Staalduinen: An eCommerce Platform Built for a Business Where Every Product Has a Shelf Life
How we turned a phone-and-fax sales operation into a self-serve online ordering platform that freed customer service to focus on sales.
About the Company
Staalduinen is a family-owned flower wholesaler and distributor, passed down through the generations. The company imports flowers from around the world and sells them wholesale to florists, event planners, and grocery stores with in-house flower shops throughout Ontario.
Flowers are a uniquely demanding product to sell. They are live goods with a very short shelf life, so inventory must move quickly, and pricing behaves like a commodity, changing frequently based on current market rates for each individual flower. Any online store for this business needs to handle both realities without slowing down.
The Problem
Staalduinen came to Mawazo with a clear request: they needed an eCommerce site. Their competitors were already selling online, and to stay competitive, they knew they had to offer the same to their customers. At the time, they had only a brochure-style website. Every order went through customer service by phone.
Behind that simple request was a complex system:
- A proprietary ERP, custom-built over many years, with little documentation and features added piecemeal as requests came up
- Two very different ways of selling: pre-orders from a seasonal list, and buy-now purchases from live warehouse inventory
- Product prices and availability changing by the minute
- Customer service staff tied up with routine tasks like resending invoices and taking basic orders over the phone
The challenge was not just building a store. It was building a platform that matched how a live-product wholesale business actually operates, on top of an ERP that was hard to map, and doing it right the first time so it would scale without a rebuild.
Engagement Details
Mawazo started by learning the flower business itself. Understanding how Staalduinen buys, sells, and delivers took time, but that discovery work is what made the platform scalable rather than something that would need rebuilding once real customers used it. The engagement combined custom web design, ecommerce website development, and back-office ERP integration into a single build, rather than treating them as separate projects.
Platform Selection: Kentico
Mawazo recommended Kentico CMS for the website design and development because of the integrations the project required. Product data would flow from the ERP, some of it in near real time. Content such as shipping information, company pages, and category descriptions would be managed in the CMS. Kentico handled that combination well for this kind of ecommerce website design, and Mawazo also provides the hosting and ongoing website maintenance.
ERP Integration with Scheduled Synchronization
Pulling every data point from the ERP in real time would have crippled site performance, especially on product list pages showing many products at once. Instead, Mawazo defined a synchronization schedule per data point. Time-sensitive data updates frequently. Stable data syncs at the end of the day or at set intervals. The result is a site that stays accurate without slowing down.
Multiple Shopping Carts Built Around Delivery Dates
Staalduinen's customers buy in two ways, and the platform treats them differently:
- Pre-order: Customers order from a set list of seasonal or available flowers, which Staalduinen then orders from its suppliers. Because these are live products, orders are built around delivery dates. A shipment for the 10th and a shipment for the 30th cannot be ordered from suppliers at the same time, or the later products would die. Each delivery date gets its own cart.
- Buy now: Customers purchase directly from live warehouse inventory, also with their choice of delivery dates.
A customer can have multiple carts open at once and manage them intuitively.
Inventory Locking with a Shopping Timer
Live inventory cannot sit reserved in an abandoned cart overnight. When a customer adds a buy-now product to their cart, the platform removes it from inventory and locks it for them, so they are guaranteed to get it. A timer then runs, set to whatever window Staalduinen chooses. Active shopping refreshes the timer. When it runs out, the customer confirms they are still shopping, or the platform empties the cart and puts the products back on sale. Fresh product stays available, and committed buyers keep what they picked.
Customer Self-Service
Registered customers now have a full window into available products through the online store. They place their own orders, track shipments against expected delivery dates, view their accounts, and download invoices and purchase orders as PDFs whenever they need them. The UX design work behind this shifted the customer experience from phone-dependent to self-serve, without losing the flexibility a wholesale flower buyer needs.
The Result
Because the foundational work on the ecommerce website was done properly, Staalduinen can keep adding to the platform. After several years of customer feedback, Mawazo is now refreshing the UX and graphic design. New features in progress include a favourites list, letting customers filter thousands of products down to their regular picks, and flyer-based filtering, so a customer who receives a digital flyer can view exactly those products on the site. These additions build on custom ecommerce solutions already in place, rather than requiring a new ecommerce web design from scratch.
The Staalduinen engagement reflects how Mawazo works: understand the business first, then build. In a company where products expire, prices shift by the minute, and the ERP grew organically over decades, that upfront work is the difference between a store that fights the business and an ecommerce platform that runs it.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| No eCommerce presence, only a brochure website | A full online ordering platform, deeply integrated with the proprietary ERP |
| All orders placed by phone through customer service | Customers order self-serve, in the way they prefer, whenever they want |
| Regular calls to resend invoices and purchase orders | Customers track shipping and download their own invoices and purchase orders |
| No customer visibility into live inventory or order status | Customer service upsells instead of order-taking: staff see incoming web orders and follow up with complementary product suggestions, growing both order size and order count |
| Falling behind competitors who already sold online | A foundation that supports ongoing enhancements without rework |
Because the foundational work was done properly, Staalduinen can keep adding to the platform. After several years of customer feedback, Mawazo is now refreshing the UX and graphic design. New features in progress include a favourites list, letting customers filter thousands of products down to their regular picks, and flyer-based filtering, so a customer who receives a digital flyer can view exactly those products on the site.
The Staalduinen engagement reflects how Mawazo works: understand the business first, then build. In a company where products expire, prices shift by the minute, and the ERP grew organically over decades, that upfront work is the difference between a store that fights the business and a platform that runs it.
Addressing the challenges of B2B field service companies
With our 25 years of experience in web development and digital marketing we have developed a unique system to address the challenges of B2B service companies. Our approach generates predictable results and we offer a unique performance guarantee.
Below is a decription of our 4-step process. This case study is relevant for phases 1 and 2 of our programme:
Find Hidden Profits In Your Business Systems
Generate 5x ROI
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Do you have any questions on the above, or would you like to share your experience? Just email [email protected] or call 289-536-6797.
At Mawazo Marketing we work with owners of B2B companies who want to accelerate their business. We help them with a concrete digital growth plan, a website that saves operational cost, and a digital marketing system that generates leads. For qualifying clients we offer a 5x ROI guarantee: if we don't reach the objective, then we pay back the difference. Book a Free Strategy Session to find out more.
