Jitterbit iPaaS Saves 5 Hours a Week for Sporting Goods Retailer

The Company

Since its founding in 1985, this sporting goods retailer has grown to be the largest archery company in the U.S. But the company doesn’t just sell bows and arrows; it also makes sure their customers know what they’re doing and feel comfortable with their equipment.

As the business has grown, its reputation has grown along with it: Their pro shop has attracted people from hours away, because they know they’ll be able to speak with knowledgeable staff and receive excellent customer service.

The Challenge

In 2021, the archery supply company moved onto their Shopify website, and shifted from using an ERP on a physical server to using NetSuite as their ERP and order management system. With 700-800 orders per day from two different portals (retail and wholesale), it was critical that these services be able to work together.

The company originally chose to go with a competing iPaaS vendor. “For the most part, it worked,” the retailer’s software developer said. But as time went on, frustrations began to mount. The solution had issues with synchronization. There were issues and bottlenecks caused by the integrations, such as credit card declines, causing orders to fail. The company couldn’t see in real time whether integrations or syncs failed. Gift card redemptions would also fail, and occasionally the solution wouldn’t set the correct price on items. All of these issues had to be fixed manually, and the team spent as much as an hour a day trying to figure out how to address the issues.

The customer service manager dealt with these challenges daily, sometimes spending half an hour a day monitoring, merging customers and resending emails. Worse, there were times when no one was able to monitor the iPaaS for a couple of hours, and the company would receive calls about missing confirmation emails, missing orders and more. Oftentimes if the software developer wasn’t in the office, there wasn’t anyone else who knew how to fix it, because “there’s just as good a chance you would break the integration completely as fix the issue,” she explained.

“There were a couple of other times when you just couldn’t make it smart enough. For example, email is the primary field in Shopify. If you have two customer records with the same email, we couldn’t tell it to just pick one. We would have to go in and merge manually,” she explained.

The company worked with a NetSuite partner to do most of the competitor’s iPaaS setup. They enjoyed working with the NetSuite partner, but also found themselves frequently cut out of the loop. “We had no contact with our previous vendor. The one time we did try to reach out to them directly, we were told that we needed to reach out through our partner. I thought that was weird — we were the ones paying them!”

Overall, she said, it was not a comfortable experience, and they wanted to find an iPaaS vendor they could build a better partnership with.

The Solution

On their first call with Jitterbit, the software developer said, they were immediately impressed. “The questions were so thoroughly answered, more than I would have ever expected on a ‘sales call’,” she said. But she still had a few questions — all of which she says were answered promptly and knowledgeably. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh sure, we can do that.’ They came back to me with specifics on how those things could be done,” she said.

However, it proved a bit more challenging to shift away from the previous vendor, who had offered little in the way of documentation on how integrations were built. “There was a little bit of guessing as to how we needed to replicate something that was not at all documented or clear,” the software developer said. But Jitterbit Professional Services had encountered this situation before and were well-equipped to help them make the switch. “Professional services made everything work so smoothly,” she said.

The two teams worked together on an implementation plan, and on setting the Jitterbit implementation up ahead of time to minimize disruption. Then they rolled it out slowly in order to make sure everything worked properly before shutting off their license with the previous vendor. “Implementation was quick,” the software developer said. “The Jitterbit professional services team I worked with had just come off another Shopify/Netsuite integration. They came in knowing how to integrate and only had to learn the nuances of our specific business.”

The Results

Unlike with the previous solution, when something went wrong, Jitterbit provided immediate notifications. This allowed issues to be addressed quickly, before they had a chance to disrupt the customer experience. The company was experiencing significantly fewer errors because they were able to address trouble points and work them into the solution from the start.

Before, the company had three or four different people in different departments monitoring for errors — but since deploying Jitterbit, it’s only the software developer and one other person. “There really aren’t any errors,” she said. “They’re just not happening.”

And this has been true from the start, including with the company’s order sync implementation: “The developer who did the work and I were just watching it, waiting for errors, and we got nervous when no errors were coming — because that doesn’t happen. I knew nothing could be perfect out of the gate. So we were both very excited to see an error actually happen. It was really incredibly smooth.”