Rebuilding Blustream's trade platform on open commerce
B2B Commerce Platform · UK · Australia · US · EU
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Vertical
- Consumer Electronics and Multi-room AV
- Timeline
- 11 weeks to first release
- Team
- 2 engineers
- Platform
- nopCommerce 4.90 (open source)
- Commerce model
- B2B · Integration · Replatforming
- Working together
- Since 2021
- PICK ERP Legacy ERP System
- Cloudinary Smart Content Delivery A smart CDN delivers image and media assets from locations close to the user while intelligently optimising them for each request. With Cloudinary, images can be automatically resized, compressed and delivered in the most appropriate format for the user’s device and browser. This reduces unnecessary file size and improves page speed without requiring teams to manually create and manage multiple versions of every image.
Blustream sells through trade — dealers and installers buying on account, each on their own negotiated pricing, across four territories with many different tax regimes. Their pricing, stock and credit data all lived in an ERP that had no route to the website.
Wired In Commerce built them a commerce platform on nopCommerce that reads directly from the ERP feed: eight price books per product per territory, live multi-warehouse stock, credit limits, and a self-service dealer portal showing aged debt and backorders. Orders flow to the relevant parties across the World. UK, Australian, US and EU storefronts run from one codebase, with currency, tax wording and VAT treatment resolved from data rather than forked per market.
Blustream's pricing model doesn't fit a standard cart. A dealer's price depends on their price band, their territory, whether their band shows VAT-inclusive or ex-VAT, and which other bands they're permitted to see alongside their own. All of that lived in a PICK ERP that spoke flat files and nothing else.
Trade customers had no way in. Price lists went out as spreadsheets that were stale on arrival. Stock figures came from an overnight extract, so a dealer could order something the warehouse sold that morning. Expanding into a third and fourth territory meant another fork of a site that was already three near-identical copies.
One open-source core, polling the ERP every sixty seconds. Pricing, stock, credit and territory rules are all data — no code fork per market.
Technical highlights
Eight price books per territory — every product carries eight tiers per market, with a visibility matrix controlling which tiers each dealer segment can see alongside their own.
Tax resolved from data, not code — each price book declares its own country and VAT treatment; rates come live from the active tax provider, so VAT, GST and zero-rated export pricing all work from the same product record.
Real-time ERP sync — a background scheduler polls the ERP drop every sixty seconds, importing products, pricing, multi-warehouse stock, customers, sales reps, backorders and shipments, with per-row error reporting on every run.
Self-service dealer portal — aged debt, credit position, sales history, live price list with Excel export, open backorders with ETAs, all behind the dealer's own login.
Four territories, one codebase — UK, Australian, EU and US storefronts share a single deployment; currency, language, tax wording and email routing are all resolved per territory at runtime.
Before
Price lists emailed as spreadsheets, stale on arrival
Stock figures up to 12 hours old from an overnight extract
After
Live price list per dealer, correct tiers, exportable on demand
Stock and ETAs refreshed from the ERP every sixty seconds
In the client's words
Our pricing was always the reason we were told this couldn't be done online. Wired In Commerce didn't simplify it away — they built the platform around it. Our dealers now see their own prices, their own stock and their own account, without picking up the phone.
Who worked on it
What continues today
We work with Blustream on a monthly retainer basis, with continued focus on enhancing the self-service portal and integration with SAP to arrive in the months ahead.