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Mesher Supply Company

Order pipeline

For over 100 years, Mesher has served Oregon-based plumbing and mechanical contractors with high-quality and reliable service, support, and products. This fourth-generation, woman-owned business developed this reputation by maintaining close, personal customer relationships. Qualities their website failed to reflect.

They came to Above The Fray with a straightforward customer-focused need: make it easy to place orders, manage accounts, and pay online.

Never having done ecommerce before, the team at Mesher was looking for a development partner who shared their values and could phase out the project to serve immediate needs while leaving the door open to greater advancements.

Website

meshersupply.com

Platform

Shopware

The Challenge

While online sales comprised a small percentage of their business, Mesher realized that their website wasn’t serving current customers’ needs. It lacked basic functionality, and many on the team were hesitant to even share it with customers.

When longtime customers began requesting digital access to invoices and the ability to pay online, Mesher began exploring how to bring modern online ordering to their website.

At a minimum, they required a solution that would remove the manual work of their current invoicing system while allowing customers to log in, pay with a credit card, and review their invoices.

The big hiccup? Whatever ecommerce solution they opted for had to integrate with their existing ERP—DDI. A lack of native API options and limitations in its ability to call and receive listed products and pricing meant that no true out-of-the-box solution existed.

With uncertainty over the level of investment, concerns about development capabilities, and knowledge that their existing technology would require complex workarounds, Mesher needed a phased approach that proved value quickly and didn’t overwhelm their team or their customers.

The Solution

Establishing trust was the priority. After conducting an onsite pre-discovery meeting and fully understanding the goals and high-level requirements, we narrowed in on Shopware as the ideal platform.

Because of the technical limitations of their ERP, our Solutions Architect conducted a total of 4 in-person discovery sessions to fully understand the business complexities including existing workflows, business rules, and customer needs before moving forward with architecting a solution.

Rather than tackling everything at once, we split out the work into phases, prioritizing a custom integration between DDI and Shopware that would introduce a login requirement through their ERP and the ability for customers to pay invoices online.

With a stable integration in place, we moved on to Phase 2 of the project–more efficient invoicing, expanded invoice views, options for customer sub-accounts, and invoice filtering and sorting.

Phase 3 will focus on building out a full customer-facing ecommerce website that will bring further transparency to product listings, automatic payment notifications, and simpler account management for Mesher employees.

Services

• Business Consulting
• Onsite Discovery
• Systems Integration
• Development

Project Highlights

To bring Mesher’s customer experience online, we prioritized the back-end foundation first. Here’s what it took to make account management and online ordering possible for both current customers and Mesher’s team.

Custom ERP Integration

ATF worked directly with Shopware and DDI to introduce updates to the ERP platform that would make customer and product information accessible for account creation and management.

Credit card and ACH payment options

ATF built a direct integration between DDI and payment providers, making it easier for customers to pay online and reducing manual work for the Mesher team.

New Shopware payment gateway connector

ATF consulted on a brand new connector, CardConnect, for ShopWare’s payment gateway and used it as part of our larger payment integration development.

Customer account customization

With the newly implemented Shopware/DDI integration, ATF has introduced additional time-saving account management tools, including sub-accounts, invoice filtering, and notifications.