Established in 1977, Barbecues Galore – Australia’s leading barbeque and outdoor furniture retailer – has long invested in its digital capability, early on expanding from their traditional brick-and-mortar presence into eCommerce. But in recent years, this single step has not been enough to keep pace with consumer behavior and retailers have been shifting their approaches accordingly.
The marketplace model has become the natural evolution of eCommerce strategies.
You will no doubt have noticed the number of marketplaces springing up, while existing marketplaces grow at phenomenal rates. Barbecues Galore knew that a marketplace approach would allow them to meet their customer’s desire for convenient one-stop shopping, while enabling them to expand their range to areas outside of its traditional line-up, with minimal outlay on manufacturing or stock.
Let’s look at how they were able to seamlessly launch a marketplace while keeping their existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud engine, and how the Marketplacer platform was integrated.
The connected technology backbone
To morph their first-party Salesforce Commerce Cloud eCommerce site into a multi-vendor marketplace, Barbecues Galore required a marketplace solution to manage:
- a multi-seller catalog
- sellers
- commissions
- order management features, and more.
Through Marketplacer’s pre-built Connector, Barbecues Galore could integrate their existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud environment with Marketplacer. This allowed them to keep all the capabilities they were already using, while Marketplacer allowed them to expand their product and category range and sell third-party products – all while retaining the eCommerce experience their customers knew.
The Marketplacer SFCC Connector is a certified cartridge designed to help connect the Marketplacer platform to eCommerce environments, reducing the cost, effort, and time to integrate. The powerful low-code connector allows the Marketplacer core to drive the back-end supplier automation and administration. Meanwhile, the user experience, shopping cart, search, and checkout functionality continue to be driven by Barbecues Galore’s existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud engine.
In Barbecues Galore’s case, the Marketplacer Salesforce Commerce Cloud Connector is used to integrate products, variant options, sellers, brands, orders, and shipments.
Here’s a high-level look at how it works
Product data model | The Barbecues Galore Salesforce Commerce Cloud categories, product data model, and attribute sets are replicated within Marketplacer.
Customer experience and navigation | The cartridge creates seller and brand entities in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, allowing every product to be paired with a seller while customers can filter by seller.
Product/seller data | Sellers use the Marketplacer Seller portal to self-manage product listings, orders, and operations with all data and products accessible to Barbecues Galore’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud instance via GraphQL API.
New Orders | New orders from 3rd party sellers flow from Barbecues Galore’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud instance to Marketplacer and are also sent to each seller for pick, pack, and ship. Any 1st party products follow the existing Barbecues Galore’s fulfillment processes.
Tracking codes | As sellers dispatch, line item updates to order status and courier tracking codes are passed from Marketplacer into Barbecues Galore’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud engine to trigger outbound consumer notifications.
While the Marketplacer Salesforce Commerce Cloud Connector handles the mechanics above, Barbecues Galore’s team and their sellers have their own dedicated portals to manage third-party product operations.
Operator Portal | Control Centre is the administration system that allows the Barbecues Galore team to create and run their marketplace. From here, Barbecues Galore can manage day-to-day seller onboarding, categorization, inventory flow, returns, lead management, customized configuration, and logistics.
- Manage sellers
- Categorization, adverts, and products
- Order and returns
- Shipping and logistics
- Seller payouts and billings
- Content management (vetting and controls)
Seller portal | This is where Barbecues Galore’s sellers manage their presence on the marketplace. Sellers use this portal to manage listings, products, leads, orders, logistics, returns, and reporting.
- Place, edit and manage adverts/products
- Orders and return management
- Insights and reporting
Online sales have increased by up to 300%
For Barbecues Galore, the Marketplacer Salesforce Commerce Cloud Connector has been a winning strategy. By augmenting their eCommerce engine with a new, strong-performing marketplace, shoppers can now visit a more complete destination and purchase from new categories such as tableware, outdoor products, rugs, lighting, toys, and yard games. Ultimately this has driven sustained growth in online sales.
They have an established process and system for onboarding new suppliers, can test and scale product ranges quickly, and are able to provide a highly personalized, integrated shopping experience to their growing customer base.
Learn more about Barbecues Galore’s marketplace transformation in their case study or watch our webinar featuring Angus McDonald, Chief Executive Officer at Barbeques Galore.
