G&M Restaurant
BigCommerce to Magento Open Source Migration for restaurant chain shipping crab cakes across the U.S.
Solution B2C eCommerce
Platform Magento Open Source (2.4)
Industry Food & Beverage
Overview
G&M Restaurant, located near Baltimore in Linthicum Heights, Maryland, is a beloved neighborhood seafood restaurant for the greater Baltimore and Washington DC metro area. As they’ve grown, they’ve expanded and grown their business to deliver high-quality seafood across the United States with their gandmcrabcakes.com eCommerce website.
For several years, G&M operated their eCommerce site on the Magento 1 platform. With Magento 1, they developed many custom shipping and fulfillment features and admin tools that were critical for their business.
A few years ago, they moved to BigCommerce and tried to adapt their business to more out-of-the-box shipping and fulfillment features. However, with many of their unique requirements for shipping fresh seafood across the US, they returned to Magento, with the goal to re-platform to Magento Open Source 2.4.
Why Kadro?
After a year of working with another system integrator without a successful implementation, G&M turned to Kadro Solutions to meet their needs and get the job done right. Kadro Solutions migrated their site from BigCommerce as well as ported and expanded their custom features from their old Magento 1 site to Magento 2.
Challenges
- BigCommerce to Magento Open Source migration
- Shipping/fulfillment with multiple package orders
- Capacity feature for Made-To-Order purchases
- Recommend and implement new hosting solution
G&M Restaurant was originally intended to be a neighborhood restaurant that local Baltimoreans could call home, offering a quality meal for a reasonable price. Over the years, our Crabcakes got national attention and around the year 2000, we decided to start shipping our sought-after products nationwide!
We successfully grew our e-commerce business and presence but for the past few years, our E-commerce partners had hit a wall and were unable to meet the needs of our business, or our customers. We were unable to take the next step necessary to continue the growth we required to sustain the business and, as importantly, we needed to stay current with new E-Commerce best practices. We were let down by several local developers and were really at the end of our rope.
We were introduced to the Kadro team and were impressed when their CEO flew up to our headquarters to meet with us in person with one of his developers in tow. He wanted to feel the soul of the business his team would be charged with creating an online presence for. He listened to the gripes we had with our previous partners and offered that if we gave his team our trust, they would not disappoint.
What other developers couldn’t complete over the course of 3 years, Kadro’s team accomplished in 6 months’ time. We are now growing and moving towards the future in ways we thought were not feasible.
As a family restaurant at heart, we feel right at home with the team at Kadro and have the confidence that they can continue to support our e-commerce brand and help us grow moving forward into the future.
Kadro implemented the G&M Crab Cakes site on Magento Open Source 2.4 to meet their online business objectives.
A significant challenge for G&M’s business is with order fulfillment and shipping. Kadro developed custom solutions, as described in detail below, for Intelligent Order Fulfillment (including automated order sorting by delivery date and box size determined by order volume automatically) and a custom checkout user experience for requesting a delivery date, using the customer’s carrier account, and managing daily limits for made-to-order purchases.
When ordering fresh food for your family, parties, or catering events, it is critical to have customer-focused shipping and delivery accuracy.
Below are details for the customizations Kadro developed for G&M Restaurant.
ShipStation Integration
Intelligent Order Fulfillment
Kadro reduced G&M Restaurant’s considerable overhead manually sorting through food orders for fulfillment by creating an automated order filtering system
Automated Order Sorting by Delivery Date
Many of G&M Restaurant’s customers place their food orders weeks in advance of their desired delivery date.
When these orders were received in Magento they were automatically sent to ShipStation for fulfillment. Employees would then have to manually organize orders all the orders that came in and sort them by date. Then only pack and ship orders that needed to go out that day.
Kadro created a system that holds all the orders in Magento. Only orders that need to be fulfilled on the current day are sent to ShipStation to be packed and shipped.
Employees don’t have to spend time manually sorting through orders to determine what needs to go out. They have a streamlined workflow knowing that anything that makes it to ShipStation is ready to be packed for shipping.
Old System (BigCommerce)
New System (Magento Open Source)
Size of Boxes Needed for Shipping Automatically Determined by Order Volume
G&M Restaurant wanted to eliminate time spent by employees determining what size boxes food orders that were being shipped out would fit into.
G&M has 2 size boxes for packing orders, small boxes and large boxes. Orders would be packed into a small box, a large box or some combination of the 2 depending on the size of the order.
Kadro’s ShipStation integration automatically determines what size box an order should be packed in based on the volume (in ounces) of the items in the order.
If the order needs to be packed into more than one box the order is split into separate suborders.
Each suborder lists which items should be packed in a small box, which should to be packed in a large box and how many boxes of each are needed if it’s a large order. Saving employees the time of figuring out how to pack the order.
Learn about other systems Kadro has integrated into Magento Open Source
Custom Checkout Enhancement
Request a Delivery Date
The majority of G&M Restaurant customers place their orders well in advance of when they’ll be needed. Kadro enhanced the Magento Open Source checkout to include a date selector that allows customers to select a delivery date.
- Delivery date tied to real time inventory data.
- Using Kadro’s custom built Capacity feature for Made-To-Order purchases G&M Restaurant admins can set inventory limits for certain dates. This affects the availability of different delivery dates.
- Kadro added the ability to set blackout dates for inclement weather, holidays, etc.
- Kadro also added to ability to set a cut off time for orders to be placed on a given day.
Custom Checkout Enhancement
Shipping with FedEx Account Number
For G&M Restaurant customers who want to have their delicious order shipped with FedEx Kadro added the ability for customers to enter their FedEx account number at checkout.
The FedEx account number field integrates with G&M’s fulfillment software ShipStation for seamless order processing.
Inventory and Fullfilment Enhancement
Daily Capacity Limits for Products
G&M Restaurant administrators can set capacity limits for certain food items used for Made-To-Order purchases.
There are 2 different settings
- A general daily Made-To-Order capacity limit that applies to all days.
- A date specific Made-To-Order capacity limit that applies to a single day.
- When the capacity limit is set it determines the number of orders than can be fulfilled. This also affects which dates are available for an order to be shipped.
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