Making the world a little homier

KAS Australia is a very successful family business, dedicated to brightening homes with beautifully designed, high-quality bedding and homewares. Starting as a stall at a Sydney market back in the late 1970s, today KAS Australia has locations all over Australia with over 30 employees — shipping products to customers and stores all over the world.

A lot has changed since the simple Sydney market stall days. KAS Australia’s business now spans multiple markets and channels. In addition to retail shoppers and purchasers on their Shopify-powered online store, KAS Australia sells a lot to business customers — many who stock KAS products in their own retail outlets.

Traditionally, B2B sales involve a lot of manual work and overhead. For KAS Australia, their business customers have different requirements to retail direct-to-consumer (D2C) customers; B2B customers require the sales team to dedicate a lot of time to managing orders, which is often done by finicky email back-and-forth.

“A big pain point is having to get customers to email their orders,” says Daniel David, KAS Australia’s business manager. “We used to have customers always emailing, you know, ‘I’ll have one of this one or that.’ It’s just annoying having to do all that manual entry.”

This back and forth can be eliminated by giving business customers a password-protected B2B online store to buy from — like being able to see a virtual warehouse, with wholesale price tags. Unfortunately, most off-the-shelf ecommerce products lack the robust functionality business customers require. KAS Australia needed to find a B2B solution that seamlessly integrated with their inventory management software, Cin7.

When KAS Australia started as a Cin7 customer in mid-2019, they tried the Cin7 B2B portal (2018 release) functionality. Unfortunately, they found it an incomplete solution.

“I remember doing trialing the B2B aspect when we first started with Cin7 and it was really clunky, to be transparent with you,” says Daniel. “It wasn’t very user friendly and the e-commerce side wasn’t the nicest looking as well.”

But now Cin7 has completely upgraded its B2B online store, and the new functionality on offer is a perfect use case for KAS Australia’s B2B customers and product offerings.

Since August 2020, KAS Australia has been trialling a closed beta of Cin7’s new B2B Online Store, and the news is good.

“The customers are finding it really easy to deal with,” says Daniel. “It’s got a good grid layout, imagery for each product, and the filtering system is quite nice. It gives the customer a really good front-end. And there’s a search bar as well, which is a great little aspect of the B2B Online Store. There’s nothing worse than having to scroll for the product you want. I think that’s where you’ve nailed it.”

“For customers, being able to search what category and brand they want is really usable and functional. It makes it a lot easier for customers to be able to find the product they want.”

Daniel says that their trial of the new Cin7 B2B online store — which is currently limited to just KAS Australia’s cushion products, so they can test the functionality before rolling it out across the business — has already saved up to 45 minutes per day.

“For us, the manual entry was the problem, and that’s what Cin7’s B2B Online Store has stopped. And it’s definitely time saved”

He says he’d recommend the B2B online store to any business that wants to give its business customers more flexibility in how they buy wholesale.

“If you don’t want to use agents and you’re happy to just give a login to your customers, then it’s definitely the way to go,” David says. “I would say, yes, go for it.”

“It’s a brilliant little platform that allows business customers to go on a website, order what they want and… happy days”