October 23, 2023

Outdoor Designer Store

Background

Nick the founder of the Outdoor Designer Store, hired a landscaping company to design his outdoor area. In order to style an outdoor setting a landscaper would typically need to order off multiple suppliers (pots, furniture, heating etc). The current workflow was a very cumbersome, and error prone process for the following reasons:

Tracking what customers liked and disliked across multiple website.
Paying multiple suppliers.
Co-ordinating the deliveries from multiple suppliers.

Nick approached CoSource, to build a platform to solve these challenges, thus the Outdoor Designer Store (ODS) was born.

The Challenges

In developing the platform, CoSource faced a number of key challenges:

Designer Portal.
Mood-board.
The ordering workflow, which was a lot different to the normal ecommerce process flow.
How to split payments between multiple parties (suppliers / designers / ods).
Suppliers Dashboard.
Reverse Worksheets.

In Summary

Customer

Outdoor Designer Store (ODS)

Industry

Landscaping B2B

Business Problem

No B2B platform to facilitate ordering from multiple supplies.

Solution

B2B platform built on top of nopCommerce. Connecting suppliers with landscapers.

Outcome

Over 300 registered users (landscapers) on the system, and has been featured in several magazines, press releases and industry events.

The Architecture

CoSource used nopCommerce, as the framework to build the solution on top of as it offered the following benefits:

nopCommerce architecture follows well known software patterns, and security best practices.
Pluggable architecture made it easy to develop custom functionality.
Supports multi-vendors, which allowed us to have multiple suppliers without a lot of custom coding.

The three main users of the platform are:

Designers (Landscapers)
Suppliers
Customers

The Solution

To solve these challenges, several existing plugins were used, but the core of the application was implemented with custom plugins and event listeners created by us to enhance and adapt the nopCommerce functionality to meet our needs.

In order to have products on the platform, we developed the Nop.UniversalImporter plugin to import items from a variety of product data feeds.
Designers needed to update their profile, upload their own products and sell them via the platform, manage their orders (event listeners), customers and worksheet history,
payments and commissions (Ods.Nop.LandscaperBrandDiscount).
Designers and clients also needed a space to show their ideas for an outdoor area
(Ods.Nop.Core)
Different users of the platform require different implementations and views during the project lifecycle:
- Designers (landscapers) in charge of planning and design several projects
- Suppliers with their own dashboard, stock management and payments
  (Ods.Nop.Core / Ods.Nop.Payments.Bpoint).
- Customers with their own space to express their ideas for their outdoor area and keep track of the project (Ods.Nop.Core)

Designers PORTAL

The designers’ portal allows the designers to do the following:

Update their profile.
View their orders, customers, and work sheet history.
Upload their own products and sell them via the platform.
List other recommended products from other websites.
Upload images (Create an image library) to use on the mood-board.

Mood-Board

The mood-board allows designers to share product, and styling ideas with potential customers. Any products that are used on the mood-board can automatically be imported into the worksheet.

The ordering workflow (The customer journey)

The journey starts with a designer creating a worksheet, which represents a job, for a customer.

The designer firstly would create a curated list of products for the customer to review. The customer would then login into the system, and would review the products marking them as either approved, undecided, or don’t like.

This process would go back and forth between the customer and designer until a final list of products was approved.

Split Payments

Once the worksheet has been finalised, the customer would pay for the products. The challenge here was the products were from multiple suppliers, who not only had different rates of commission for the designers and ODS, but also different levels of commission by product category.

Reverse Worksheets

Reverse worksheets allows designers to host a page on their website, to grant their customers access to the Outdoor Designer Store. The advantage for the designer is that it gives them the ability to earn passive income, as they receive a commission for each order a customer places.

Final thoughts

The platform to date has over 300 registered users on the system, and has been featured in several magazines, press releases and industry events.

nopCommerce, because of its flexible architecture allows us to continuously build new features into the platform, while having the foundation to scale to meet future demand.