Case Study: Stock Import Automation with REST API WooCommerce Plugin

WP Masters developed two WooCommerce plugins for Orange River, a jewelry trade business. They helped them optimize and automate their stock imports via working with REST API and made their website fit diamond industry standards of product display. That helped them work faster, save money, and boost their relationships with their customers. 

Client & Challenge 

Australian wholesaler that deals in diamonds and gemstones, Orange River Diamonds, messaged us on Upwork to help them deal with the following obstacles their e-commerce platform faced: 

1. Lack of functionality/design customization necessary for the industry standards. The standard WooCommerce layout the client has been using for their shop didn’t allow for a display of diamonds and gemstones that’s adopted within the jewelry trade. Usually, e-commerce platforms have a product grid layout with several items in a row. Orange River needed all characteristics of its items (each item had one photo, and data about its carat, color, clarity, etc.) displayed in tables.  
2. Lack of automation within supply & order management. An XML API they wanted to use to pull out the data about diamonds and gemstones (their carat, color, clarity, and other item qualities that are important for buyers) from their suppliers wasn’t accessible from WooCommerce. Every time Orange River received an order, they needed to call their suppliers, reserve the product, and only then proceed to make a deal with a customer. It made order processing unnecessarily long.  
3. Poor website performance. Because of the previous bottleneck, the client’s website has been overloaded with different WooCommerce plugins that were supposed to handle the legacy API situation and haven’t been working well.  

Orange River Diamonds wanted us to fix all that — and we have. 

Solution

Our developer worked for two weeks using XML, JSON, and cURL and working towards resolving these challenges. We have managed to: 

• Customized Product Table for WooCommerce plugin and integrated it with WooCommerce for a table-like product layout of the store
• Developed a custom solution that synchronized in-store diamonds & gemstones with corresponding certificates and displayed certificates on the product page 
• Developed a plugin connector between WooCommerce shop and supplier’s XML API and automated stock import  

We also developed a tier system for different user groups that differentiated between different cost margins these groups had. The system calculated different prices of gemstones for them. 

Value

In collaboration with Orange River, we’ve managed to 

• Change the UI of the platform, so it would fit industry standards of the jewelry trade, which increased the trustworthiness of the platform and improved user engagement 
• Automate stock management, so customers could reserve the items directly on the supplier’s side via XML API, without making any calls. That streamlined order processing and increased customer satisfaction 
• Introduce loyalty tiers with special prices for first-time customers, B2B customers, and so on, and automate price differentiation for them, making the order processing simpler and faster once again 

In conclusion, our plugins and optimization helped Orange River accelerate and improve their collaboration with their customers, improved working times, and increased profits for the client.