Founded in 1924, Totes Isotoner grew from their love for the rain and midwest roots into an international cold weather accessory supplier based out of Ohio. Their products (umbrellas, ponchos, rain boots, outdoor slippers, and so on) inspire customers to go outside and enjoy the day–regardless of rain or shine.
Totes chose Corra to replatform four of their sites: totes.com, isotoner.com, acorn.com (including the Manzella microsite, and totes-isotoner.ca from Oracle ATG to Shopify Plus. They were impressed by Corra’s dedicated Shopify Plus team, our experience with complex integrations, and our transparency throughout the sales cycle and project. Corra’s technical expertise, hands-on collaboration, and agile approach allowed us to deliver this project three weeks early and significantly under budget.
Totes experienced a series of pain points on their previous platform, Oracle ATG. These included inventory management issues, product management issues, and little to no control over design.
Most notably, inventory levels didn’t update in real-time, proving to be a serious headache for their business. As a B2B2C company serving retailers like Kohl’s and Macy’s who would place bulk orders, the stock count wasn’t immediately updating. So when a consumer went to buy three clear bubble umbrellas, for example, the order would still go through even though the item was sold out. The consumer would then need to be notified via email and be reimbursed, but there were no guarantees that they would read the email. Essentially, the customer could still be waiting for an order that would never arrive. The new solution Corra built alleviates these frictions and significantly improves the customer experience.
REAL-TIME INVENTORY CHECKS
The Corra team developed an API-based integration between the Totes’ ERP and Shopify Plus. The custom app replaced a costly AWS (Amazon Web Services) middleware and eliminated the need to use flat files for orders, products, inventory, fulfillment, and general ledger transaction data (refunds and captures). Now, all data is passed over the Shopify Plus rest API.
From an inventory management standpoint, benefits are immense. Previously, Oracle ATG would need to compile a flat file of all orders placed in a period of time that would then be sent to the ERP for Totes to fulfill. The problem was, this process was happening once an hour, so availability wasn’t always aligned with the current inventory levels. Meaning a customer could still place an order for rain boots that were freshly out of stock.
The new API-based approach means the Totes team can now rely on a fast and secure integration that allows for real-time data transfer.
IMPROVED OPERATIONAL AGILITY
With the previous method of transferring data via flat files, Totes was creating products within their ERP and the information was sent out to Oracle ATG via these files. But in order to modify the product information, custom development was required on the Oracle ATG side.
Corra’s solution eliminated the product-level merchandising step before the products were published. Now, the Totes team can create and modify products in the ERP, and the information is automatically reflected on Shopify Plus.
The integration has also eliminated the need for manual intervention when orders can’t be fulfilled. Before, Totes was forced to manually cancel the orders, refund them, and notify the customer. Now, “killed” orders are flagged in their ERP and our solution automatically cancels the order and notifies the customer.
CUSTOM DATA LAYER FOR ATTRIBUTION
Pinpointing exactly how and where consumers interact with your brand prior to purchasing are crucial insights for any ecommerce business. This can be accomplished with a data layer–which tracks all user behavior on-site (selection choices, exit intentions, clicks, scrolls, and so on).
Corra built a proprietary data layer for Totes that only loads the required information for specific third-party tracking scripts to avoid impacting the performance of the site. Now, Totes can accurately track purchase behavior events across all of their active campaigns (Criteo, Facebook, Google Ads, Bing, among others).
TAG MANAGEMENT
When consulting Totes’ on their tag management strategy, our SEO specialists realized that the team was paying a premium price for a solution whose advanced features were simply unnecessary and too complex to be leveraged to their full potential. To enable operational agility and reduce costs, Corra’s specialists migrated all SEO tags to Google Tag Manager. As a result, even non-technical team members now have the confidence to track tags independently and effectively.
Corra delivered four new Shopify Plus storefronts under budget and three weeks before the originally anticipated launch date. Our Technical SEO specialists performed a successful 301 redirect that allowed the Totes sites to gain search equity.
