Magnolia Market

Having just reopened their original “Little Shop on Bosque” location in Waco, TX—on the heels of HGTV’s airing of the first season of Fixer Upper—Chip and Joanna Gaines launched their online store on Shopify Plus, integrated with ShipStation for ecommerce fulfillment.

Big Dreams and Growing Pains

Facing Inventory Challenges With Increasing Volume

Magnolia Market’s online store was thriving, but the backend was struggling to stay in stride. Orders placed on Magnolia Market’s Shopify Plus store would pass to their inventory software which would then import into ShipStation. The problem was, their 3rd party inventory software wasn’t keeping up with the other platforms in the workflow. “Our order volume increased fairly quickly and our inventory management system had trouble keeping up,” Richard Ashley, Head of Information Technology at Magnolia says. “Our inventory software eventually told us their application couldn’t support our volume.”

“Our goal has been to, in the midst of extreme growth, provide a quality-consistent customer experience.”

The Magnolia team selected NetSuite, the cloud ERP and enterprise inventory management platform they needed to scale. Unfortunately, everything was going to be manual if they wanted to put NetSuite in their workflow. Needing the system to be automated, they hired Nova Module to implement Celigo’s Shopify connector for NetSuite and, also, build a custom integration to connect NetSuite to ShipStation.

Constructing the Right Tools

Nova Module Provides Solution For NetSuite Connection

Nova Module was brought on to connect NetSuite to Shopify Plus and ShipStation. They worked with the Magnolia IT team to build a solution tailored to their exact needs. “We built the specs for what we wanted,” says Richard. “It was completely custom for us.” Richard says Nova Module has exceptional customer service. “Basang’s team went above and beyond to make the launch successful.”

The platform and connectors built on the platform have a state of the art field mapping tool that allows to map fields between various systems easily and enable end-users to become self-reliant with an easy-to-use dashboard and advanced settings. Nova Module’s ShipStation-NetSuite Connector features:

SMART CONNECTORS FOR NETSUITE

• BFN (Built for NetSuite) Badge by NetSuite and approved by ShipStation
• Built on Celigo’s integrator.io – a true and modern iPaaS platform
• Published on NetSuite’s applications marketplace SuiteApp.com

SALES ORDER EXPORT

• Uses NetSuite sales order record or a NetSuite item fulfillment record to create a new sales order in ShipStation
• Accounts for discounts, various NetSuite item types, weights, units of measures, requested or actual shipping methods, and other pertinent details
• Import sales orders into ShipStation as split orders based on an item that can be assigned to a particular ShipStation Store ID
• Import sales orders into ShipStation and identify items that can be shipped by itself

FULFILLMENT IMPORT

• Assign Bin numbers to a Warehouse Location field in ShipStation so products can be easier found in the warehouse when warehouse staff print pick tickets
• Import fulfillment data into NetSuite from ShipStation after sales orders are marked as “shipped” or “fulfilled” in ShipStation
• ShipStation sends actual shipping cost, carrier code, service code, and the clickable shipment tracking URL into an item fulfillment record in NetSuite
• Supports sales order cancellations in both directions and partial fulfillment

PRODUCT UPDATES EXPORT

• Update product-related data from NetSuite to ShipStation (product name, description, weights, dimensions, and other fields that are available in the API)
• Uses NetSuite’s robust saved search functionality used to aggregate/compile data to export from NetSuite and import into ShipStation

“Nova Module is great. They went above and beyond to make the launch successful.”

With NetSuite fully integrated with Shopify Plus and ShipStation, Magnolia Market’s backend was back in stride. “Our orders come into Shopify, push to NetSuite to keep inventory accurate, and then ShipStation to be fulfilled.” Thanks to Nova Module’s solution, everything was automated in that workflow. Richard says, “Nova Module allowed us to automate fulfillments across the life cycle of an order.”

Expanding Retail and Online Stores

Scaling Shipping For Omnichannel Success

ShipStation has been a crucial ecommerce tool to help keep up with growing demand for the online Magnolia Market store since 2014. “Being a SaaS platform has been crucial,” says Richard. “The stability and extremely user-friendly interface has been a big deal.” Today, they’re processing upwards of 40,000 orders a month.

“We started using ShipStation when we began using Shopify in 2014 back when we were shipping a couple packages a week. It’s scaled with us since then.”

Richard says the tags in ShipStation underpin the entire fulfillment workflow. They print pick slips for hundreds of orders that are distributed to pickers who then pick items into totes. Packers then put the orders with their tag together in a box. The shipment is passed to a processor who puts the shipping label on the box and loads it in the truck at pickup. Richard says the ShipStation tags make it really easy to track the efficiency of their warehouse team. “There are packer stats and returns stats, which are traced back to packers by the tags, to gauge efficiency and quality.”

Extending Beyond The Walls of Brick And Mortar

Since 2014, the Magnolia brand has grown beyond its original brick-and-mortar retail location—in 2015, the company opened Magnolia Market at the Silos in downtown Waco. The Magnolia brand has also grown to include a bakery, Silos Baking Co., a restaurant, Magnolia Table and a lifestyle magazine, Magnolia Journal, among other businesses.

And speaking of growth, they have seen incredible growth on the e-commerce side since launching the Magnolia Market online store. Starting out around 50 orders a week in 2014, Magnolia Market has seen somewhere in the ballpark of 432% YoY growth in shipments in less than 5 years. Richard says they’ve been with ShipStation since day one because it’s helped them stay on top of their progress. “ShipStation lets us operate at a high volume. Having a single platform scale easily has saved us time and money.”