About
Half Price Drapes is a family owned business designing and providing quality window coverings since 2005. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, HPD has grown from a small workroom and storefront, serving our local community, to a leading E-commerce specialty company. HPD now provides a wide range of ready-made, made to order and custom products across the country and beyond. From New York to Miami, Seattle to San Diego and everywhere in between Half Price Drapes has dressed more than 1 million windows across North America.
The Challenge
Half Price Drapes needed a solution that would handle multi-channel e-commerce, as well as inventory management across multiple warehouses. Additionally, they needed custom functionality such as fabric calculations, which would measure the amount of the fabric to be cut along with advanced calculations for matching dye lots of the curtain to ensure that each of the curtains matches in terms of quality and color. One of the most important requirements of this project was that all elements needed to integrate to give one dashboard, and one central location for all information being stored.
In addition to these advanced calculations, Half Price Drapes required all this functionality to be implemented and set through the Microsoft NAV ERP system to be able to trace and track the profitability of each of the curtains. Needing a more advanced solution than an out of the box e-commerce platform they were looking and needed an enterprise solution that would help them to achieve their end goals. In addition to advanced backend capabilities, Half Price Drapes was looking for a solution provider which would be able to support marketing invectives including marketplace management, website optimization, and SEO driven marketing. They essentially needed a partner that would help them turn their ideas into reality, as well as stay competitive in their niche of the e-commerce world.
The Approach
The first aspect of starting was to understand the business and processes clearly to understand the next steps in the project. With rapidly growing business and growth on – Overstock, Wayfair, Amazon, and the Webstore Half Price Drapes required a business partner who could help them grow further as well as make technology an enabler instead of getting it the way. The typical approach of working with Half Price Drapes is to listen to their concern, which is consistently changing with over 10 years of partnership. By working with them to automate all aspects of their business, including warehouse, inventory, e-commerce, marketing, marketplaces, and optimization we are able to create a business that runs itself and continued to grow exponentially year on year.
A highlight of How We Helped Increase Revenue
Integrated Microsoft NAV – Centralized Backend Management
Needing a centralized backend system to make the management process smooth, easy and automated, Half Price Drapes required a seamless integration between their ERP system and e-commerce. The integration between Half Price Drapes e-commerce backend system and, Microsoft Dynamics NAV creates an efficient and effective extension of the e-commerce sales activities. The perfect bridge between product information and business logic, Half Price Drapes website became an extension of the invaluable source of information provided by the Microsoft NAV ERP system. The result of integration provided Half Price Drapes with the Business Intelligence they needed to make better and more cost-effective decisions.
Automated Custom Inventory Management System
Needing a centralized system for all inventory we created an automated system which would accommodate all areas of Half Price Drapes business including multi-warehouse management, marketplace integration, and e-commerce stores. All inventory was synced to Half Price Drapes NAV ERP integration. Ensuring that inventory stayed updated in real time on any store, marketplace, or warehouse. All attributes from product catalog are synced in real time, so any changes made or stock update show everywhere. The result of this is a more profitably run business and business intelligence that can be counted on.
Advanced Tax Management
Needing a way to automate e-commerce sales tax transactions, we built an automatic tax calculation system based on zip codes. E-commerce software often overlooks or oversimplifies sales tax calculation, we built an advanced taxation feature that lets the customers calculate taxes on the basis of their zip codes. By creating this program Half Price Drapes has been able to spend less time worrying about compliance and dedicate more time to grow their business.
Business Intelligence System
By integrating Half Price Drapes business systems, we were able to create a long list of business intelligence reports to help them run their business better. Our unique business intelligence reports include, and automated the main reports needed to efficiently run an e-commerce business. Some of the reports we created for Half Price included:
- Top Performers:Most profitable advertising campaigns, customers, segments, products, and sales channels.
- Trend Analysis:Analysis of changing customer preferences and behavior.
- Margin Analysis:cost and profitability of products and product lines, areas where margins can be increased, price sensitivity and elasticity of demand.
- Marketing Reports:Products included in the cart, abandoned carts, search terms used, the response of newsletter, etc.
- Sales Report:Sales Analysis, sales, returns, taxes, shipping, refunds, discount coupons, promotional offerings, etc.
- Inventory Reports:Items sold, available quantities, items to be reordered, new items, orders in hand and on order, inventory in transit and much more.
Faceted Navigation
Needing a method and way to create an easier way to search for curtains, we implemented “guided search” or faceted navigation. Faceted navigation enabled Half Price Drapes customers to filter for favorite curtains by attributes such as Color, Size, Type, Style, Etc. We create a backend functionality to ensure the fields for attributes could be filled easily in the future, by any person on the Half Price Drapes team. Additionally, we optimized the attribute for search engines, by targeting each keyword as a long-tail keyword to collectively drive more searchers. Faceted navigation has proven to be one of the best methods for increasing search performance.
THE RESULT
Half Price Drapes business has grown 30 percent consistently over the last 10 years, with our partnership. Offering suggestions and automating business processes, keeps Half Price Drapes competitive within the market. Over time the system to automate permeates and enhances every part of Half Price Drapes business and helps to increase not just sales but overall profitability of the business. There are many layers of automation in the system, with rules and logic built in, the interface requires very little human interaction to run smoothly. E-commerce processes, happen automatically and seamlessly – providing a seamless customer experience – from the sale to fulfillment. With enterprise-level capability, and currently processing over 40,000 transactions a month, the system is built to scale and grow with Half Price Drapes store.
