KENTUCKY SOAPS & SUCH
Building A Better System
Kentucky Soaps & Such has had a website of some sort available to the public since 2007. Considering their size and location, they should be commended for understanding the importance of having a web presence early on.
That said, the design and functionality of the website left much to be desired as late as 2014. By 2018, the look of the site had improved tremendously, but the e-commerce functionality and connection to their POS system were still inaccurate and inefficient. That’s where we came in.
THE CHALLENGE
Build a website that utilizes an effective e-commerce platform to better connect online sales to in-store sales with accurate inventory tracking.
A Puzzle With Missing Pieces
We are big believers in WordPress and its capabilities as a platform. That said, it can get very messy very quickly. The setup KSS had in place was WooCommerce-based with plugins on top of plugins on top of plugins, with all being supported to various degrees of effectiveness by their developers. It functioned, but not without constant update supervision and not without being totally disconnected from in-store inventory.
Start With The Right Platform
By 2021, Shopify had become the premiere solution for small businesses to sell online. Beyond that, they had expanded their platform to include a Point of Sales solution for in-store sales. This would not only allow KSS access to a more functional and stable solution for online sales, but it would make managing inventory much easier overall.
THE SOLUTION
The Kentucky Soaps & Such website would be rebuilt on Shopify to take advantage of their effective solutions for POS, shipping, payment processing, and supported Apps.
Building the website from scratch on a new platform was no easy task, but we felt that the improvements Shopify could offer would be worth it. We worked with Kentucky Soaps & Such staff as well as internal IT resources to plan and execute a proper migration timeline. The change gave the staff a chance to review and correct inventory and explore systems for tracking raw materials more efficiently.
Before the rebuild, Kentucky Soaps & Such staff had to keep track of inventory in two places. In-store sales were automatically tracked and online sales had to be accounted for manually. This led to inaccurate inventory, week-long marathons to manually correct counts each January, and significant losses factored into yearly sales. Switching to Shopify for online and POS sales allowed for one source of truth for inventory.
Shopify offers built-in sales channels that allow for direct sales and advertising on most social media platforms. It also offers convenient connections to email and SMS delivery platforms to easily enable customer journeys and marketing automation. The result was we had more capabilities for delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time than ever before.
In addition to offering connections to most platforms we use for marketing, Shopify also offers robust analytics with attribution data for all those platforms in one place. We could see revenue generated from emails, digital ads, and social media all in one place. This makes budgeting and optimizing investment much easier.
THE RESULTS
Aside from making life easier for the KSS staff, the combination of the platform change and the easy access to marketing channels resulted in record sales for the store.
FROM 2020 TO 2023
SOURCED FROM KSS STAFF
SOURCED FROM QUICKEN & SHOPIFY
SOURCED FROM WOOCOMMERCE & SHOPIFY
SOURCED FROM GOOGLE
SOURCED FROM SHOPIFY
