Electronic Data Interchange in E-Commerce

Lovebrands.hu: a lovable online shop as a new addition to the beauty market

While Lovebrands stands out for its unique and distinctive voice in the B2C industry, processes in the background are standardized and fully automated. The online shop is directly connected to the ERP system, which allows the company to save both time and money.

Beauty with heart and soul

Lovebrands was established two years ago at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, during a time of uncertainty. The goal was to become one of the key players in the Hungarian beauty product market before long.

Over the past year, the company has gradually expanded its portfolio in an effort to build a truly useful and helpful community. Loveable also defined its key values and priorities, one of them being environmental protection. The company’s electronic shelf labels at its brick-and-mortal stores are testament to this approach. Another goal is the paperless office.

From day one, another priority was the automation of background processes, including ordering and invoicing.

Initial difficulties

When the company first started, no electronic connection between the online shop and Lovebrand’s ERP system existed, which meant that orders had to be recorded manually in a time-consuming process.

Before the upgrade, there was no option for integrating external applications into the ERP system. Since the company wanted for the ordering and invoicing processes to happen automatically without creating additional work, they sought external help to make that happen.

ERP system and online shop integration

EITEL Hungary had been in contact with Lovebrands before and was familiar with their existing ERP system. Since the previous experience had been a very positive one, Lovebrands once again decided to work with EDITEL Hungary.

During the project, a connection was established between the online shop and the ERP system and the existing EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) connection was incorporated. In addition, an e-invoicing and digital archiving solution was set up.

The most challenging task during the implementation was the integration of the online shop engine with the ERP system since these are fundamentally different from each other. One of the issues that needed to be addressed was data transfer. It took considerable effort to create an XML format based on available data that was able to share the information with the ERP system as needed.

Eventually, all of Lovebrand’s ideas were put into practice. Orders based on the unified XML format, inventory information updates, and electronically signed e-invoices were gradually added during the course of the project.

An invisible solution

Since it all happened in the background, the entire project went almost unnoticed. Lovebrands employees can do their job smoothly and without interruptions.

“Mistakes tend to manifest themselves as downtime and bottlenecks during everyday operations,” said Ákos Domán, an e-commerce manager at Lovable. “But none of that happened here. What we saw was a fully operational system at all times.”

Since the online store is a B2C service, buyers are individuals who benefit greatly from swift and accurate order processing.

Automation has made the order process much shorter. Manual data recording is now a thing of the past since everything happens automatically in the background. Process accuracy has increased greatly, which decreases the everyday workload.

“This solution makes money by not losing money,” as Gábor Szatmári, a Lovebrands digital marketing manager, put it. “The fact that we do not have to take care of processes manually ultimately saves us a lot of money.”