Northcore’s B2B arm, Left Point Distribution, sells to shops and distributors worldwide, creating the need for regionalised trade pricing and individual-to-customer pricing based on criteria such as volume sales.
In addition to customer pricing, there is also the matter of manufacturing cost, landed cost, etc., to track on a per-product basis.
Before POP built the bespoke pricing system, Northcore performed all these calculations and stored the data in an enormous spreadsheet. This method had the usual issues of managing large data sets and calculations in spreadsheets:
- Not very user-friendly
- It is hard to find specific data quickly and manage it efficiently
- It used a lot of linked formulas which were easy to disrupt or accidentally break, which then had catastrophic effects on the whole document
- Once updated successfully, sharing the resulting price spreadsheet with clients wasn’t great from a customer experience viewpoint
- Once the new year’s prices needed creating, it was a case of duplicating worksheets per country and then painstakingly working through it all again to update all the numbers for the new year
Using the CodeIgniter PHP framework, we created the pricing system to be as user-friendly as possible. The UI (User Interface) looks and works similarly to how you manage products within an e-commerce CMS. This structure helped transition to the new platform, as the team working on the company’s website already felt familiar with it.
Instead of a worksheet containing the whole product catalogue per country, the system has a single editable entry per product. This entry has the Sterling pricing and costs, plus the option for additional currencies such as US dollars and euros.
The product entry also stores the additional product information, such as SKU, catalogue and box quantities, and the RRP, trade price, distributor price, costs and margins.
Northcore can easily duplicate product entries to create products similar to existing ones, such as product range variants. When they need to create a new year’s catalogue, the team can carry over the whole catalogue and update it, retaining the previous years’ for reference.
Once Northcore has finalised the costs and pricing, they can create a branded PDF catalogue to issue to stockists and distributors.
The introduction of the system made cost and product price management much more straightforward, quicker, and more accurate, and the resulting PDF price catalogues significantly improved customer experience.
What we did:
- Scoping and planning
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Bespoke CodeIgniter build
- Support and additional development
