Caffe Ladro, a company that roasts coffee beans and sells coffee and pastries to wholesale and retail customers, is brewing up a new way to sell more easily online while also cutting operating costs.

The Seattle coffee roaster’s shift to a new web portal for wholesale customers, along with a new online storefront for consumers, has produced a 400% jump in combined online sales, , wholesale marketing coordinator Adrienne Kerrigan says. It also has reduced by 600% the time required to record online wholesale orders in its accounting software

The company, founded in 1994, operates 16 Seattle-area retail cafés in addition to its wholesale business of selling to other retailers, coffee houses, restaurants and offices. It specializes in selling “sustainably and ethically produced” coffees as well as its own pastries and deserts.

Until the middle of last year, Caffe Ladro’s online sales were hobbled by an e-commerce system that made it difficult for customers to find and order products. It probably turned away more site visitors than it converted to buyers, Kerrigan says.

Then it moved to its new e-commerce portal and EDI system, making a change that was like night to day, she adds.

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“We’re talking Stone Age to modern age,” Kerrigan says. “Our old e-commerce system was really bad and all of our customers felt it. Once we moved to the much easier, mobile-friendly online system, customers found it much easier to order and everyone started ordering more consistently.”

Caffe Ladro has broken up the project into multiple parts to address the needs of its three types of customers: consumers, managers of Caffe Ladro stores, and wholesale customers at restaurants, cafés, offices and other businesses.

The initial shift began last summer and involved the launch of Caffe Ladro’s new retail site, store.caffeladro.com, on the Nexternal eCommerce technology platform from HighJump Software Inc., which acquired Nexternal last year.

The new site provides for easier product selection and shopping cart transactions, Kerrigan says. For example, customers can place items in a shopping cart, then enter coupon codes and gift certificate numbers, and calculate shipping and sales tax based on their delivery addresses—all without leaving the cart. The site also handles subscription orders and automatic re-ordering. The website automatically sends all transactions to Caffe Ladro’s QuickBooks Enterprise accounting software to update its financial records.

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The early part of the project also added last year a new wholesale e-commerce portal, built with technology from HighJump that integrates the Nexternal eCommerce platform with the TrueCommerce Global Commerce Network for EDI transactions. The wholesale portal, which HighJump calls a TrueCommerce eStore, is designed to receive self-service e-commerce orders as well as EDI orders, and forward them all to an enterprise resource planning system, updating such information as financial records, inventory levels and customer activity. Some of Caffe Ladro stores place wholesale orders via EDI, and some via self-service e-commerce; the portal accepts either type of transaction. EDI transmits purchase orders, invoices and related documents between buyers and suppliers.

Most of the initial growth in sales from the new e-commerce technology came in the 2015 year-end holiday season, when Caffe Ladro was able to better handle the rush of orders. “The thing that really impacted our sales was moving from our old online store platform to the Nexternal online store platform,” Kerrigan says.

Caffe Ladro was able to run a test of the newly integrated Nexternal-TrueCommerce platform before deploying it, and quickly saw the benefits of avoiding having to manually re-enter wholesale orders into its accounting system, Kerrigan says.

“We saw the possibilities for it,” she says, including “greatly reduced data entry and not having to do a bunch of tedious data entry by hand. It cuts way down on mistakes. It’s been a very good timesaver in a lot of ways.”

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The biggest savings so far, she adds, have come from faster and more consistent coffee roasting orders from the company’s own retail stores, whose managers Caffe Ladro considers “inside wholesale” customers. “We save the most amount of time with the data entry by being able to streamline that,” Kerrigan says. “Those orders are now made by each individual store manager twice a week. It comes in through the system and we’re able to just take those orders and import them directly into QuickBooks without having to physically type in each of the order numbers.”

Each store order typically includes about 12-15 lines of products, she says. “It used to take at least an hour for one person to sit there and just hand enter all of those orders into QuickBooks. Now it happens in a matter of maybe 15 minutes, or much less than that.”

The next phase, Kerrigan adds, will integrate other aspects of online portal ordering for outside wholesale customers like restaurant chains and corporate offices, many of which prefer EDI while others prefer self-service e-commerce. This will involve first setting up about 40 different pricing levels for customers based primarily on volume in the Nexternal system, Kerrigan says.

“The outside wholesale customers are not currently being run through the Nexternal system,” Kerrigan says “We’re working on that but there are some price level pieces that are needing to be set up on the QuickBooks accounting back end before that will work.:

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Kerrigan adds that this final stage could take at least three more months to complete. But based on what Caffe Ladro has experienced so far with its new e-commerce technology, “I’m assured it will work,” she says.

Kerrigan declined to comment on the cost of deploying the technology from HighJump. A spokesman for HighJump did not immediately respond to a request for information on deployment costs.

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Phil Burgert is a Pittsburg, Kan.-based freelance writer.

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