Automated ecommerce for EG Agri

Through our ongoing partnership with Elta Group, we manage and maintain 13 websites across their UK and Ireland ecosystem. Part of this ongoing support is the proactive development of features and functionality that will help improve internal processes and deliver the best possible customer experience.

EG Agri provides hassle-free farm supplies through an easy-to-use website. The Elta team wanted to establish an advanced integration between the EG Agri e-commerce platform, driven by WooCommerce, and their CRM, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This project would reduce manual work and duplicate data entry, making the purchasing experience as seamless as possible.

Delving deeper with discovery

It’s always vital for any project for both us and the client to challenge the assumptions that we might have. This is equally important, if not more so, when there’s an existing relationship, as we had already been managing the EG Agri site for several years and may have had preconceived ideas about how it should work.

During the discovery sprint, we identified and mapped the key user journeys on the EG Agri site and internal tasks and processes that were behind them. This enabled our team to define the key functionality and technical specifications behind the integration. We also defined the responsibilities of all the parties involved in helping to facilitate the integration, ensuring the project ran as smoothly as possible.

Streamlining the customer experience

Sam Poole, Digital Marketing Executive at Elta Group and lead on the EG Agri project, highlighted demand from customers as the main driver behind the project:

Our farming customers are shifting to a more digital-first approach – they work long hours and don’t always get the chance to go to brick-and-mortar shops. Demand for effortless online trading was growing, and we needed advanced integration between the site and our internal systems to deliver the best possible customer experience.

To deliver on the key features of EG Agri’s offering for both their trade and general web customers, the Dynamics NAV integration needed to support the following:

• Customer-specific pricing on all products
• Management of multiple delivery addresses, available to select from at checkout
• Ability to pay using a credit limit
• Assigned “responsibility centres” which provide the customer with options for click and collect locations in the frontend
• Real-time stock levels with detail at a location level

All of this can be managed within Dynamics NAV and synced to the CMS and WooCommerce via an API, which we have configured and extended to allow for non-standard fields. Stock levels, regular pricing, and per-customer pricing for both simple and variable products are retrieved via a single API call to the CRM. The integration includes real-time stock updates by location, enabling precise availability for each click-and-collect branch.

​​In addition to the key features, we extended the functionality to:

• Auto-create customer records via an API, checking for existing entries in the CMS and marking them for update if needed
• Import non-standard fields like account codes, credit eligibility, shipping settings, and responsibility centres
• Automatically send welcome emails to new users
• Enable trade dashboards where users can manage addresses, view account numbers, and control purchasing preferences
• Allow customers to enter PO numbers during checkout, which are then synced directly to the CRM for easier order referencing on the customer side
• Display free shipping if applicable, controlled via the CRM
• Hide all payment methods other than credit if the customer is eligible, with the CRM handling credit approval and syncing order statuses back to the CMS

For the customer, this means they can quickly and easily place an order on the EG Agri site, with their unique pricing, and collect or have the goods delivered in whichever way is most convenient for them. All of this happens automatically, rather than them having to wait for an order to be processed. The integration also enables automated order confirmations, keeping the customer up to date with an accurate status of their order.

Improving internal processes

Providing the best possible experience for customers starts and ends with a streamlined internal process. Manual data entry and other time-consuming tasks mean longer lead times for customer orders. The integration between the EV Agri site and Dynamics NAV removes the need for manual processes for the most part – the only manual process is authorising credit, which the CRM will flag and send an internal notification for, as well as keeping the customer informed automatically as their order is processed. New trade customers can be added more quickly and set up on the website, again removing the need for them to be added manually to both platforms.

This operational efficiency allows the EG Agri team to focus more of their energy on the work that really matters -like supporting mental health in the farming community.

This advanced integration not only simplifies day-to-day operations for EG Agri’s staff but also provides their customers with a faster, more intuitive online ordering experience. With the technical groundwork in place, the platform is now well-positioned to grow its trade offering and continue supporting the agricultural community with the ease and reliability they’ve come to expect.

Sam concludes:

The integration project has helped us streamline and automate so many of our internal processes around the ecommerce experience. We can be more efficient and more proactive in our sales and marketing approach. This project will help us with scaling the operation in the future and ultimately help us better serve more customers.