WoodUpp customer case
“As a business at high speed, we needed a partner like Tinx to take care of things quickly and easily and not make it too complicated to understand for us.”
ERP system: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS
E-commerce platform: WooCommerce
WoodUpp creates remarkable sustainable wooden products for private customers, like restaurants, hotels, office environments and other exciting projects worldwide. Serving customers through their various webshops (Sweden, Denmark, Poland, The Netherlands, France and Belgium), they continue to grow and deliver great products to their customers. To ensure that web orders are processed correctly into their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP, WoodUpp uses the Tinx WooCommerce Connector.
Martin Rosenkvist Petersen, Business Development Manager at WoodUpp, talks about how he experiences the Tinx WooCommerce connector.
Can you introduce yourself? What’s your role at WoodUpp? How long do you work at WoodUpp?
“My name is Martin Petersen, and I am a Business Development Manager at WoodUpp. I ensure that our communication and contact with our external partners and internal departments are excellent, secure, and stable. Also, I am responsible for implementing new business systems, new connectors, and new tools so we can develop our company the way we want for the future.“
“Our company is very young. WoodUpp started just four years ago/in 2017, and I have been part of the team for one year and ten months. So, I am “pretty new,” so to speak, but at the same time also “pretty old” in the company because we are such a young company.”
Could you describe WoodUpp? What kind of products do you sell?
“At WoodUpp, we are producing our very own akupanels. The akupanel is basically an item of acoustical interior furniture. We also refer to them as acoustic panels. Our customers can use it in their homes for their walls and sealings. It creates a better environment related to noise and reverberations. So, if people want a better sound climate in their homes, our products help them to create better rooms and spaces. It has a functional point of reducing noise, but also, the panels’ expression and looks are things that people love. It is basically a do-it-yourself product. People can be very creative and install it themselves, making it very popular.”
In what phase is WoodUpp currently? Are you a scale-up?
“Of course, we started as a start-up, but at the moment, we have developed ourselves as quite a big e-commerce company running at high speed all the time. A lot of things are happening at the same time. Maybe you have experienced this as well, but we’re currently in need of good partners that are committed to a fast journey and are very efficient, just like Tinx.”
In which countries do you sell the products?
“We are located in Denmark and sell to most of Europe. We have our own departments in Sweden, The Netherlands, and France. Besides that, we also work with partners in Germany, UK, Switzerland, Austria, USA and Spain. We export a lot of products to western and eastern Europe.”
Do you sell the products in physical stores, only online, or both?
“We are mainly an online business. Customers have the option to come to our warehouse in Denmark and take a look in our showroom in order to buy the panels directly, but we don’t have actual physical stores. You could say that we are 100% an online e-commerce company and focus the marketing and sales exclusively on our webshops. Since we are a 100% online e-commerce focussed company, we need to make sure that our systems work and communicate with each other, that everything is connected with our webshops, and that our business system is fully operational 100% of the time on every day. We are so reliant on these IT systems and webshops.”
What are the important objectives for WoodUpp?
“We always like thinking of innovative ideas and new products next to improving existing ones. As a company, we are always thinking about improving and developing. Part of our strategy is to expand as a company as well.”
How did WoodUpp first come into contact with Tinx? How did you find us?
“In the beginning, we started a dialogue with our consultants to implement our Business Central (BC) ERP and how to connect it to our WooCommerce webshops. BC doesn’t support a WooCommerce Connector themselves, so we pretty quickly became aware that we needed a third party who could make this happen for us. We started to search in Microsoft’s AppSource with the words WooCommerce Connector or WooCommerce implementation. We looked around a bit, but it didn’t take long to see that Tinx was quite interesting to us. Especially the description on the front page of AppSource. But we also needed a connector that could take us to the next levels and not just a connector that could provide functionality where we were at that time, but one that could evolve with us over time.”
“So, we contacted you and started to get more interested in what you could offer and have more knowledge about Tinx as a company. We had some good conversations during several meetings with the sales department and consultants, and I think we have found a great match.”
WoodUpp has gone live with five WooCommerce Connectors simultaneously, and the sixth one has also gone live recently. How did you experience this process?
“When you implement a new big system in a relatively short period of 2 months like we did, there will always be a lot of new challenges, as there are in IT systems. So, implementing the WooCommerce connector was also another step in that journey. With the challenges that were moving in both Business Central and WooCommerce, we actually, together with you, found a good balance between what we needed in the connector and which data we needed to import from WooCommerce into Business Central. This way, we could follow along with the WooCommerce orders we’ve got and need to register into Business Central.”
“I think you can’t implement systems like this without meeting challenges. But the most important part is that we could fix this problem pretty quickly together with you, and then we also learned more new things about our business and the potential of the connector. I think it is a good education actually to start from scratch like we did and, together with you, develop the knowledge about what we need as a company and also what we need from the WooCommerce side to Business Central. It has been a great learning process!”
“We had a test version of Business Central and put it live simultaneously with the five WooCommerce connectors. That was very exciting! It was great to collaborate with a partner as you committed to working at the weekend to finish our deadline. Even when we went live, we expected to have some minor issues because there always are when you implement new systems and especially big systems like we did. Even Saturday and Sunday, we sat together with you and our WooCommerce partner Bo-We and solved it along the way. Your consultants, Sam Weel and Kasper Dissel helped us a lot and easily explained our different options. We’ve had some online meetings, of course, but I really liked that we also had a direct Teams chat between WoodUpp and your team. We would just write a question, and not long after, we would receive a response mentioning that it was fixed or at least an option on how we could fix it. We are also a company where young people work, and the communication with Tinx was nice, fast, and easy, not very formal like things can get when you communicate through e-mails.”
“The connector needs a steady and stable flow that we can trust for 100%.”
Looking back to the time before the integration, what were your e-commerce challenges?
“We wanted a new business system that could take us to the next level so we could start to get to know our business, company, and customers even more. This way, we could start by analysing which customers we sell our products to and what products we sell the most, etcetera. Therefore, we chose a system like Business Central to implementing into our business. Since Business Central doesn’t have a direct connector to connect with WooCommerce, a problem occurred. We needed to have the data imported from WooCommerce into Business Central to do, among other things, the analyses. So that was the main challenge.”
What kind of solution were you looking for?
“We were looking for one solution, a straightforward solution that had a good overview and was easy to understand. Behind the scenes, it is very complex, but at the front desk, it needs to be suitable for the online business we want to do. We don’t want to use a lot of time not having a clear overview of our sales and customers. Also, the integration needs to be stable, and we didn’t want to have a connector that takes a lot of time whenever a problem may occur. The connector needs a steady and stable flow that we can trust for 100%.”
“As part of our strategy is to expand, we needed a connector that would have the potential to improve and develop our company in this area.”
What were the final reasons for choosing Tinx?
“The fact that you have a professional team, excellent communication, and a good and stable connector for which we could see the potential within our company in terms of expanding and growth for the future. And also, the fact that you are a serious and professional business partner.”
Which functionalities of the WooCommerce Connector do you use now?
“We import the webshop orders from our WooCommerce webshops directly into a webshop order table in Business Central. Together with your team, we’ve ensured that the web order will only be created in BC once the web order reaches a certain status in WooCommerce. That was very important for us since we didn’t want to waste time on orders that were cancelled in WooCommerce but were still being created in Business Central as a sales order, which we then had to delete afterwards. So, we were looking for a flexible connector in terms of setting up conditions in an uncomplicated way on which criteria orders had to meet before they were transferred into Business Central.”
“We have also implemented a reference order number into the sales header to track the order from being placed in the webshop until it gets booked or posted on the customer. So, there is no doubt about which order belongs to which customer. For example: when our finance department makes an overview or analysis of the last six months concerning the revenue, we can easily track where the orders are coming from and how they are moving in the system. I think it is very successful what we’ve established together.”
“With the data now available, we can make decisions concerning business processes in order to expand and improve our business.“
Do you also have plans for the future to use other functionalities of the WooCommerce Connector?
“Yes, we probably will. In the beginning, during the scope sessions, we discussed if it was necessary to import each customer instead of one generic customer per country from WooCommerce into BC. We were aware that your connector could do both, so we have thought about this, and for now, we’ve decided to use the generic customer option. But it could be an excellent idea for the future to import each webshop customer from each country into BC since there are a lot of extra marketing possibilities with the additional data concerning customers that becomes available by choosing this option.”
For example:
- Email marketing: “If we have the information and acceptance from the customer.”
- “More specific data analysis of our customers and product purchasing.”
How do you experience the Tinx WooCommerce Connector? What do you like? What is the profit?
“The profit is that we can finally register our webshop orders and webshop products. We know what kind of sales we have done and where the sales end up. Prior to using the connector, we had a very small view of what we exported from our webshops. We could only see this data in WooCommerce. While WooCommerce is a great commercial platform, it isn’t a system for making business analyses as much as Business Central allows you to. So actually, that was the most important part of the connector. It had to export the correct data that we could use for the future in order to be wiser and cleverer about our customer database and the products we sell.”
“With this data, we can make decisions concerning business processes in order to expand and improve our business. Off course, if you want to grow as a manufacturer and company, you have to know where there’s potential interest in your product and where there is a potential to expand on an existing market or to penetrate into a new one.”
What is the biggest challenge for WoodUpp right now?
“I would say it is probably to hold our horses and follow along. As a company running at high speed, the biggest challenge is keeping along.”
What are the main goals for the coming years?
“To create new products for our customers so they can create even better spaces and quality of life in their homes and businesses. Also, getting to know more about being creative with our existing products, being cleverer about our own business and developing with the interesting trends in our business area.”
“With the use of the Tinx Connector, the required data to achieve the above goals is available in BC.”
What do you find most impressive about our product?
“The WooCommerce connector looks very simple to us. I mean in terms of using the connector. But I know it is pretty complicated and highly advanced behind the scenes. So, the most impressive part is that you make the connector look very simple, easy and gentle to a company like us, which is what we wanted to end up with. Because, as a business at high speed, we needed a partner like you to take care of things quickly and easily and not make it too complicated to understand for us. At the end of the day, people need to work with the connector on a daily basis without having any frustrations!”
Tinx will always try to find a way to make it happen and therefore try to fulfil your wishes. At least that is my experience!”
If you had to tell someone in another company about Tinx, what would you tell them?
“I would tell them they will get a very professional and efficient partner in problem-solving. Tinx will listen to you, take all your enquires in, and find options to make it work for you, even if it is not part of the original connector base code. Tinx will always try to find a way to make it happen and therefore try to fulfil your wishes. At least that is my experience!”
“One other thing that we were very optimistic about was that even if we had five connectors to implement simultaneously, you did it faster than the first estimations. It shows that you are not just throwing out a quote and sticking to that, but even if you are more efficient, you are trustworthy enough to say we used less time than we originally estimated, and we will invoice you less than expected based on the initial quotation. It shows that you are trustworthy and efficient at the same time.”
Do you have any tips for Tinx?
“Actually, we are very happy with the WooCommerce connectors as it is right now, but we will probably have a long-time business relationship, so whenever there is a tip in the future, I will let you know!”
Do you have any questions?
“No, not really. I am happy about our collaboration and looking forward to going further like this!”
Solution provided
Tinx E-commerce WooCommerce Connector
