Shosha is 100% New Zealand owned, and is the largest local retail group of Vape Gears, Heat Not Burn, Hookah, and other Smoking-Related products. Founded in 2011, Shosha began with a single small store on Hobson Street, Auckland. The company now owns over 95 stores all located in New Zealand, and has several stores opening throughout Australia. Shosha is the only company in New Zealand and Australia that carries the top brands for vaping devices and offers shipping for orders in New Zealand and Australia. The company is committed to offering the best customer service experience to ensure their customers’ smoking needs are always met.
Shosha has partnered with Synatic to solve its ERP, inventory management, and e-commerce integration challenges. Through Synatic’s powerful Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP), Shosha was able to effectively implement a solution to improve their Warehouse Management System (WMS), enabling the vape company to effectively integrate data into Vend to rapidly fulfil online orders. After implementing Synatic’s solution, Shosha was able to save over 100 person-hours per month that would have otherwise been spent manually transferring and reconciling data between the multiple systems.
With multiple stores located all over New Zealand, growing in Australia, Sosha was under immense pressure to overhaul its e-commerce websites, managed through WooCommerce and Magento, in order to fulfill product orders quickly and efficiently. When an order was placed, Shosha staff would analyze each product within every purchase order and manually identify the store that had the required stock to fulfill the customer's order. The Synatic team was able to integrate their multiple disparate systems to create a centralized view of all of their stores and inventory using Vend and WMS software. This integration enabled Shosha to automate the process of fulfilling each customer's order from point of sales inquiry to delivery of the products to the customer, with incomparable speed!
Before working with Synatic, Shosha would receive product orders through multiple e-commerce platforms, namely Magento and Woocommerce. Using multiple e-commerce platforms meant that Shosha staff were required to manually keep track of orders that were coming in from both platforms and input that data into their WMS. This was done to facilitate the processing and delivery of products from the main warehouse to the correct Shosha stores or directly to the customer. Not only was this process extremely cumbersome and vulnerable to human error, but it was considerably time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Synatic was able to build an integration solution that allowed Shosha to handle data in-flight between Magento, WooCommerce, Vend, and their WMS. Synatic’s HIP pulled orders from Shosha’s Magento and Woocommerce website into a buffer, automatically checked the buffer to identify orders that already exist in the system, filter out duplicates, and transfer new orders into Vend. Once all the orders were transferred and processed through Vend, an API trigger would assign the orders to a specific outlet based on the products in the order and the stock that the outlet had on hand. The solution also had a flow instructed to check if the Shosha’s WMS had stock to fulfill any orders and if the warehouse had the necessary products, then the order was sent to the warehouse.
“Synatic was exceptional in terms of handling our integration between Vend and our other e-commerce platforms,” stated Tony Le, Web Developer Lead at High Group. “Synatic’s robust capabilities allowed us to manipulate data in a way that would have been very difficult with any other current applications that we have across the enterprise,” Le continued.
In addition to Shosha’s Vend solution, Synatic was able to build a WMS flow that enabled owners and staff with admin rights to easily order stock to their store directly from their POS solution, and receive stock from the main warehouse. Synatic would then grab that information, transform it into an XML file, and then drop it into WMS for the order to be processed.
Kunal Goyal, Director at High Group said, “Synatic gave Shosha the ability to manage all of our product order, warehouse management, and e-commerce challenges.” This included ETL, integration, API management, and automation through a single platform, allowing the vape company to get the right data, to the right person, at the right time.
“Synatic is opening the doors to the endless possibilities of solutions that we didn't think could be addressed easily,” said Goyal. He also mentioned that “working with Synatic was amazing as the team helped Shosha streamline operations by reducing the number of manual tasks.”
Working with Syantic helped empower Shosha to leverage the benefits of automation and reduce the amount of time the Shosha team spent manually coding their own solutions. Le said, “the Shosha team received training from Synatic to efficiently use the platform, and provided support with Vend and the new WMS.” Synatic was able to educate Shosha about the intricacies of both platforms and advise the team on how exactly flows were set up within Synatic to automatically fulfill product orders.”
“The Synatic team was very responsive to all of our needs. Whether it was a question that we had about a particular aspect of the Vend integration or challenges that we were not able to overcome independently, the Synatic team was always available to assist whenever we needed them to. I couldn't be happier.”
