International, B2B & Retail Ecommerce for cake decoration and baking supplies manufacturer.

As a predominantly B2B/Wholesale business, PME Cake needed an ecommerce platform that was natively designed to support such a model. That means functionality is inherent to the platform so tools like online invoicing (view, pay, part-pay, see credit notes), account management (credit limit, credit terms, account balance), quick orders and saved baskets is all available.

However, having some B2C channels as well meant that more retail focussed functions like a blog were also required. Fortunately, as tradeit has been designed from the ground up to support international B2B, Retail and D2C ecommerce it's able to provide specific tools aimed at each unique business model across any channel.

As one of the main reasons for choosing Red was our vast experience in integrating with the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products, the 2-way flow of data between tradeit and their ERP was crucial. This means data like credit limits and financial statements is pulled from Dynamics GP to tradeit in real time using web services, whilst other information like customer and order information is pushed from tradeit back to GP via XML. This ensures both systems are harmonious and up to date, whilst saving on lots of manual processing.

Having originally started with two UK channels, quickly followed by a US site, PME Cake have been quick to seize on the international capabilities of tradeit and quickly expand their business overseas. Following the UK's decision to withdraw from the EU, separate channels for Spain, France, Germany & The Netherlands have been launched to help fulfil orders from the EU and avoid much of the paperwork now required when shipping goods from the UK. A new channel to support Asia and Oceania was also launched out of Hong Kong. Other new channels are also in the pipeline, helping to expand their operations across the world. A big change for a company who barely had a web presence just a few short years ago.

One side effect of the rapid international expansion has been the limitation of their payment providers in being able to service all their different international channels. However, despite all being on the same installation of tradeit, different channels can be serviced by a different PSP, so TRU//ST Payments and Adyen have both been integrated with tradeit for different markets, meaning there has been no disruption to the business and customers still have multiple payment methods available to them across each of their channels.

PME Cake have shown that by embracing the demand of their customers to buy online, and selecting a class-leading B2B and Retail Ecommerce Platform, the potential for growth is enormous, particularly with their drive to expand internationally. We expect them to go from strength to strength as they continue to grow.