Blueberry Diapers Upgrades its Web Platform, Grows Online Sales

Brands offering a seamless and engaging online shopping experience is no longer an expectation, it's a requirement. Whether you're selling to consumers or businesses, your customers want to feel comfortable making purchases from your e-commerce site. Blueberry Diapers, a manufacturer and global distributor of cloth diapers, is in a rather unique position: while the majority of its sales are to other businesses, its customers prefer a B-to-C-like online shopping experience. Nearly 95 percent of Blueberry Diapers' B-to-B sales are transacted online.

Blueberry Diapers realized it needed to upgrade its web platform to help it convert more online visitors into buyers as well as improve its back-end process for fulfilling orders. After a thorough evaluation period, the brand replaced its custom-built PHP website with NetSuite's SuiteCommerce platform in January 2010. The lack of automation that its previous website offered was a major factor in the company's decision to invest in a new platform.

"Previously we had a custom PHP website," recalls Casey McClure, Blueberry Diapers’ director of sales. "We had it custom designed for us in 2004, went live in 2005 and kept updating it every year, adding more and more content to it until we switched to NetSuite. It had limitations, obviously, in how much automation it had. There weren't a lot of things that automated to it; we had to do a lot of things manually."

The back-end functionality offered by the SuiteCommerce platform, particularly its shipping services, was especially attractive to Blueberry Diapers. Prior to the platform upgrade, the retailer was forced to manually pull customers’ addresses from its website and then go into outside shipping software like Endicia or UPS to ship their orders. Blueberry Diapers then had to get the tracking number and input it back into its system, save it, and finally send a confirmation email to the customer. Needless to say, the steps required to process an order were time consuming and inefficient, McClure says.