Harlem Kitesurfing’s ecommerce implementation required no follow-up
When Harlem Kitesurfing launched a B2B webshop, no questions came back from customers. The orders simply started flowing in.
For Wouter de Ridder, COO at Harlem Kitesurfing, that very silence was the greatest compliment, because a project no one questions is a project that works. The webshop replaced orders by phone, email, and WhatsApp with a solution built on top of the company’s own ERP system, so data only needed to be maintained in one place.
When Harlem Kitesurfing sent an email to all customers saying they now had a B2B webshop, no questions came back. No one responded. The orders simply started flowing in, and customers started using the webshop without blinking.
For Wouter de Ridder, COO at Harlem Kitesurfing, it was precisely the silence that was the greatest compliment. A project no one questions is a project that works. And both the customers and the company itself were satisfied with the result.
Harlem Kitesurfing designs kitesurfing equipment: kites, boards, and bars. Everything you need for the sport. Production is handled by suppliers around the world, who manufacture according to the company’s design, ship the goods back to the warehouse, from where they go on to customers all over the world.
How did customers order before Harlem Kitesurfing got a webshop?
Before Harlem Kitesurfing got a webshop, customers ordered in every conceivable way. Phone, email, WhatsApp, a chat on the beach. And each of those inquiries had to be translated into a real order in the system, often with a couple of rounds back and forth with the customer.
It was very time consuming. The basic task itself, getting an order into the system and making it ready for delivery, cost so many hours that the math was hard to ignore. If the company continued like that while growing as expected, many hands would be needed just for order handling.
The core process needed to be streamlined before growth really set in.
What was the goal of Harlem Kitesurfing’s webshop project?
The goal of the webshop project at Harlem Kitesurfing was clear. No manual work should be spent on order receipt before the equipment actually needed to be picked in the warehouse and packed for shipping. The packing itself naturally still requires hands. But work hours should no longer be spent helping the customer choose a product, typing in the order, and pushing it onward toward picking.
For that, a webshop was needed where customers could place orders themselves. With a couple of extra steps built in: shipping costs had to be calculated before the customer checks out, so the price is fixed. This is what you get, this is what it costs. From there, the order can run through the system with minimal interference.
For Wouter de Ridder, it was about the bottom line in the long run. When you don’t have large volume, you can live with the time spent. But with growth ambitions, every minute you can take out of the core process counts. That was also the conversation he had to have with his fellow managers: the tools cost money, but the saved work time earns it back, and really pays off once volume increases fivefold or tenfold.
Why was cleaning up the ERP system the most important preparation?
Cleaning up the ERP system turned out to be the most important preparation for the webshop at Harlem Kitesurfing. Because everything you want to make available in a webshop only works well if the system contains the right products with the right information. If the data is in order, it’s far easier to build a website on top of it.
Shortly before, Harlem Kitesurfing had switched to a new ERP system. That forced the company to thoroughly clean up the number of items in stock and get a clear picture of exactly what was on the shelves.
Why did the webshop need to be built on one central system rather than several databases?
Harlem Kitesurfing built the webshop on one central system because Wouter de Ridder didn’t want to introduce yet another place where item numbers, prices, and stock levels had to be maintained. There was to be one core database, the ERP system, and that was precisely why Harlem Kitesurfing had switched to it.
Instead of connecting to multiple databases and pumping data back and forth, everything had to live in one place. The task was therefore to find a tool that allowed exactly that.
How did customers and colleagues react to the new webshop?
After the launch of the webshop, improvements at Harlem Kitesurfing came on several fronts. Customers welcomed the option to order through a webshop. They weren’t particularly fond of having to call, email, or send a WhatsApp message either, and they’re happy with the solution they now have.
The colleagues in order handling at Harlem Kitesurfing felt the same. They receive clean orders into the system instead of messages they have to interpret. That makes order receipt both easier and more accurate.
What surprised Wouter de Ridder the most was the absence of surprises. With the ERP system, there had been many discussions about what the system could and couldn’t do, and things still come up that sound simple but aren’t supported. With the B2B webshop, there was none of that. What he was told he would get was also what he got.
What is the most important takeaway from Harlem Kitesurfing’s webshop project?
If there’s one takeaway, it’s the value of building the webshop on top of the data you already have in the ERP system. If you have the structure in place, the webshop can be built almost on the spot, and the only thing you need to maintain afterward is your own data. The rest happens automatically.
By comparison, Harlem Kitesurfing uses a different tool for their B2C webshops. Here, data first has to be corrected in their own system and then checked and corrected again in the webshop. That is both cumbersome and a source of errors, because you can forget to synchronize or transfer a change.
That’s exactly why the value of one central system is so great, when the webshop is only a mirror of what’s already in your own system. Most of the other solutions Wouter de Ridder looked at instead built an entirely new dataset alongside the existing one. He was skeptical of that model, and his experience points to one source of data being the better path.
After three months, there’s nothing more to talk about. It just works. And a project you don’t need to return to is perhaps the best recommendation a core process can get.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Wouter de Ridder?
Wouter de Ridder is COO at Harlem Kitesurfing, a company that designs kitesurfing equipment such as kites, boards, and bars.
Why was cleaning up the ERP system important before the webshop was built?
Because a webshop only works well if the system behind it contains the right products with the right information. Harlem Kitesurfing had shortly before switched to a new ERP system, which forced the company to clean up its items, and that cleanup turned out to be the most important preparation for the webshop.
Why did Harlem Kitesurfing choose to build the webshop on one central system rather than several databases?
Because Wouter de Ridder didn’t want to introduce yet another place where item numbers, prices, and stock levels had to be maintained alongside the ERP system. The webshop was only meant to be a mirror of the data already in the ERP system.
What changed for customers and colleagues after the launch of the webshop?
Customers welcomed being able to order online instead of calling, emailing, or writing on WhatsApp, while the colleagues in order handling started receiving clean orders in the system instead of messages they had to interpret themselves.
