How The Chesterfield Brand lets its wholesale business and webshop work together effortlessly with iWeb

The Chesterfield Brand is a Dutch bag brand that designs its own collection and distributes it from Assen to retailers throughout Europe. The company has always been a family business, and as a family they do everything they can to align the processes and systems within the company as well as possible. In addition to the wholesale side, the company also sells directly to consumers through its own webshop and, more recently, via Bol.com. The combination of B2B and D2C on one and the same stock makes the IT landscape considerably more complex than it appears at first glance.

Martijn Hoving has a broad role within The Chesterfield Brand: from sales to jointly managing the digital infrastructure with his sister Avelon Hoving. He was closely involved in setting up the webshop and the search for the right connectors. And that search was not the first.

The challenge: a connector that actually holds up

Unlike most webshops, the online shop of The Chesterfield Brand has no stock of its own. Every order draws directly from the central wholesale warehouse, the same warehouse that also supplies the retailers. That means an online order has to be converted immediately into a sales order in Exact Online, the stock has to be updated in real time and the logistics process has to start automatically. If that does not run smoothly, problems arise: customers ordering products that have just been picked by the wholesale side, orders that do not come through or get processed twice.

The Chesterfield Brand had previously brought in another party for the connector. But after just a few months it turned out that it did not run smoothly enough for their specific situation. The conclusion was quickly drawn: they needed a partner who truly understands the complexity of a combined wholesale and webshop environment. That is how they ended up at iWebDevelopment.

The solution: a triangular connector between webshop, accounting and warehouse

Together with iWebDevelopment, a connector was set up that ties three systems together: Shopify as the webshop, Exact Online as the main administrative system and the logistics system for warehouse processing. Not a standard connector, but tailored to the specific situation of a wholesaler that also sells directly to consumers.

In concrete terms that means:

• Every online order becomes a sales order right away. Orders from Shopify and Bol.com automatically end up in Exact Online, as if they were a regular wholesale order.
• The warehouse springs into action by itself. As soon as the order is in Exact Online, the pick-and-pack process starts without any manual intervention.
• The stock is always accurate.There is deliberately no split in stock for B2B and D2C, everyone draws from the same central warehouse. A safety stock prevents customers from ordering products that have just been picked by the wholesale side. That way no one comes up empty-handed, regardless of the channel. 
• Invoicing runs automatically. No more creating invoices by hand after every online order.

The impact: running smoothly without worries

After a short startup period in which the triangle connector was fine-tuned, everything runs stable. So stable that hardly any support tickets come in anymore. For a company that processes orders daily across multiple channels, that is exactly what you want: a connector you never have to think about.

"Once it is in place, it works. Then you can just run your business without any worries, without having to arrange too much support."

Martijn Hoving, The Chesterfield Brand

The difference with the previous connector provider is best summed up by what no longer happens: no more outages that need to be fixed by hand, no stock problems and no lost orders. Just calm.

In 2024 The Chesterfield Brand migrated from Lightspeed to Shopify. Thanks to the flexibility of the connector, that switch went smoothly. And with the recent launch on Bol.com the number of sales channels keeps growing, while the foundation stays solid. All orders come together in Exact Online, no matter which channel they come from. For the future, The Chesterfield Brand is looking at the option of connecting retailers to the same stock through a dropship model. The infrastructure for that is already in place.

Do you also want your wholesale and webshop to work together smoothly?

At iWebDevelopment we help companies like The Chesterfield Brand to connect their sales channels, accounting and logistics in a smart way. Whether you work with Shopify, Exact Online, marketplaces or a combination of these, we make sure the data is correct and the processes keep running, without you having to keep an eye on it constantly.

Curious what we can do for your processes? Contact us for a no-obligation conversation. We are happy to think along with you.