INTERNATIONALIZATION SOLUTIONS
Bar Codes Talk
When you're in a global industry, you need an international presence and a growth strategy that crosses continents.
Project highlights
Internationalization for B2B means more than speaking the language.
An integrated architecture allows your business operations to remain consistent but have a front-end experience that speaks directly to your client, no matter the language. Decoupling your infrastructure allows you to cater to each geographic demographic while maintaining the same backend. Streamlined content management allows for multiple front-end setups while maintaining a single platform.
The right internationalization strategy builds an infrastructure that allows you to meet your customers where they are — becoming a local — without physically being there.
- Connect your business operations through a single, centralized platform.
- Reach your customers in their preferred language and currency.
- Personalize customer journeys and create custom selling opportunities through location services.
- With localized data, be able to offer geographic pricing, catalogues, currency and control.
- Comply with local governance online.
- Centralize your international ecommerce revenue in your country of choice without trading off currency options.
Our work with Bar Codes Talk is about designing an architecture that enables location-based services and allows for seamless language, currency, and tax table translations.
This is what it takes to scale your products and services globally.
Background
A wholesale business ready to expand its global reach and improve user experience.
Bar Codes Talk opened its doors in 2009 and since then their business has steadily grown and evolved. They are a US-based business with a loyal customer base of over 150,000 wholesale and B2B companies. They continue to add new clients from all over the globe every day.
With growth comes new challenges. Bar Codes Talk was ready for those challenges because they chose to work with Acro Commerce and use an integrated open framework, building an ecommerce platform designed to grow and evolve with their business, not limit it.
Objective
Creating workflows that facilitated the entire business, not just ecommerce.
Bar Codes Talk set out to create an excellent commerce experience for their customers and automation for their staff.
To meet the expectations they had for their customer’s journey, there were a few hurdles we had to get over.
Speed up the sales fulfillment process.
Bar Codes Talk required a solution to get their customers from point A (placing an order for their barcodes) to point B (receiving their barcodes) in the most efficient way possible.
The roadblocks to achieving this included:
- Barcode order packages were too large due to image files — barcode graphics are generated on the fly through the site.
- Serving B2B customers means selling hundreds of thousands of barcodes in a single order. Bar Codes Talk originally built its site with smaller order quantities in mind. As they grew, demands became more significant, and the website could not handle the larger orders without crashing the entire artwork repository.
Streamline the label order process.
A thorough discovery process found a couple of obstacles that needed a plan first: ordering the barcode was step one. Step two required getting that graphic printed onto a label using full automation.
- The need for label-building software that could create an accurate bar code representation on-demand.
- Defining an efficient label order process from purchase to printing via NiceForm software and then shipping.
Building multi-language and multi-currency sites.
With an eye on expansion and growth, Bar Codes Talk required an ecommerce platform that could cater to a global market.
- Bar Codes Talk needed to sell its products in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and India while maintaining functionality and data synchronization across each language-specific site.
Solution
Custom-built integrations that solve the most complex business functions.
Bar Codes Talk faced many challenges to achieve its goals. Still, Acro Commerce had the knowledge and experience to deliver a custom open framework solution that realized Bar Codes Talk’s vision for their business. Read on to find out how Acro Commerce leveraged open software and integrations to create custom solutions.
- Barcode Generator (custom module) — automatically maintains a repository of pre-generated barcode graphic files so that customer orders can be compiled and processed as soon as possible and downloaded instantly.
- Stamps (custom module) — communicates with the Stamps.com API for enhanced USPS shipping automation during the shipping fulfillment process.
- Packing Slips (custom module) — creates PDF packing slips of label orders showing an itemized list of each label purchased. It also displays a sample of each label.
- Nicelabel/NiceForm (custom module) — communicates with NiceForm (label printing software) and automatically puts the labels purchased in the printing queue.
- HubSpot — automatically inputs all Bar Codes Talk customers into the HubSpot CRM and separates each customer into different sales tiers based on their purchase.
How these integrations worked to solve the objectives.
Automate the sales fulfillment process.
These changes allowed for packages to be put together faster and use fewer server resources. It also allows customers to download their orders faster than ever before, which resulted in a better, more refined user experience.
- The system automatically recognizes larger orders that the repository (storage for images) could not handle.
- When customers place a large order, they receive a PDF and spreadsheet that lists all the barcodes they purchased.
- They are also notified that their order was too large to put together immediately and that once their order is processed, the customer will get an email.
- We also optimized the software that builds out the images to reduce file size wherever possible.
Streamline the label ordering process.
Bar Codes Talks' product required a system that could handle highly configurable product options. We built a custom NiceForm script to communicate with Bar Codes Talk’s NiceForm (label printing) software, streamlining the printing process. This allowed for the automation of time-consuming, manual and repetitive tasks, speeding up the time to print.
The label builder:
- Allows customers to create a label from various selections of label types, sizes, and layouts.
- It includes a live preview that instantly updates the customer's preferences to show how their custom label will look.
Building globalized sites.
To achieve Bar Codes Talk’s goal of a multilingual and multi-currency platform and catering to global customers, Acro Commerce had to ensure that all of their country-specific sites worked in concert with one another and data across all the sites remained in sync.
The first step was building an integrated architecture that allowed for multiple front-end experiences. For example, Bar Codes Talk currently has English, Chinese, and Spanish user experiences, all supported by the same connected backend.
- When a customer places an order for a barcode on a language-specific site (China, for example), that site will sync the order with the connected backend system and start the fulfillment process.
- The connected front-end sites all pull data from the same barcode pool on a single database, which automatically checks to ensure that each barcode is purchased only once. This streamlined process eliminated a huge manual stumbling block in barcode generation.
- The US site will fulfill the order as normal and notify the other sites when their specific order is processed and ready for download.
Outcome
Bar Codes Talk came to Acro Commerce with clear objectives: Make the barcode and label buying experience as easy as possible, streamline internal processes to increase efficiency, and build a system capable of reaching global markets.
With the power of integrated architecture and the scalable solutions we developed, we can safely say with 100% confidence that we accomplished these objectives.
Working with Bar Codes Talk has been, and always will be, about continuous innovation. Through our strategic development process, based on Agile principles, we continue to improve on the solutions we have built to fit Bar Codes Talk’s growing needs and create new and exciting solutions as they build their business internationally.
Bar Codes Talk and Acro Commerce have partnered for over ten years, working daily as a cohesive team to keep the B2B enterprise growing and competitive in the digital market.
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