Rural King

How Rural King Rules Retail and Online

In 1960, two farmers founded a farm and home supply store in Mattoon, Illinois. To this day, their mission is to offer the best products at the best price. The family-run business has grown to 8,000 employees and 105 stores across 12 states. In 2015, President and CEO Alex Melvin announced they reached, for the first time, $1 billion in total sales. With RuralKing.com, the company can extend their friendly customer service to farmers by delivering their products across the country.

The Challenge To Cultivate Efficiency

At the time, Rural King had an inefficient solution to a complex shipping process. Each store had a singular on-premise access point to manage incoming orders, which required costly software installs. Much of their process was paper-based, had complex rules and regulations, was labor intensive, and prone to human error.

The goal was to allow each store location to use on-hand inventory from any store to fulfill online orders. Employees needed an interface to create labels for orders in-store. Software platforms needed to be in the cloud and easy to access from any location. Connections to multiple carriers and mainting negotiated FedEx rates was crucial. Choosing Magento OMS, they needed a powerful shipping API that would handle these requests natively within Ship From Store.

The Solution For Future Growth

Rural King’s eCommerce Team chose ShipStation as their shipping platform of choice because of its powerful API and automation rules. When orders import from Magento OMS, shipping methods and presets are instantly applied by SKU. Tags and filters help them control where highly regulated products can be sent.

ShipStation API is directly integrated with Magento OMS so every retail location can fulfill ecommerce orders. This setup creates transparency and makes it easy for employees to create shipping labels within the Ship From Store interface. “This way,” says Chad Davis, “the associate just follows the order fulfillment screens in Magento Order Manager and does not have to use a second interface for the label.”

• 109 retail stores
• 8,000 employees
• $1 Billion in 2015 sales

The Results From Powerful API Tools

By switching from their legacy shipping platform, Rural King can now keep up with their rapid retail growth and online demand. Creatuity was able to replace and improve their massively outdated system with Magento OMS and ShipStation API. Ship From Store will allow store and warehouse inventory to work together in the cloud, lower shipping costs, and speed up delivery to their customers.

• 40k shipments a month
• 70% growth in e-sales
• 40% growth in shipments

The solution is powerful, cost effective, and will be adaptable as Rural King’s needs increase. For almost 60 years, Rural King has cultivated a tradition of exceptional customer service they’re now able to extend to ecommerce customers. Andrew Figgins says the company expects to cut order processing time by 50% within seven months of implementing ShipStation API and Magento OMS.

“We’re going to be saving them a substantial amount of time, increasing customer service quality, and decreasing the time it takes for customers to receive their orders.”

Joshua Warden, CEO at Creatuity Corp