Goodyear Belts

About Goodyear Belts

We are all familiar with the name ‘Goodyear’. Renowned as the long-standing tire and rubber manufacturer built on years of quality, this American multinational started licensing its brand name to other quality organizations within the auto parts industry. Goodyear Belts is one of these partnerships that began its journey as a startup in 2020 with a product lineup of belts, pulleys, tensions, etc. for industrial and retail sales.

As a part of the licensing agreement, Goodyear Belts is subject to the branding guidelines established by Goodyear Corporation. So they wanted to be able to:

Uniquely brand Goodyear Belts in the highly competitive automotive belts industry
And offer e-commerce sales to their growing B2B customers while staying within the guidelines

The second part is where Codaemon came in. We were the technical support partner of Goodyear Belts and took up the responsibility of supplying the back-end systems architecture and technical resources for the e-commerce setup.

How we did it

Technology

WordPress WooCommerce Celigo AWS NetSuite

Challenge

Setting up e-commerce capabilities on the website
Setting up real-time data sync for their large inventory with nested data structure
Introducing categorization in the price discount structure
Accommodating 5 different user roles and price confidentiality between them
Supporting high data transactions

Solution

Replatformed the site from Wix CMS to WooCommerce to support the large-scale web store
Mapped, integrated, and synced the huge database from NetSuite to WooCommerce using Celigo
Added a log-in feature to keep price confidentiality
Built the AWS hosting infrastructure to scale the RDS DB instance vertically and horizontally to support web store expansion

Outcome

Fast turnaround from conception to reality allowing Goodyear Belts’ customers to start using the system in less than 3 months
Goodyear Belts is extending the service agreement to create many more tools and applications around this B2B e-commerce platform

Replatforming

Initially, the Goodyear Belts website was running on Wix CMS with AWS hosting. To support Goodyear Belts’ goal to serve as a large-scale web store, we leveraged WordPress CMS and WooCommerce e-commerce engine. We built a WordPress site in partnership with a creative digital agency using the exact duplicate of design and content that was previously approved by Goodyear Corporate to avoid any additional scrutiny on branding. The WooCommerce store was designed with custom shopping capabilities for retail customers and auto parts suppliers. It supports bulk orders and orders by part number as well as the usual browse-select-order hierarchy. The system can create RFQ (Request for Quotation) for custom orders and these RFQs are delivered to the Goodyear sales representatives for bid. Customers can also create multiple shopping lists and schedule the purchase, thus automating the process.

Mapping, Integrating & Synchronizing the Database

The Goodyear Belts e-commerce store features 10,000+ SKUs and three product lines - Belts, Tensioners, and Pulleys with additional product lines to be added later. This large inventory had a nested data structure with customizable shopping options but no provision for real-time data sync. While this wasn’t a problem for the initial order placement setup through NetSuite, it does not support the e-commerce B2B purchase pattern. To tackle this problem, we first needed to map multiple data points from NetSuite to the WooCommerce engine. These data points were customer data, shipping locations, sales discount structures, authorized payment options as well as over 300 categories for the auto part products. The next challenge was integrating and synchronizing the Woocommerce database with the NetSuite database. We used Celigo, a smart data connector tool supported by NetSuite, to fetch data from NetSuite to WooCommerce. The database needed to be exactly mirrored on NetSuite as the control and Woocommerce as the display for the product catalog. We custom-programmed our way to meet branding guidelines and the functional specifications of Goodyear Corporate. With the Celigo iPaaS making the data transition smooth, the following results fell into place:

Real-time order sync from B2B store to NetSuite
Mapping of products, inventory, and orders in 15-minute frequencies
Location-wise real-time product inventory sync

This maintains inventory, just-in-time manufacturing, and supply chain control.

Implementing Multi-Level Discount & User Structure

Goodyear Belts provides multi-tiered discounts on their products based on more than 4 data points. Each customer is awarded more than three levels of discounts depending on the user type and the products being purchased. For example, the price of a product is different for an automobile client and an industrial client. Naturally, the prices are confidential. We introduced a log-in feature for all customers to view their exclusive prices and place orders from their accounts. A customer/company account with Goodyear Belts is assigned multiple contacts. Based on the role, each of these contacts has filtered access to the online store. For example:

Customer Contact is the customer’s representative who can only view the order he/she places
Partner Contact is a Goodyear representative who manages a customer/company’s account. This person has access to anything about a customer they are assigned to.
Goodyear Contact can view all admin features and has access to the activities of Customer and Partner contacts

We established this multi-level user structure and managed the access control to the store between these contacts.

Enabling Quick Order Placement for B2B Customers

A B2B customer generally needs to create a big purchase list of products in a very short time. With an average of 20-50 products per order, we needed to implement an easy and quick way to add products to the cart. The new B2B WooCommerce setup for Goodyear Belts uses the product part number entered by the user to automatically check the order stock and the user-specific discount structure and then displays them for purchase. Users can add these products to the Shopping List with one click. This Shopping List can then be revisited for purchase or used for recurring purchases.

Supporting High Data Transactions

A B2B site generally has lower traffic than a B2C site but the data transactions are high. Some of these data transactions in Goodyear Belts include:

Celigo iPaaS syncing data every 15 minutes between NetSuite and WooCommerce
Continuous real-time inventory updates etc.

To accommodate these, we built the AWS hosting infrastructure to scale the RDS DB instance vertically and horizontally. This means the Goodyear Belts e-commerce platform can easily expand for increasing data transactions. AWS Autoscaling group ensures that the server is added and removed on demand. The outcome is a robust store with the capacity to cater to an increase of more than 1 million SKUs and hundreds of simultaneous connections.

Responsive UI/UX

We worked alongside a creative digital agency on making the Goodyear Belts website responsive. This will allow users to access the platform and place orders from any device - mobile, tab, laptop, etc. Workflow is the main consideration in responsive UI/UX design. The goal was to create easy-to-understand application screens that provide enough information and detail without confusing the user while providing a method to complete a task and move on quickly to the next without a gap in the flow. Our partner agency created all of the system workflows, UI/UX wireframes, and final systems screen designs to meet the functional specifications. Our custom-designed theme is the center of operations for Goodyear Belts providing product sales, marketing support, and customer service support using Twilio SMS to enable mobile text notifications for customers and Goodyear sales administrators. This enables users to react to notifications while actively engaging with the mobile responsive site.