Accelerating Global Growth with Sana Commerce Cloud
at Moto Direct

With no prior experience in this type of project, Moto Direct underestimated the complexity of the Magento web store implementation. The project quickly fell behind schedule and over budget, and received poor feedback from internal stakeholders. This, in turn, significantly delayed the launch of the new ERP system — a huge investment for the company.

When implementing Magento, the main issues faced by Moto Direct included:

• Cost of B2B customization: As Magento isn’t a pure B2B platform, there were many missing features. This meant additional development was needed, which added time, cost and complexity, and held the project back.
• Complexity of integrating B2B logic: When integrating Magento with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the business logic and processes already stored in the ERP have to be replicated in Magento. From complex pricing to real-time, accurate inventory information, a lot of additional development and manual work was needed to synchronize the data between the NAV ERP and Magento. This would not only prove to be an issue during implementation, but would also require constant maintenance after the web store launch.

Although the team could likely have made the Magento platform work for them eventually, the necessary ongoing integration costs and poor functionality meant that it did not make sense to continue with the implementation. Moto Direct also recognized that continuing with Magento would lead to a web store that would not have delivered the excellent customer experience the company prides itself on. Despite having already invested a lot of time and money, Moto Direct made the difficult decision to find a new provider, and switched to Sana Commerce.

Moto Direct’s Sana Commerce web store helped the company meet all its initial goals, and has received positive feedback from its customers. It also delivered the following results:

• Reduced cost of implementation: Thanks to the seamless ERP integration, the initial cost of implementing the Sana web store was 50% lower than what Moto Direct had invested into the partial implementation of the Magento platform. Moto Direct also expects the total cost of ownership (TCO) over 3 years to be 27% less for Sana than for Magento.
• Low maintenance cost: Since there is no need to replicate ERP data into the web store, the maintenance of Moto Direct’s new web store requires minimal business resources — even less than Moto Direct’s previous web store. Maintenance also doesn’t require any technical knowledge, so no experts are needed in house.
• Increased efficiency with customer self-service: Just four months after going live, Moto Direct was already seeing a reduction in calls and emails as customers become used to accessing the information they need online. Whether the customer is looking for product specifications, a tracking number for a recent shipment, or a copy of their latest statement, they can find it all in the web store. This saves time both for Moto Direct and its customers.
• Increased export orders: Within a few months of the web store launch, export customer online orders — which are very often larger and more complex than typical orders — quadrupled compared to the order levels on Moto Direct’s previous website. Feedback from key export customers has also been very positive.

Whenever I work with Sana, I’m consistently blown away. Every single person I speak to is helpful, friendly and goes out of their way to work for Moto Direct. I think it’s a huge part of why our project has been so successful. `{`…`}` I would 100% recommend Sana Commerce to other companies considering Magento, so they can avoid repeating our mistakes.

Sean Hefferin | Supply Chain Manager at Moto Direct