Online Shop for Yoga Equipment & Lifestyle
10 Employees
Europe-wide distribution
strong growth since 2013
Like so many times in life, the idea usually comes before starting a business. This also happened to Marten Peyser, who began selling his own meditation cushions online from home in 2013. The issue of sustainability was important to him. And that was to pay off: Fairly produced and traded products have experienced a unique boost in recent years. It comes as no surprise that the sale of his own yoga cushions quickly gave rise to an extensive webshop that carries numerous items related to yoga, lifestyle and meditation. After all, yoga is a way of life that is about focusing on health and ethical principles. This is why yoga has been experiencing a very large influx in our fast-paced, stressed-out world for quite some time.
As far as greenyogashop’s business is concerned, the rapid growth created structures and processes that no longer met the current requirements for efficient and lean e-commerce. The old, in-house developed ERP system was to be replaced by a modern, lean system. Due to the connection to various online marketplaces, payment service providers and fulfillment partners, many processes were unmanageable and the workflows had become far from perfect. In their search for a suitable system that could integrate their own online store as well as external service providers and partners and simplify accounting and item management, the founders finally came across xentral ERP. Since greenyogashop had special requirements for the interfaces to external partners, the contract for implementation was finally awarded to ruhr.agency.
Before introducing a new ERP system, there are always questions about the requirements. Thus, ruhr.agency first worked out a requirements catalog together with greenyogashop, in which all requirements for the project were recorded.
In addition to order management, invoicing and accounting, the new ERP system should also offer the possibility of article management including product data. The main focus, however, was the connection to the many external interfaces and service providers. xentral offers its own interfaces to Amazon FBA and FBM as well as Shopware, which were set up accordingly by ruhr.agency.
The situation was different with the Avocadostore marketplace: In this case, an interface specially coded by ruhr.agency were used. As a payment service provider, the greenyogashop relies on Mollie, which presented an additional challenge in the project. Because xentral does not offer an initial connection for Mollie. Thus, ruhr.agency developed its own interface, which includes a wide range of functions. In addition to the usual payment methods, an advanced payment via Mollie was also set up for the greenyogashop. The highlight: customers can receive individual payment links from xentral or even automatically receive credit notes from returns. Both processes significantly simplify the daily work in e-commerce.
As mentioned, xentral offers its own interfaces for many third-party service providers such as Amazon. However, this is not always the case for external fulfillment service providers. Here, ruhr.agency had to code its own interface. This provides the greenyogashop with fully automated logistics processes: Customer orders, updates of product master data or the setup of new products, supplier orders as well as transfer orders to Amazon FBA now go out automatically thanks to the specially programmed interface.
On the other hand, xentral offers greenyogashop operators process automation and services that make up modern e-commerce. These include shipping notifications including tracking information, order cancellations, stock transfers, incoming returns or incoming deliveries from orders. To ensure the best possible customer service, error messages from the fulfillment service provider are also sent immediately to IT by email for immediate clarification. Customers have become very demanding when it comes to shopping online. That’s why customer service must also be at the heart of e-commerce. The greenyogashop achieves that with xentral and offers its customers an automatic returns management system. For example, returns notifications from a fulfillment service provider are automatically created as a return and a credit note in xentral. When the credit note is released by an employee, it is refunded to the customer in a fully automated process.
Nowadays, e-commerce does not just mean selling via your own webshop. If you want to run a successful e-business, you have to be present on various marketplaces such as Amazon, Avocadostore or Zalando. Marten Peyser and his employees are well aware of this. Therefore, the planning for further connections to sales channels such as Otto, Zalando and others via the middleware solution Tradebyte is already in full swing and will be implemented in the next project phase.
However, coding the interfaces and setting up xentral to meet greenyogashop’s requirements were only part of the project. A central aspect of any ERP project is the data. Since greenyogashop had been working with a proprietary system for years, the existing data first had to be consolidated and validated. In the next step, they were then migrated to xentral.
Modern, lean and efficient – by using xentral, greenyogashop now uses all the possibilities of a Lean ERP with connection to various external partners. At the same time, internal processes and workflows have been significantly optimized thanks to xentral. greenyogashop now works more efficiently and can offer its customers even better service at the same time. Marten Peyser, Managing Director of greenyogashop, knows this too:
“With xentral we were able to optimize processes and structures that were created over the years by working with our own system. xentral offers us all the possibilities of a modern ERP system and can be optimally adapted to future requirements and new sales channels due to its good expandability.”
Martin Peyser
Co-Founder greenyogashop