9,000 Items, £14K Saved: eCommerce Automation with Linnworks & BigCommerce

The Client

The director of the UK-based family-run company selling cross stitch, latch hook, tapestry, and all sorts of craft products at competitive prices since 2005 with over 10,000 items available online. They are in the top 3 online websites for needlework.

The Challenge

The client has been using our SyncTools (Linnworks QuickBooks connector) since April 2019 for Invoices, Contacts, Payments, and Purchase orders sync. They had over 10,000 active items and 3,000 to 4,000 seasonal items. BigCommerce to Linnworks inventory sync was working for them but the client needed further enhancements.

When the stock level of any item reduces to a low quantity such as 20 then the BigCommerce website should show a message under the quantity label as Only XX left! and for some items Last XX left! Here the client wanted to use the social psychology concept of FOMO(fear of missing out) to increase his sales.

Further when any item is reduced to stock level 0, depending on the item the BigCommerce website should show a message under the quantity label as Will be available in XX days or Arriving in XX days. Here the client wanted to give assurance to end users that they would still place the order. And they shall get it delivered in xx days. This would also increase the conversion rate at e-commerce stores.

At that time, the client had one dedicated person responsible for managing this task. This was costing them salary expenses, sometimes back and forth due to mistakes and dependency was testing the nerves.

The Solution

Satva’s business analyst and tech lead understood all the client’s pain points and the gap between the two systems and proposed the cloud-based middleware stock-level sync module under SyncTools only. As it already was connected to Linnworks that saved some time and cost for the client.

As the volume of inventory was high enough, we set up a cloud function to run every 20 minutes and download the latest stock levels, and based on the formula given by the client, the system was updating the item’s stock status message in BigCommerce.

To improve transparency and have a good hold of control, the Satva team included status logs of every update or change in item status or stock level in the sync history. so it can be audited as needed.

Benefits

• Increased Conversion Rate: Enhanced FOMO messaging led to higher checkout rates.
• Automatic Management: Daily management of stock levels for over 9,000 items.
• Cost Savings: Reduced salary expenses by over 14,000 GBP annually.
• Improved Productivity: Operational efficiency increased by 22%.
• Error-Free Operation: No support is needed post-release, with performance and accuracy at 100%.

Platform/Technology

• Scalable Azure cloud function, blob storage
• Windows Service in C# for scheduled download of items from big commerce.