Stone Technologies
The Client
Stone Technologies Ltd, A Converge Company (Stone Group) is one of the UK’s largest circular IT solution providers to educational, public and private organisations.
Before contacting Fluid, they had a brochure website that signposted customers to one of their sister companies to make a purchase. All sales and customer service was done manually by phone or email.
They came to Fluid for a website that would allow the public to buy products and access their services directly. Their goals were to:
- Speed up the buying and selling process
- Allow their catalogue to be viewed online
- Reach more customers and boost sales
In addition, Stone Group had a list of requirements for the site and their custom-built ERP. They needed someone to help guide then on a CMS and ecommerce system.
Following a series of highly technical discovery sessions looking closely into APIs, we determined that B2B Adobe Commerce was the best solution for the business.
Why Adobe Commerce?
Integrated B2B CapabilitiesStone Group wanted Adobe Commerce (powered by Magento) for the integrated B2B capabilities it offers, including:
- Create a purchase order
- Build requisition lists
- Request a quote and price negotiation
- Account management with self-service portals
- "Approval Workflows", ensuring that only certain users in an organisation have permission to place orders
Adobe Commerce automates and simplifies everything that their account and sales managers used to do manually.
Seamless ERP ConnectivityAdobe Commerce connects seamlessly with Stone Groups’ ERP system. Their internal ERP system, built by Stone Group, contains all of their products, orders, sales and customer information.
With more than 70,000 products, it was essential that their new B2B site connected smoothly with this system via API connections.
What we did
The new Stone Group B2B site was launched in 2022 on Adobe Commerce 2.4.2.
APIsOnce everything was documented, our back end developers built out all the APIs. We wrote the framework and created multiple custom tables in Adobe Commerce that would allow us to store and index the data being received.
DesignMultiple front end developers also worked on the ambitious designs produced by IF Collective. These required a lot of technical work, breaking the norm of Magento Frontend design and functionality.
TestingThroughout the build we continually tested the APIs on our side, working with Stone Groups in-house developers to test on their side to ensure it worked with their ERP system.
Client-specific portalsAn exciting part of the project was creating client-specific portals. This allows customers to log into the website with a unique URL, and gain access to a custom set of products and prices.
This was done by utilising the databases in the back end, pulling everything together by the API. With multiple API calls on a page, depending on what the site gets back from their ERP will determine what is displayed on the page.
IntegrationsWe integrated the site with key technology partners:
- Klevu
- Stripe
- Paypal
As Stone Group has 10s of 1000s of products, the site needed a powerful system that could handle the volume, producing search results instantly. To enable this, the integration with Klevu, the AI-powered search solution, was extremely advanced.
We integrated Klevu’s search and category navigation modules, integrating a category page that was custom-built by Klevu using custom Java Scripts - one of the first of its kind.
Award Nominated
Our work for Stone Group was shortlisted for two awards:
- 2023 UK Ecommerce Awards - B2B Ecommerce Website of the Year
- 2023 European Ecommerce Awards - European B2B Ecommerce Website of the Year
