Compac Industries Inc. is relaunching its business-to-business e-commerce site and integrating it with its EDI, accounting and warehouse management systems to improve how it processes orders from customers of varying types and sizes.

The distributor of home goods, oral hygiene products, and kitchen and bathroom items generated less than $1 million in e-commerce orders last year, but its e-commerce sales are on pace to grow about 20% this year, says president Dean-Paul Hart. Compac also compiled about $4 million in sales processed through electronic data interchange, or EDI, to large retail chains, including Walgreens, CVS, Kroger and Babies ‘R Us.

With a new technology platform that processes e-commerce and EDI orders from various types and sizes of businesses, Compac is positioning itself to increase its overall sales while also operating more efficiently, Hart says.

Compac is relaunching its e-commerce site on Nexternal eCommerce software, which it chose because it enables Compac to easily set up multiple price levels for several categories of customers, including consumers, Hart says. The new site, Shop.CompacInd.com, will launch by early October, he adds.

“The new site brings new branding, new clarity,” Hart says. “We have at least six price points we sell at for particular groups of customers, so we needed a platform that could support all those price points without having to build multiple websites.”

Adds Marcus Raven, Compac’s director of marketing and merchandising, “We wanted to create one storefront, putting everything from both B2B and B2C levels on a single platform, without having to manage two different back ends. Now multiple types of customers can access and buy across all our brands.”

Nexternal also provided for a pervasive shopping cart—one always visible to the customer—that wasn’t available on its old e-commerce software, he says.  “It’s also huge for us that the shopping cart can always be on-screen,” Raven says. “We didn’t want it to get lost throughout the buying experience. And we wanted to mirror as closely as possible what people were used to seeing on Amazon, where the cart is always on-screen.”

Nexternal has tools for tagging the approximately 350 SKUs on Shop.CompacInd.com with terms designed to improve rankings in internet search, Raven says. For example, the tools enable Compac to have product-related keywords embedded in a product page URL, helping the page show up higher in Google results. With the capabilities the Nexternal software provides for pricing products across multiple customer groups and improving search rankings, Compac says it will soon add about 800 more SKUs to the new site.

Nexternal provides the added benefit of enabling Compac to process all orders—EDI as well as e-commerce—more efficiently, Compac says.

When Compac first approached Nexternal, Hart says it didn’t realize Nexternal was a division of HighJump Software Inc., which also provides software for processing orders through EDI and managing warehouse systems. Compac had already been using HighJump’s TrueCommerce EDI system for processing EDI orders from large retailers. Because Nexternal’s e-commerce software was designed to integrate with TrueCommerce EDI, Compac can now process both e-commerce and EDI orders through the same technology platform, which sends all e-commerce and EDI orders into a single accounting system for updating financial records.

That integration, Hart says, lets Compac dedicate a single person to oversee all order processing. “If we didn’t have TrueCommerce EDI, we’d probably have to hire another three people,” he says.

Compac also uses HighJump’s warehouse management system, which integrates with Nexternal to update inventory records as the distributor processes online orders.

In about three months, Compac will also finish the deployment of software from NetSuite Inc. for its enterprise resource planning, or ERP, system, which is a suite of business software applications that managing such things as inventory, customer orders and financial records. Compac chose NetSuite in part because the technology integrated with its HighJump and Nexternal software, Compac says.

Also planned are sales through the Amazon.com marketplace, which Nexternal’s technology supports with features for sending product and pricing data to Amazon’s platform, Compac says.

The company declines to comment on the cost of the new Nexternal technology. But Raven says Compac expects to recoup the investment on the e-commerce technology by mid-2017.

Compac’s new technology system, he says, “is our opportunity to get engage with more people than we’ve ever done before, instead of us waiting for the doors to open.”

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Nona Tepper is a Chicago-based freelance writer.