longtime JD Edwards service provider, our team was familiar with the constraints around their ERP and how that would impact the integration with an eCommerce site. The corporate Smithers-Oasis IT policy dictates that their JD Edwards system does not push out any data, which deviates from a typical eCommerce and ERP integration. This parameter was the main challenge for our team when creating the Smithers-Oasis wholesale B2B eCommerce site.

The Solution

To meet the highly specific B2B needs of Smithers-Oasis while adhering to strict corporate IT policies that prohibit JDE from pushing out data, Briteskies implemented Adobe Commerce with a custom theme and a Briteskies-built API layer. The integration was uniquely engineered to be pull-based: a cron job was implemented to pull JDE for inventory updates, and real-time API calls were used to retrieve sensitive, customer-specific data like tier pricing and order history.

This complex integration supported several critical B2B customizations, including automated conversion of cases to pallet quantities and custom shipping rules dynamically determined by JD Edwards based on the cart contents. Furthermore, a checkout request date calendar was implemented to allow customers to select their desired ship date, replacing a previous manual process. This unique solution ensured both data integrity (via JDE control) and a seamless, automated B2B purchasing experience.

The Result

Smithers-Oasis ended up with a B2B Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 site that is integrated with their legacy JD Edwards ERP, sharing the required information between systems while maintaining their corporate IT standards. While the integration points were challenging compared to a standard integration, our team was able to achieve as close to real-time communication between systems as possible, given the constraints.

The Smithers-Oasis team had a unique go-live strategy that was very successful. They did a slow rollout, going live with just a handful of customers each week or so before adding additional groups of customers. Our team found this to be an effective, smart way to release a B2B site, which requires customers to create new accounts before they can shop. By going live with a few customers at a time, Smithers-Oasis was able to interface with its customers more, walk them through the new site and set up, and get feedback about the live site from real customers.

Since going live, Smithers-Oasis has entered into a managed services contract with our team, allowing us to maintain their new wholesale site and help with some additional projects as well.

The Details - How We Did it

Implement Adobe Commerce using the Briteskies foundational store and custom company module for building users and relationships within customer companies. Integrate Adobe Commerce with the existing JD Edwards environment using Briteskies-built APIs.

• Inventory – cron

• Pricing – real-time

• Order history – real-time

• Implement a store theme.

• Allow for inventory to integrate in real time while meeting corporate IT restrictions.

  • Typically, inventory data would be pushed from the ERP to Adobe Commerce, but that wasn't allowed within Smithers-Oasis's corporate data standards.

  • The Briteskies team built a cron job to reach out to JDE via API and ask for inventory, but that required the cron to ask for inventory on every product every time.

  • This resulted in large data responses for each chron.

• Create purchasing customizations, specifically around pallets.

  • Customers can purchase cases, and the customization then converts cases to pallets depending on the quantity of each specific item.

• Create customizations around order creation and shipping rules.

  • Depending on what is in the customer's cart, parameters are sent to JD Edwards to determine shipping rules, replacing the Smithers-Oasis team's manual process.

• Build a checkout request date calendar to allow customers to select their desired ship date.

  • Required specific rules depending on client type and shipping location.

  • Briteskies set up admin forms so that the Smithers-Oasis team can establish shipping options by customer or location.

• Set up tier pricing and adjust the integration point accordingly.

  • Smithers-Oasis wholesale pricing is based on tiers.

  • The real-time call to JD Edwards asks for the customer's tier price, requiring a customization to have company management store customer tier IDs for pricing as opposed to customer IDs.