WHOLESALE BOUTIQUE SPEEDS UP NATIONWIDE ORDER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM WITH FISHBOWL WAREHOUSE®
Wholesale Boutique is a nationwide wholesale supplier of unique monogram-friendly items, personalized jewelry, and fashion accessories. The company got its start in 1999 when the owner began selling wholesale jewelry out of the trunk of her car and at local festivals. Currently, more than Wholesale Boutique 30,000 orders a year are shipped from Wholesale Boutique’s headquarters in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina to retail stores and small businesses all over the United States.
Business Challenges & Needs
In 2009, the leaders of Wholesale Boutique made the strategic decision to move the bulk of their business onto the Web by launching their website: www.wholesaleboutique.com “The decision to move our business to the Internet offered such exciting growth potential, but it also introduced a layer of complexity that was new territory for us,” said Michael Berry, Wholesale Boutique’s eCommerce Director. “We could no longer handle the order volume using QuickBooks as our only application.”
“We could no longer handle the order volume using QuickBooks as our only application.”– Michael Berry
eCommerce Director, Wholesale Boutique
During their peak season, they spent up to two hours just getting the orders out of QuickBooks Enterprise to process them. Their Shipping Department was nearly unmanageable because of the fact that QuickBooks had limited integration with UPS.
They had to manually enter drop ship orders and other shipping information. Berry realized that the company needed to drastically change the way they processed orders if they wanted to keep up with all of their new business. He set out to find an order management system that would integrate with both QuickBooks Enterprise and the company’s eCommerce platform.
The Solution
Berry’s search didn’t take long. He found Fishbowl in 2010 and he decided it was the right solution to solve Wholesale Boutique’s urgent inventory and order management challenges. Fishbowl is the No. 1 manufacturing and warehouse management software for QuickBooks users. Fishbowl’s training and support staff helped the company to quickly get set up and start improving their delivery times. “Our Fishbowl technician was able to configure Fishbowl to connect our PDG Commerce Web store and our QuickBooks Enterprise environments seamlessly and with no downtime to our Order Processing Department,” Berry said. “Orders kept coming in, and we were able to continue to ship them out within a couple hours of going live!”
The Results
Wholesale Boutique started seeing positive results almost immediately after they started using Fishbowl. “We were able to process orders from our website using Fishbowl,” Berry said. “Our onsite Fishbowl trainer made our implementation seamless and helped us avoid a long and expensive implementation period!”
Fishbowl Warehouse has not only helped the company improve their delivery times and speed up their order management processes, but it has also improved their customer service. “The configurability of Fishbowl has enabled us to push more of our customers’ order information, such as shipping information and order tracking numbers, back out to the website, giving them faster access to their information and decreasing the number of customer service phone calls we receive,” Berry said.
“We are excited to begin using more of the robust capabilities of [Fishbowl’s] technology into our overall IT strategy.”– Michael Berry
eCommerce Director, Wholesale Boutique
The time the company used to spend solving order issues can now be devoted to further improving their customers’ experience on their website and to finding new sources of growth. “Fishbowl is a major part of our upcoming migration to barcoding and move towards tighter inventory controls,” Berry noted. “We are excited to begin using more of the robust capabilities of their technology into our overall IT strategy.” Keeping up with 30,000 orders a year would have been unthinkable for this company before they started using Fishbowl. Now they’re gearing up to add even more capacity, and there’s no limit to how big they can grow.
