Background
For over 35 years, Gentec have played a crucial role in sourcing and distributing consumer electronics, from small independent retailers to major national chains like Costco and Walmart. While the company had successfully leveraged Shopify for B2C operations, it needed a more robust B2B eCommerce solution to address specific challenges in pricing, order management, and customer accessibility.
The challenge
Gentec’s previous B2B eCommerce platform was outdated and inefficient, creating significant bottlenecks for both internal teams and customers. Their existing system was an off-the-shelf web solution designed specifically for their ERP, but it presented multiple issues that hindered their ability to scale effectively.
One of the major pain points was slow page load times and a lack of intuitive filtering. Customers found it difficult to browse the extensive catalogue of 6,000–7,000 products, leading to frustration and inefficiencies in the ordering process.
Although the platform was shared among multiple users, Gentec had to finance the development of new features - only for those features to then be made available to other companies on the platform. This created an unfair scenario where Gentec were effectively subsidising innovation for their competitors without gaining exclusive benefits.
Pricing structures were highly complex, with thousands of customers receiving unique price lists, leading to inefficiencies in order processing. In their old system, one customer alone had 60 different price lists attached, leading to incredibly long compute times - pricing calculations took up to 6 hours every night. This inefficiency significantly slowed down operations and created additional work for the team to manage pricing.
On Gentec’s previous platform, customers were required to shop by brand first, then by product line within that brand, restricting visibility across the full product catalogue. This created missed opportunities for cross-selling, as customers weren’t able to explore complementary products they might have been interested in, such as a camera retailer purchasing TV mounts for in-store displays.
The solution
After evaluating various B2B platforms, Gentec discovered SparkLayer. The platform’s ability to support multiple price lists, sales representatives, and customised ordering processes made it the perfect fit. Customers who previously placed orders manually via fax or email were successfully transitioned to the new online portal, reducing administrative overhead.
SparkLayer’s seamless integration with Shopify allowed Gentec to maintain a separate B2B store with full control over content and pricing. By restructuring their internal price lists and leveraging SparkLayer’s pricing engine, Gentec reduced daily price computations from 6 hours to just an hour and a half.
Opening up their product catalogue enabled customers to explore a wider range of products, leading to increased cross-category purchases. Gentec take pride in being a value-add distributor. Rather than just shipping orders, they work closely with their partners to ensure special pallets are used for larger products - and check that items will fit through people’s doorways and elevators! The range in value and volume of orders means they have to be incredibly flexible in their approach to wholesale.
Gentec have both internal and external Sales Reps, with some agents managing multiple store accounts. The previous platform made it difficult for agents to switch between accounts seamlessly, leading to confusion. SparkLayer’s dedicated Sales Agent functionality helped internal and external agents manage multiple accounts efficiently.
The results
Since implementing SparkLayer, Gentec have seen a dramatic shift in their B2B operations. They’ve gone from spending 6 hours each day on computing their price lists to just 1.5 hours. This huge time saving has allowed their teams to focus on more value-add activities that better benefit their end customers.
“We have a few thousand customers across 7,000 products - you multiply those two numbers together and we're calculating a price for every single one of those. It was about 2 million records that were being computed every night. So by dropping the number of price lists from 60 to 5 through SparkLayer, we really streamlined that process.” Mike Last, Director of Marketing and eCommerce.
The business has been able to bring several large accounts on board that were previously using email or faxing PDFs/ spreadsheets to place their B2B orders. Those customers have quickly embraced SparkLayer’s CSV upload functionality, allowing them to easily process orders with hundreds of line items.
This has led to a dramatic decrease in customer pricing issues for the Gentec team, as end customers can now see their exact price before placing orders rather than working from an expired price list or promotions. This has led to 100+ fewer support tickets per month, allowing their team to spend more time on more complex customer challenges.
Gentec have seen an increase in B2B orders now coming through the website rather than manual entry. Customers are purchasing across multiple product categories, leading to higher order values and increased repeat business. Their internal Sales team can now manage customer accounts more effectively, and the customers benefit from a more intuitive self-service ordering experience.
“Our customers can see a wider breadth of catalogue that we have, and they're also able to shop different products that they may have not been able to before. Just because you're in a camera store doesn't mean you should only buy camera things!” Mike Last, Director of Marketing and eCommerce.
Gentec continue to refine their B2B eCommerce experience, working closely with SparkLayer to optimise pricing structures, improve Sales Agent workflows, and introduce new customer-focused features. By embracing an innovative and scalable solution, they have positioned themselves for continued growth in the ever-evolving B2B market.
"In my quest to find a B2B platform, when SparkLayer said they had Sales reps, when they said they had multiple price lists, we set up the call. When I was talking to the two founders of the company and was able to tell them where our pain points were, how we’re looking to architect it, and what features we needed, they were very receptive. We were able to reach out to the Development team at SparkLayer through the whole onboarding process." ~ Mike Last, Director of Marketing and eCommerce
Explore more
To learn more about Gentec, their product range, and the story of their brand, visit their website.
To see how SparkLayer works with Shopify, you can explore via the links below: