MedSpares

B2B — MEDICAL

MedSpares

Powerful search and streamlined fulfillment. How we brought this medical equipment supply company online.

Project highlights

• Custom solutions for operational improvements 
• Robust search function for improved customer experience
• Platform evolution through continuous improvement

Serve your B2B buyers with a platform that meets today’s needs and exceeds tomorrow’s expectations.

Matching business and operational requirements with customer’s expectations in your digital systems is a balancing act. The right digital solution brings those needs and desires together cohesively. B2B digital solutions need to drive revenue growth and company evolution. The right digital tools allow you to:

• Access product stock, inventory delivery & transparency of order status.
• Ensure real-time pricing accuracy, on a per-account basis.
• Simplify the reordering process.
• Offer your accounts specialty pricing, in a self-serve option.
• Create payment and accounting terms that reflect real-life needs.
• Integrate to payment gateways, invoicing, quoting and CRM systems.

Our work with MedSpares is an example of starting with an exacting set of requirements, building the right digital solutions and continuously innovating and improving that platform to grow with our customer’s needs.

Background

A successful offline B2B business model, in need of an efficient and powerful ecommerce platform. True digital transformation.

MedSpares is a medical equipment supply company based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. They sell and deliver high-quality medical diagnostic products. 

Running as a fully offline business model, MedSpares didn’t have a website, and they were accumulating products faster than they could sell them. They looked to Acro Commerce to develop a robust, secure, and efficient ecommerce solution to meet demand and scale the business to handle an increasing amount of transactions while decreasing fulfillment time.

Objective

Robust and accurate search functions through a faceted search tool.

Through a discovery conversation, it became clear that one of the site's core functions would be to give users the ability to search for products using a part number.

This search functionality is integral as parts are unique to the machine for which they are built. The only way to identify and find each part for these types of products is via its unique product number. Drupal's Search API and Apache Solr modules were the tools we needed to meet these search requirements.

On top of the search requirements, MedSpares also needed a tool to help keep the inventory that customers were searching for up-to-date. By displaying only the products they physically have on hand, MedSpares can increase fulfillment times and erase any conflicts for their clients. This required building a tool that MedSpares could easily use to update the site content.

Solution

A potent combination of modules to create a powerful and flexible search function capable of precise results.

The combination of Drupal Commerce and Apache SOLR, a powerful faceted search engine, was the key to the success of this project. SOLR works with the commerce platform’s Search API module to give the client the ability to create views (filters) to refine the focus of searches made from the back end of the site. This provides unparalleled flexibility. 

The commerce out-of-the-box search is great for searching keywords in basic content nodes. However, MedSpares needed a search capable of narrowing down search results to specific data types, such as product title, SKU, model number, etc. The Search API, combined with Apache Solr, allowed us to configure exactly what is searchable and assign priority to this data, resulting in a more relevant match and better user experience.

• Search API — A framework for easily creating searches on any entity known to the system using any kind of search engine.

Custom product import solution: solving the online product availability problem.

The biggest challenge of the build and one of the greatest successes was the development of a custom product import that we called Commerce XLS Importer. This allows MedSpares’ technicians to update a spreadsheet with product parts as complete machines are decommissioned and disassembled. The spreadsheet then updates the website inventory with images and descriptions. This allows for simple updates of products with multiple variations. While a spreadsheet may seem low-tech, it was a way to enable power-user behaviour quickly without adding the expense of developing logic to match what a simple spreadsheet could already do, en masse.  

• Commerce XLS Importer — A Drupal Commerce module that allows the import and export of Commerce Products using an XLSX file.

Outcome

A robust, efficient and powerful ecommerce site that opened the doors to global partnerships.

Through Acro Commerce’s continuous development approach, there have been many releases to the MedSpares website since it came online. Some of these feature improvements include payment and marketing-related integrations like PayPal Flow and MailChimp.

With this evolving commerce platform as the backbone of their online operations, MedSpares’ sales have significantly increased, and their business is continuing to grow. As a result of the project’s success, MedSpares was able to establish partnerships in the UK, which is helping them to further develop their internationalization strategy.

Project features

• Robust configurable product catalogue.
• Powerful faceted search functionality.
• PayPal Pro integration.